“To-day is Monday.  I will endeavour to have your uncle and brother start to-morrow.  Remember to write me very often, and tell Diego Mendez to write at length.  Each day messengers go from here yonder.  May our Lord have you in His Holy keeping.

“Done in Seville, December 1.

“Your father who loves you as himself.

.S.
.S.A.S. 
XMY
Xpo FERENS.”

The gout from which the Admiral suffered made riding impossible to him, and he had arranged to have himself carried to Court on a litter when he was able to move.  There is a grim and dismal significance in the particular litter that had been chosen:  it was no other than the funeral bier which belonged to the Cathedral of Seville and had been built for Cardinal Mendoza.  A minute of the Cathedral Chapter records the granting to Columbus of the use of this strange conveyance; but one is glad to think that he ultimately made his journey in a less grim though more humble method.  But what are we to think of the taste of a man who would rather travel in a bier, so long as it had been associated with the splendid obsequies of a cardinal, than in the ordinary litter of every-day use?  It is but the old passion for state and splendour thus dismally breaking out again.

He speaks of living on borrowed funds and of having devoted all his resources to the payment of his crew; but that may be taken as an exaggeration.  He may have borrowed, but the man who can borrow easily from banks cannot be regarded as a poor man.  One is nevertheless grateful for these references, since they commemorate the Admiral’s unfailing loyalty to those who shared his hardships, and his unwearied efforts to see that they received what was due to them.  Pleasant also are the evidences of warm family affection in those simple words of brotherly love, and the affecting advice to Diego that he should love his brother Ferdinand as Christopher loved Bartholomew.  It is a pleasant oasis in this dreary, sordid wailing after thirds and tenths and eighths.  Good Diego Mendez, that honourable gentleman, was evidently also at Court at this time, honestly striving, we may be sure, to say a good word for the Admiral.

Some time after this letter was written, and before the writing of the next, news reached Seville of the death of Queen Isabella.  For ten years her kind heart had been wrung by many sorrows.  Her mother had died in 1496; the next year her only son and heir to the crown had followed; and within yet another year had died her favourite daughter, the Queen of Portugal.  Her other children were all scattered with the exception of Juana, whose semi-imbecile condition caused her parents an anxiety greater even than that caused by death.  As Isabella’s life thus closed sombrely in, she applied herself more closely and more narrowly to such pious consolations as were available.  News from Flanders of the scandalous scenes between Philip and Juana in the summer of 1504