Indies, he had done little else than memorialize, and
petition, and negotiate about his rights. But Ferdinand, who had always
looked coldly on his projects, was disposed to regard his claims with
still less favour. Columbus professed himself willing to sacrifice the
arrears of revenue due to him, but urged strenuously his demand that his
son Diego should be made viceroy of the Indies, in accordance with the
terms of the grant making that dignity hereditary in his family. Ferdinand
did not refuse absolutely: the breach of faith would have been too
flagrant. But he procrastinated, and ended by referring the matter to the
significantly named Board of Discharges of the Royal Conscience, which
board regulated its proceedings by the known wishes of the king, and
procrastinated too.

The proverb, "Fear old age, for it does not come alone," was especially
applicable to Columbus, while suffering sickness without the elasticity to
bear it, poverty with high station and debt, and all the delay of
suitorship, not at the beginning, but at the close, of a career. A similar
decline of fortune is to be seen in the lives of many men; of those, too,
who have been most adventurous and successful in their prime. Their
fortunes grow old and feeble with themselves; and those clouds, which were
but white and scattered during the vigour of the day, sink down together,
stormful and massive, in huge black lines, across the setting sun.

DEATH OF COLUMBUS

Shortly after the arrival of Philip and his queen in Spain, Columbus had
written to their Highnesses, deploring his inability to come to them,
through illness, and saying that, notwithstanding his pitiless disease
(the gout), he could yet do them service the like of which had not been
seen. Perhaps he meant service in the way of good advice touching the
administration of the Indies; perhaps, for he was of an indomitable
spirit, that he could yet make more voyages of discovery. But there was
then only left for him that voyage in which the peasant who has seen but
the little district round his home, and the great travellers in thought
and deed, are alike to find themselves upon the unknown waters of further
life. Looked at in this way, what a great discoverer each of us is to be!
But we must not linger too long, even at the deathbed of a hero. Having
received all the sacraments of the Church, and uttering as his last words,
"In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum," Columbus died, at