ties in the Azores. Then, stopping in Portugal
while homeward bound for Spain, Columbus
himself had escaped the plotting of Portuguese
courtiers who wanted their king to havethe
mariner killed to prevent news of his success
from becoming known. Against tremendous
odds, Columbus was now safely in Spain,
eagerly awaiting the moment when he could
describe his discoveries to the king and queen.
A FACE IN THE CROWD
When Columbus and his entourage rode
through the streets of Barcelona on April 20,
1493, one of the curious onlookers was 18-
year-old Bartolomé de Las Casas. The young
man’s father would sail with Columbus when
the admiral returned to “the Indies.” Bar-
tolomé himself would later immigrate to Cuba
to work as a planter before becoming the first
priest ordained in the Western Hemisphere,
an important historian, and an impassioned
defender of the rights of Native Americans,
whose cruel mistreatment at the hands of his
countrymen outraged him.
Las Casas continued to observe Columbus
closely over the years and would become close
to the admiral’s brothers and sons, relation-
ships that helped him compile his History of
the Indies.Bythe time the book was com-
pleted more than 70 years later—it would not
be commercially published for another 300
years—he had personally known many
famous (and infamous) explorers: Hernán
Cortés, Vasco Núñez de Balboa, Juan Ponce de
León, Pánfilo de Narváez, Ferdinand Magel-
lan, and other figures who played great and
small parts in Spain’sage of discovery. Las
Casas would find much to both admire and
criticize in Christopher Columbus.
On that day in 1493, however, young Las
Casas watched the strange procession passing
by. “The entire city came out, so that there was
not room for all the people in the streets,” he
wrote. “All wondered to see that venerable
person who was said to have discovered
another world; to see the Indians, parrots,
jewels, and gold things he had discovered.”
The common people of Barcelona and
Spanish nobility alike watched, Las Casas’s
account continued, as Columbus reached a
canopied platform that the sovereigns had
ordered built to receive him in full public view.Columbus Returns to Spain B 3
Christopher Columbus landed on the islands of
Cuba, Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican
Republic), San Salvador, and Guadeloupe in late- This woodcut appeared in a book about
Columbus’s voyage to the Americas published in - (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division [LC-USZC4-4806])