Following the return of the vanquished army of Spain to its home country was another solemn voyage, undertaken for the transfer of the bones of Christopher Columbus from the world he had discovered to the land that grudgingly, cautiously permitted him to discover it. Spain claimed all the benefits that arose from his knowledge, his bravery, his skill, his energy, and his enthusiasm, and rewarded his years of service with dismissal from office and confinement in chains as a prisoner, but now it repented, and wished to house his unwitting relics in state. Once before these bones had crossed the sea. After the death of the great navigator, in Valladolid, Spain, in 1506, his body remained in that city for seven years. Then it was taken to Seville and placed in Las Cuevas monastery with that of his son, Diego. In 1536 both bodies were exhumed and sent to Santo Domingo, or Hispaniola, an island that Columbus appeared to hold in a warmer liking than either of the equally picturesque, fertile, and friendly islands of Cuba, Porto Rico, or Jamaica. In the quaint old cathedral of Santo Domingo, built in 1514, the bodies of the great admiral, his son, and also his grandson, Louis, first Duke of Veragua, rested for more than a century without disturbance. On the appearance of the English fleet, however, in 1655, the archbishop was so fearful of a raid on the church and the theft of the bodies that he ordered them to be hidden in the earth. During the years in which they remained so covered the exact burial-place of the admiral may have been forgotten, or, it may be, as several people allege, that the San Dominicans tricked the Spaniards when, in 1795, the latter gave their island to France and carried with them to Havana the supposed skeleton of Columbus. Bones of somebody they certainly did take, but it is no uncommon belief in the Antilles that the monks of Santo Domingo had hidden the precious ones and sent to the monks of Havana the bones of the son, Diego, albeit a monument was erected to the memory and virtues of the great Columbus in Havana cathedral.