ad suffered at that man's hands was never made. The last eighteen
months of the Admiral's life were spent in sickness and poverty.
Accumulated hardship and disappointment had broken him down, and he died
on Ascension day, May 20, 1506, at Valladolid. So little heed was taken
of his passing away that the local annals of that city, "which give
almost every insignificant event from 1333 to 1539, day by day, do not
mention it."[616] His remains were buried in the Franciscan monastery at
Valladolid, whence they were removed in 1513 to the monastery of Las
Cuevas, at Seville, where the body of his son Diego, second Admiral and
Viceroy of the Indies, was buried in 1526. Ten years after this date,
the bones of father and son were removed to Hispaniola, to the cathedral
of San Domingo; whence they have since been transferred to Havana. The
result of so many removals has been to raise doubts as to whether the
ashes now reposing at Havana are really those of Columbus and his son;
and over this question there has been much critical discussion, of a
sort that we may cheerfully leave to those who like to spend their time
over such trivialities.

[Footnote 616: Harrisse, _Notes on Columbus_, New York, 1866,
p. 73.]

[Sidenote: "Nuevo Mundo."]

There is a tradition that Ferdinand and Isabella, at some date
unspecified, had granted to Columbus, as a legend for his coat-of-arms,
the noble motto:--

A Castilla y a Leon
Nuevo mundo dio Colon,

_i. e._ "To Castile-and-Leon Columbus gave a New World;" and we are
further told that, when the Admiral's bones were removed to Seville,
this motto was, by order of King Ferdinand, inscribed upon his
tomb.[617] This tradition crumbles under the touch of historical
criticism. The Admiral's coat-of-arms, as finally emblazoned under his
own inspection at Seville in 1502, quarters the royal Castle-and-Lion of
the kingdom of Castile with his own devices of five anchors, and a group
of golden islands with a bit of Terra Firma, upon a blue sea. But there
is no legend of any sort, nor is anything of the kind mentioned by Las
Casas or Bernaldez or Peter Martyr. The first allusion to such a motto
is by Oviedo, in 1535, who gives it a somewhat different turn:--

Por Castilla y por Leon
Nuevo mundo hallo Colon,

_i. e._ "For Castile-and-Leon Columbus found a New World." But the other
form is no doubt the better, for Ferdinand Columbus, at some time not
later than 1537, had ado