1897.

TO
WILLIAM HENRY STONE,
THIS LIFE OF COLUMBUS
IS DEDICATED
WITH SINCERE ESTEEM AND REGARD
BY HIS AFFECTIONATE.
FRIEND,
ARTHUR HELPS.
London, October, 1868

PREFACE.

This Life of Columbus is one of a series of biographies prepared under my
superintendence, and for the most part taken verbatim from my "History of
the Spanish Conquest in America."

That work was written chiefly with a view to illustrate the history of
slavery, and not to give full accounts of the deeds of the discoverers and
conquerors of the New World, much less to give a condensed memoir of each
of them.

It has, therefore, been necessary to rearrange and add considerably to
these materials, and for this assistance I am indebted to the skill and
research of Mr. Herbert Preston Thomas.

Perhaps there are few of the great personages in history who have been
more talked about and written about than Christopher Columbus, the
discoverer of America. It might seem, therefore, that there is very little
that is new to be said about him. I do not think, however, that this is
altogether the case. Absorbed in, and to a certain extent overcome by the
contemplation of the principal event, we have sometimes, perhaps, been
mistaken as to the causes which led to it. We are apt to look upon
Columbus as a person who knew that there existed a great undiscovered
continent, and who made his way directly to the discovery of that
continent--springing at one bound from the known to the unknown. Whereas,
the dream of Columbus's life was to make his way by an unknown route to
what was known, or to what he considered to be known. He wished to find
out an easy pathway to the territories of Kublai Khan, or Prester-John.

Neither were his motives such as have been generally supposed. They were,
for the most part, purely religious. With the gold gained from potentates
such as Kublai Khan, the Holy Sepulchre was to be rebuilt, and the
Catholic Faith was to be spread over the remotest parts of the earth.

Columbus had all the spirit of a crusader, and, at the same time, the
investigating nature of a modern man of science. The Arabs have a proverb
that a man is more the son of the age in which he lives than of his own
father. This was not so with Columbus; he hardly seems to belong at all to
his age. At a time when there was never more of worldliness and
self-seeking; when Alexander Borgia was Pope; when Louis the Eleventh
reigned in France, Henry the Seven