DE GONZ. FERN. DE OVIEDO.

The foundations for the governance of the new kingdom having been laid and the Jews cast out of Spain, the Catholic Sovereigns departed from Granada toward Aragon, taking in their company the infantas and Prince Don Juan, their children. They remained in Zaragoza for some months, until in October they set out for Barcelona, where the King was on the verge of being a victim of treason or madness.

"Friday, the seventh day of the month of December (writes Oviedo, an eyewitness to the event), a peasant native to the place of Remensa in the Principality of Catalonia, called Juan de Cañamares, gave a knife blow to the Catholic King in the neck in Barcelona, so dangerous that he arrived at the point of death. A very notable justice was done to that traitor, notwithstanding that as it seemed, he was mad and always said that if he had killed him, he would be king" 11.

Not yet recovered from his wound, Don Fernando had a new occasion to admire the clear foresight of the Catholic Queen regarding the existence of the New World. The illustrious Genoese, held before for a madman, arrived in Barcelona in April of the following year, presenting to the Sovereigns a large and brilliant display of the riches that the unknown America treasured. In payment for such an extraordinary service, he not only achieved the greatest honors, according to the capitulations established, but he obtained the grace, requested by him, that his children be received into the number of the pages of the prince 12. This was a favorable juncture for the plans of Oviedo, who was only fifteen years old, and he certainly did not let it pass. The respect that Christopher Columbus had inspired in him turned into pure affection for his children. Distinguished by the prince, it was an easy enterprise for Oviedo to initiate himself into the friendship of the youths Diego and Fernando, inquiring from their father along this path everything that had happened on that voyage, the fruit of which was the discovery of such strange regions. But although a boy, Gonzalo had already learned that historical truth should not be gathered from a single source, and in order to verify the facts he was noting, he tried to inform himself also from the Pinzon brothers, and especially from Vicente, with whom he sustained friendly correspondence from then on 13.

11 General and Natural History of the Indies, Part I, book II, cap. 7.

12 "But as he was a prudent man (Christopher Columbus), as soon as he went to Spain with the news of the first discovery, he begged the Catholic Sovereigns to be pleased that the Prince Don Juan should receive his children as his pages... And thus Prince Don Juan treated these children of his well and they were favored by him and walked in his house until God took him to his glory in the city of Salamanca in the year 1497" (Hist. Gen. y Nat. de Ind., Part I, lib. III, cap. 6).

13 Narrating what occurred in the first voyages that Columbus made to the Indies, Oviedo says: "Beyond what, I was informed of them and others of the first road, as well as of Vicente Yañez Pinçon, who was one of the first pilots of those three Pinzon brothers, of whom mention is made; because with this one I had friendship until the year 1544 that he died" (Hist. Gen. y Nat. de Ind., Part I, lib. II, cap. 13).