placed upon the
man who had worn the robe of royalty. His last years before the public
were even more bitter than his first. Until his death he seemed to spend
all his time in trying to recover from the king his lost prestige,
titles and possessions, but they never came. He besought Ferdinand
pitifully to bestow them as a perpetual heritage upon his son, even if
not to him. In a letter to his sovereigns, he said: 'Such is my fate
that twenty years of service, through which I passed with so much toil
and danger, have profited me nothing; and at this day I do not possess a
roof in Spain that I can call my own. If I wish to eat or sleep, I have
no where to go but to the inn or the tavern, and I seldom have wherewith
to pay the bill. I have not a hair upon my head that is not grey; my
body is infirm, and all that was left me, as well as to my brothers, has
been taken away and sold, even to the frock that I wore, to my great
dishonor. I implore your highness to forgive my complaints. I am indeed
in as ruined a condition as I have related. Hitherto I have wept for
others: may Heaven now have mercy upon me, and may the earth weep for
me!'

"He died in bitterest poverty at Valladolid at about the age of seventy
years. He was buried at Valladolid for a short while to satisfy the
Franciscans, and then removed to Seville by request of his relatives. It
was said that Columbus wished to be buried in San Domingo, and Charles
V. gave authority for this to be done to the grandson of Columbus, and
the family of Colon was to occupy the chapel of the cathedral. But there
is no record whatever of the events of his burial at San Domingo. This
is accounted for only on the theory that Drake, the English pirate,
destroyed them when he sacked San Domingo.

"In 1795 Spain ceded San Domingo to France and it seemed to the Spanish
people to be a national disgrace for the bones of Columbus to remain on
foreign soil. There were no explicit directions as to the exact spot
where his bones were and it was not known then that five of the family
were buried together there. What was supposed to be his ashes were taken
to Havana but in 1877 while making some repairs in the vaults another
tomb was discovered in which was a strip of lead from a box which proved
that the place contained the ashes of the grandson of Columbus. Then a
further search was made; only a few inches from the vault first opened
another vault was found and in it a lead box containing p