After the return to Spain of Diego Mendez, the loyal friend who had cared for his interests so well in San Domingo, she had raised him to noble rank.
It is clear, therefore, that among her last thoughts came in the wish to do justice to him whom she had served so well.

She had well done her duty which had been given her to do.

She had never forgotten the new world to which it was her good fortune to send the discoverer, and in her death that discoverer lost his best friend.
On his arrival in Seville, where one might say he had a right to rest himself and do nothing else, Columbus engaged at once in efforts to see that the seamen who had accompanied him in this last adventure should be properly paid.

Many of these men had been disloyal to him and unfaithful to their sovereign, but Columbus, with his own magnanimity, represented eagerly at court that they had endured great peril, that they brought great news, and that the king ought to repay them all that they had earned.
He says, in a letter to his son written at this period, "I have not a roof over my head in Castile.

I have no place to eat nor to sleep excepting a tavern, and there I am often too poor to pay my scot." This passage has been quoted as if he were living as a beggar at this time, and the world has been asked to believe that a man who had a tenth of the revenue of the Indies due to him in some fashion, was actually living from hand to mouth from day to day.