be done in both ways.  Although we will not await them here, as with the labourers we have here we hope, with the aid of God, once the people are in good health, to amass a good quantity of gold to be sent on the first caravels which return.

["This will be fully provided for in another manner.  In the meantime their Highnesses order Don Yuan de Fonseca to send the best miners he can obtain; and to write to Almaden to have the greatest possible number taken from there and sent.]

“Item.  You will entreat their Highnesses very humbly on my part, to consider Villacorta as speedily recommended to them, who, as their Highnesses know, has rendered great service in this business, and with a very good will, and as I know him, he is a diligent person and very devoted to their service:  it will be a favour to me if he is given some confidential charge for which he is fitted, and where he can show his desire to serve them and his diligence:  and this you will obtain in such a way that Villacorta may know by the result, that what he has done for me when I needed him profits him in this manner.

          ["It will be done thus.]

“Item.  That the said Mosen Pedro and Gaspar and Beltran and others who have remained here gave up the captainship of caravels, which have now returned, and are not receiving wages:  but because they are persons who must be employed in important matters and of confidence, their compensation, which must be different from the others, has not been determined.  You will entreat their Highnesses on my part to determine what is to be given them each year, or by the month, according to their service.

     “Done in the city of Isabella, January 30, 1494.

["This has already been replied to above, but as it is stated in the said item that they enjoy their salary, from the present time their Highnesses order that their wages shall be paid to all of them from the time they left their captainships.”]

This document is worth studying, written as it was in circumstances that at one moment looked desperate and at another were all hope.  Columbus was struggling manfully with difficulties that were already beginning to be too much for him.  The Man from Genoa, with his guiding star of faith in some shore beyond the mist and radiance of the West—­see into what strange places and to what strange occupations this star has led him!  The blue visionary eyes, given to seeing things immediately beyond the present horizon, must fix themselves on accounts and requisitions, on the needs of idle, aristocratic, grumbling Spaniards; must fix themselves also on that blank void in the bellies of his returning ships, where the gold ought to have been.  The letter has its practical side; the requisitions are made with good sense and a grasp of the economic situation; but they have a deeper significance than that.  All this talk about