“Be assured that your imprisonment weighed heavily upon us,” wrote the sovereigns some years later, still mindful of the shock the news had given them; and when Columbus knelt before his Queen the sobs of pent-up bitterness with which he recounted his troubles awoke answering tears of regret and understanding in her eyes. “After they had listened to him,” says Oviedo, “they consoled him with much kindliness and spake such words that he remained somewhat comforted.” Confidence was temporarily restored, but the Admiral’s hour of glory and triumph had passed never to return. His bad treatment was acknowledged, but so also was his bad government; for though he might not have deliberately tyrannized and deceived, yet he had failed to keep order or fulfil his promises. The Queen was growing old, and, broken by ill-health and private griefs, took less share than she was wont in public business. Ferdinand had never liked the Genoese sailor; moreover he was no longer necessary to royal schemes and that to the astute King was ever sufficient excuse for discarding a tool. Columbus sailed for the fourth time to the lands of his discovery in 1502; but it was to find that Nicholas de Ovando, another royal protégé, had succeeded Bobadilla in command at Española, while treachery and ill-luck dogged his own efforts. Bitterness and suspicion had begun to eat like a canker in his mind, and his letters are full of querulous reproaches that the bargain he had made was ill-kept and his due share of the commercial profits denied him. In 1504, he returned home suffering in body and spirit, but no longer to meet with the sympathy for which he craved. Three weeks after he arrived at Seville Isabel died and her will, that contained a special petition for the kindly treatment of the natives, made no mention of his name. Writing to his son Diego the Admiral says: The principal thing is affectionately and with great devotion to commend the soul of the Queen, Our Lady, to God. Her life was always catholic and holy and ready for all things of His holy service, and for this reason it may be believed that she is in His holy glory and beyond the desires of this rough and wearisome world. In these words lie the confession of his own disillusionment. His world, once so fair a place of material visions and dreams, had proved in its essence wearisome; and, clad in the Franciscan habit of renunciation, he himself, on the 20th of May, 1506, passed thankfully into the rest of God’s “holy glory.” “His life,” says Filson Young, “flickered out in the completest obscurity.” No Peter Martyr eulogized his memory in letters to his courtly patrons. No grateful country of adoption bestowed on him a gorgeous funeral. Even the lands he had discovered were destined to receive their name from another, the Florentine sailor Amerigo Vespucci, whom he himself had helped on the road to fame.