relief. This order was punctually executed. The captain approached the
shore, delivered a letter of empty compliment from Ovando to the admiral,
received his answer and returned. About four months afterwards a vessel
came to their relief; and Columbus, worn out with fatigues and broken by
misfortunes, returned for the last time to Spain. Here a new distress
awaited him, which he considered as one of the greatest of his whole life:
this was the death of queen Isabella, his last and most powerful friend.

He did not suddenly abandon himself to despair. He called upon the
gratitude and justice of the king; and in terms of dignity demanded the
fulfilment of his former contract. Notwithstanding his age and infirmities,
he even solicited to be farther employed in extending the career of
discovery, without a prospect of any other reward than the pleasure of
doing good to mankind. But Ferdinand, cold ungrateful and timid, dared not
comply with any proposal of this kind, lest he should increase his own
obligations to a man, whose services he thought it dangerous to reward. He
therefore delayed and avoided any decision on these subjects, in hopes
that the declining health of Columbus would soon rid the court of the
remonstrances of a suitor, whose unexampled merit was, in their opinion, a
sufficient reason for destroying him. In this they were not disappointed.
Columbus languished a short time, and gladly resigned a life which had been
worn out in the most signal services perhaps that have been rendered by any
one man to an ungrateful world.

Posterity is sometimes more just to the memory of great men than
contemporaries were to their persons. But even this consolation, if it be
one, has been wanting to the discoverer of our hemisphere. The continent,
instead of bearing his name, has been called after one of his followers,
a man of no particular merit. And in the modern city of Mexico there is
instituted and perpetuated, by order of government, an annual festival in