The Queen, we are told, “did not consider the undertaking very certain.” Here spoke her habitual caution, prompted by a life in which the demands on her assistance perpetually outran not her interest but her resources; yet it is evident from the first the project caught her fancy, while in Ferdinand it merely aroused a cold distrust. The country was scarcely pacified from the anarchy of civil war and foreign invasion; national credit and patriotism were strained to the uttermost in what, it had become evident, must be a prolonged struggle against the Moors; the French were threatening his own loved kingdom of Aragon, and he could spare neither time nor money to regain command of the eastern Pyrenees; insidious heresy was sapping the Catholic Faith, and wide care and organization would be required for its suppression. Was this the moment to take up chimerical schemes for reaching China or discovering lands that every man of common-sense or culture had long believed to be fabulous? His arguments, somewhat to this effect, can be imagined, uttered with a dry, logical force, not without its appeal to Isabel’s own logical brain. She could see it all from his point of view, her reason accept his conclusion; and yet deep in her nature was a power that differentiated her statesmanship from his, and that in a crisis prompted her, in the teeth of the logic that ordinarily governed her actions, to run what has been happily called a “divine risk.” If Ferdinand lacked the visionary instinct that made Isabel recognize the Genoese sailor, not as adventurer or fool, but as a possible genius, it must be confessed that in his case faith would have made greater demands. Castile and Aragon were united into a single Spain, but it is reading history from a modern outlook to suppose the individual sympathies of King and Queen Spanish rather than distinctively Aragonese and Castilian. Throughout past centuries, as we have remarked before, the magnet of Aragonese attraction had been the Mediterranean; and Ferdinand was no less under its spell than his uncle, Alfonso V., the conqueror of Naples. It required an effort to turn his mental gaze westwards; whereas Isabel, heiress of Castilian hopes and ambitions, was imbued with the spirit of rivalry with Portugal and looked on the “sea of darkness” not with bored aloofness but with awed speculation. It might well seem that its secrets held no immediate prospects for Aragon; they were pregnant with possibilities of empire and wealth for the sister kingdom with her Galician and Andalusian seaboard. It is thus that both by character and race Isabel and not her husband was destined to be Columbus’s true patron, and that looking back over years of probation he could write later: In all men there was disbelief; but to the Queen, my lady, God gave the spirit of understanding and great courage, and made her heiress of all as a dear and much-loved daughter.