d
prevent their incursions upon those innocent islanders to whom he had
made so many promises of protection. But he fell ill, and for a short
time at least was wholly unconscious. The officers in command took
occasion of his illness, and of their right to manage the vessels, to
turn back to the city of Isabella. He arrived there "as one half dead,"
and his explorations and discoveries for this voyage were thus brought
to an end. To his great delight he found there his brother Bartholomew,
whom he had not seen for eight years. Bartholomew had accompanied Diaz
in the famous voyage in which he discovered the Cape of Good Hope.
Returning to Europe in 1488 he had gone to England, with a message from
Christopher Columbus, asking King Henry the Seventh to interest himself
in the great adventure he proposed.

The authorities differ as to the reception which Henry gave to this
great proposal. Up to the present time, no notice has been found of his
visit in the English archives. The earliest notice of America, in the
papers preserved there, is a note of a present of ten pounds "to
hym that found the new land," who was Cabot, after his first voyage.
Bartholomew Columbus was in England on the tenth of February, 1488; how
much later is not known. Returning from England he staid in France, in
the service of Madama de Bourbon. This was either Anne of Beaujeu, or
the widow of the Admiral Louis de Bourbon. Bartholomew was living in
Paris when he heard of his brother's great discovery.

He had now been appointed by the Spanish sovereigns to command a fleet
of three vessels, which had been sent out to provision the new colony.
He had sailed from Cadiz on the thirtieth of April, 1494, and he arrived
at Isabella on St. John's Day of the same year.

Columbus welcomed him with delight, and immediately made him his
first-lieutenant in command of the colony. There needed a strong hand
for the management of the colony, for the quarrels which had existed
before Columbus went on his Cuban voyage had not diminished in his
absence. Pedro Margarita and Father Boil are spoken of as those who
had made the most trouble. They had come determined to make a fortune
rapidly, and they did not propose to give up such a hope to the slow
processes of ordinary colonization. Columbus knew very well that those
who had returned to Spain had carried with them complaints as to his own
course. He would have been glad on some accounts to return, himself,
at once; bu