and recalled to Granada. Santangel was, by descent, a Jew. Several
of his kindred suffered under the Inquisition, before and after, and
he fortified himself against the peril of the hour when he financed
the first voyage of Columbus. Granada fell on the 2nd of January
1492. The Jews were expelled on the 10th of March. On the 17th of
April the contract with Columbus was signed at Santa Fe. The same
crusading spirit, the same motive of militant propagandism, appears in
each of the three transactions. And the explorer, at this early
stage, was generally backed by the clergy. Juan Perez, the hospitable
Franciscan, was his friend; and Mendoza, the great cardinal of Toledo,
and Deza, afterwards Archbishop of Seville. Talavera, the Archbishop
of Granada, found him too fanciful to be trusted.

Sailing due west from the Canaries he crossed the Atlantic in its
widest part. The navigation was prosperous and uneventful until,
changing their course to follow the flight of birds, they missed the
continent and came upon the islands. It was the longest voyage that
had ever been attempted in the open sea; but the passage itself, and
the shoals and currents of the West Indies, were mastered with the aid
of nautical instruments from Nuremberg, and of the Ephemerides of
Regiomontanus. These were recent achievements of the Renaissance, and
without them the undertaking was impossible. Even with the new
appliances, Columbus was habitually wrong in his measurements. He put
Cuba 18 degrees too far to the west; he thought San Domingo as large
as Spain; and he saw mountains 50,000 feet high in Yucatan. Indeed,
he protested that his success was not due to science, but to the study
of the prophet Isaiah. Above all things, he insisted that Cuba was
part of the Asiatic continent, and obliged his companions to testify
to the same belief, although there is evidence that he did not share
it.

He had promised Cathay. If he produced an unknown continent instead,
a continent many thousands of miles long, prohibiting approach to
Cathay, he would undo his own work; the peasants who had exposed his
fallacies would triumph in his failure, and the competing Portuguese
would appropriate all that he had undertaken to add to the crown of
Castile. Without civilisation and gold his discoveries would be
valueless; and there was so little gold at first that he at once
proposed to make up for it in slaves. His constant endeavour was not
to be mist