This he did. His son Fernando “saw them always hanging in his cabinet, and he requested that when he died they might be buried with him.” The sight, the thought, of the great admiral brought in chains from the lands he had discovered turned all hearts to him with indignant pity. The queen, it is said, was moved to tears. Rewards and satisfaction were promised Columbus, and Bobadilla was deposed. Another voyage Columbus was to make,--his fourth and last,--in search of a strait or passage by which he might reach Portuguese Asia. On May 9, 1502, he set sail with four ships and one hundred and fifty men. It was a voyage of “horror, peril, sickness, and starvation.” Columbus sailed along the Gulf of Mexico, coming pitifully near lands as rich in gold as the eastern ones which he sought. He missed them and found only savage tribes with a few rings and chains of gold. The story of these months is a sad one of famine, hardship, disease, tempest, mutiny, and quarrels with the natives. It was told in after years by Columbus’s brave young son Fernando, who accompanied him on this voyage. At last the admiral turned homeward and reached Seville in the autumn of 1504. While he lay ill, soon after his return, he received the sad news of the death of his good friend, Queen Isabella. In vain during the months and years which followed did the admiral strive to win justice from the king. Old and worn out, he had, as he said, “no place to repair to except an inn, and often with nothing to pay for sustenance.” He died, May 20, 1506, thinking to the last that the land which he had discovered was a part of the Old World. The voyages of the great admiral did not end with his life. His body was moved from one tomb to another in Spain, then was carried to the Cathedral in Santo Domingo and, in 1796, to the Cathedral of Havana. Seven years after his death, king Ferdinand erected in his honor a marble tomb, bearing this inscription, “To Castile and Leon Colon gave a new world.” But the New World slipped from the grasp of the Spaniards, unable to hold the rich prize. Other nations of Europe claimed and sought to share it, but the brave and hardy English overcame one after another of their rivals and established here the colonies which grew into our mighty commonwealth. The land which Columbus discovered is a nation richer and greater than the Cathay of which he dreamed. Ferdinand De Soto The Discoverer of the Mississippi River