[Illustration: MAP OF 1492. (SEE LIST OF MAPS)]
Columbus learned how he had been used, and his wife's death helped to
decide him, in his disgust for place and people. Towards the end of
1484, he left Lisbon. Three years later, when he had become fully as
much disgusted with the dilatory sloth and tricks of Spain, he offered
himself again to Portugal. King John had repented of his meanness; on
March 20, 1488, he wrote in answer to Columbus, eagerly offering on his
side to guarantee him against any suits that might be taken against him
in Lisbon. But the Court of Castille now became, in its turn, afraid of
quite losing what might be infinite advantage; Columbus was kept in the
service of Ferdinand and Isabella; and at last in August, 1492, the
"Catholic Kings" sent him out from Palos to discover what he could on
his own terms.
What followed, the discovery of America, and all the subsequent ventures
of the Cabots, of Amerigo Vespucci, of Cortes and Pizarro, De Soto and
Raleigh and the Pilgrim Fathers, are not often connected in any way with
the slow and painful beginnings of European expansion in the Portugal of
the fifteenth century, but it is a true and real connection all the
same.
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