CHAP. I L ]
CHRISTOPHER
COLUMBUS.
387
CHAPTER I I . MUTINY OP PORRAS. [1503 ]
IT might have been thought that the adverse fortune which had so long persecuted Columbus was now exhausted. The envy which had once sickened at his glory and prosperity could scarcely have devised for him a more forlorn heritage in the world he had discovered. The tenant of a wreck on a savage coast, in an untraversed ocean, at the mercy of barbarous hordes, who, in a mo ment, from precarious friends, might be transformed into ferocious enemies ; afflicted, too, by excruciating maladies which confined him to his bed, and by the pains and infirmities which hardship and anxiety had heaped upon his advancing age. But he had not yet exhausted his cup of bitterness. He had yet to expe rience an evil worse than storm, or shipwreck, or bodily anguish, or the violence of savage hordes,—the perfidy of those in whom he confided. Mendez and Fiesco had not long departed when the Spaniards in the wreck began to grow sickly, partly from the toils and ex posures of the recent voyage, partly from being crowded in nar row quarters in a moist and sultry climate, and partly from want of their accustomed food, for they could not habituate themselves