Produced by David Widger
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
AND THE NEW WORLD OF HIS DISCOVERY
A NARRATIVE BY FILSON YOUNG
TO
THE RIGHT HON. SIR HORACE PLUNKETT,
K.C.V.O., D.C.L., F.R.S.
MY DEAR HORACE,
Often while I have been studying the records of colonisation in the New
World I have thought of you and your difficult work in Ireland; and I
have said to myself, “What a time he would have had if he had been
Viceroy of the Indies in 1493!” There, if ever, was the chance for a
Department such as yours; and there, if anywhere, was the place for the
Economic Man. Alas! there war only one of him; William Ires or Eyre, by
name, from the county Galway; and though he fertilised the soil he did it
with his blood and bones. A wonderful chance; and yet you see what came
of it all. It would perhaps be stretching truth too far to say that you
are trying to undo some of Columbus’s work, and to stop up the hole he
made in Ireland when he found a channel into which so much of what was
best in the Old Country war destined to flow; for you and he have each
your places in the great circle of Time and Compensation, and though you
may seem to oppose one another across the centuries you are really
answering the same call and working in the same vineyard. For we all set
out to discover new worlds; and they are wise who realise early that
human nature has roots that spread beneath the ocean bed, that neither
latitude nor longitude nor time itself can change it to anything richer
or stranger than what it is, and that furrows ploughed in it are furrows
ploughed in the sea sand. Columbus tried to pour the wine of
civilisation into very old bottles; you, more wisely, are trying to pour
the old wine of our country into new bottles. Yet there is no great
unlikeness between the two tasks: it is all a matter of bottling; the
vintage is the same, infinite, inexhaustible, and as punctual as the sun
and the seasons. It was Columbus’s weakness as an administrator that he
thought the bottle was everything; it is your strength that you care for
the vintage, and labour to preserve its flavour and soft fire.
Yours,
FILSON YOUNG.
RUAN MINOR, September 1906.
PREFACE
The writing of historical biography is properly a work of partnership, to
which public credit is awarded too often in an inverse proportion to the
labours expended. One group of historians, labouring in the obscurest
depths, dig and prepare the ground, searching and sifting the documentary
soil with infinite labour and over an area immensely wide. They are
followed by those scholars and specialists in history who give their
lives to the study of a single period, and who sow literature in the
furrows of research prepared by those who have preceded them. Last of
all comes the essayist, or writer pure and simple, who reaps the harvest
so laboriously prepared. The material lies all before him; the documents
have been arranged, the immense contemporary fields of record and
knowledge examined and searched for stray seeds of significance that may
have blown over into them; the perspective is cleared for him, the
relation of his facts to time and space and the march of human
civilisation duly established; he has nothing to do but reap the field of
harvest where it suits him, grind it in the wheels of whatever machinery
his art is equipped with, and come before the public with the finished
product. And invariably in this unequal partnership he reaps most richly
who reaps latest.
I am far from putting this narrative forward as the fine and ultimate
product of all the immense labour and research of the historians of
Columbus; but I am anxious to excuse myself for my apparent presumption
in venturing into a field which might more properly be occupied by the
expert historian. It would appear that the double work of acquiring the
facts of a piece of human history and of presenting them through the
medium of literature can hardly ever be performed by one and the same
man. A lifetime must be devoted to the one, a year or two may suffice
for the other; and an entirely different set of qualities must be
employed in the two tasks. I cannot make it too clear that I make no
claim to have added one iota of information or one fragment of original
research to the expert knowledge regarding the life of Christopher
Columbus; and when I add that the chief collection of facts and documents
relating to the subject, the ‘Raccolta Columbiana,’--[Raccolta di
Documenti e Studi Publicati dalla R. Commissione Colombiana, &c. Auspice
il Ministero della Publica Istruzione. Rome, 1892-4.]--is a work
consisting of more than thirty folio volumes, the general reader will be
the more indulgent to me. But when a purely human interest led me some
time ago to look into the literature of Columbus, I was amazed to find
what seemed to me a striking disproportion between the extent of the
modern historians’ work on that subject and the knowledge or interest in
it displayed by what we call the general reading public. I am surprised
to find how many well-informed people there are whose knowledge of
Columbus is comprised within two beliefs, one of them erroneous and the
other doubtful: that he discovered America, and performed a trick with
an egg. Americans, I think, are a little better informed on the subject
than the English; perhaps because the greater part of modern critical
research on the subject of Columbus has been the work of Americans.
It is to bridge the immense gap existing between the labours of the
historians and the indifference of the modern reader, between the
Raccolta Columbiana, in fact, and the story of the egg, that I have
written my narrative.
It is customary and proper to preface a work which is based entirely on
the labours of other people with an acknowledgment of the sources whence
it is drawn; and yet in the case of Columbus I do not know where to
begin. In one way I am indebted to every serious writer who has even
remotely concerned himself with the subject, from Columbus himself and
Las Casas down to the editors of the Raccolta. The chain of historians
has been so unbroken, the apostolic succession, so to speak, has passed
with its heritage so intact from generation to generation, that the
latest historian enshrines in his work the labours of all the rest.
Yet there are necessarily some men whose work stands out as being more
immediately seizable than that of others; in the period of whose care the
lamp of inspiration has seemed to burn more brightly. In a matter of
this kind I cannot pretend to be a judge, but only to state my own
experience and indebtedness; and in my work I have been chiefly helped by
Las Casas, indirectly of course by Ferdinand Columbus, Herrera, Oviedo,
Bernaldez, Navarrete, Asensio, Mr. Payne, Mr. Harrisse, Mr. Vignaud,
Mr. Winsor, Mr. Thacher, Sir Clements Markham, Professor de Lollis,
and S. Salvagnini. It is thus not among the dusty archives of Seville,
Genoa, or San Domingo that I have searched, but in the archive formed by
the writings of modern workers. To have myself gone back to original
sources, even if I had been competent to do so, would have been in the
case of Columbian research but a waste of time and a doing over again
what has been done already with patience, diligence, and knowledge. The
historians have been committed to the austere task of finding out and
examining every fact and document in connection with their subject; and
many of these facts and documents are entirely without human interest
except in so far as they help to establish a date, a name, or a sum of
money. It has been my agreeable and lighter task to test and assay the
masses of bed-rock fact thus excavated by the historians for traces of
the particular ore which I have been seeking. In fact I have tried to
discover, from a reverent examination of all these monographs, essays,
histories, memoirs, and controversies concerning what Christopher
Columbus did, what Christopher Columbus was; believing as I do that any
labour by which he can be made to live again, and from the dust of more
than four hundred years be brought visibly to the mind’s eye, will not be
entirely without use and interest. Whether I have succeeded in doing so
or not I cannot be the judge; I can only say that the labour of
resuscitating a man so long buried beneath mountains of untruth and
controversy has some times been so formidable as to have seemed hopeless.
And yet one is always tempted back by the knowledge that Christopher
Columbus is not only a name, but that the human being whom we so describe
did actually once live and walk in the world; did actually sail and look
upon seas where we may also sail and look; did stir with his feet the
indestructible dust of this old Earth, and centre in himself, as we all
do, the whole interest and meaning of the Universe. Truly the most
commonplace fact, yet none the less amazing; and often when in the dust
of documents he has seemed most dead and unreal to me I have found
courage from the entertainment of some deep or absurd reflection; such as
that he did once undoubtedly, like other mortals, blink and cough and
blow his nose. And if my readers could realise that fact throughout
every page of this book, I should say that I had succeeded in my task.
To be more particular in my acknowledgments. In common with every modern
writer on Columbus--and modern research on the history of Columbus is
only thirty years old--I owe to the labours of Mr. Henry Harrisse, the
chief of modern Columbian historians, the indebtedness of the gold-miner
to the gold-mine. In the matters of the Toscanelli correspondence and
the early years of Columbus I have followed more closely Mr. Henry
Vignaud, whose work may be regarded as a continuation and reexamination
--in some cases destructive--of that of Mr. Harrisse. Mr. Vignaud’s work
is happily not yet completed; we all look forward eagerly to the
completion of that part of his ‘Etudes Critiques’ dealing with the second
half of the Admiral’s life; and Mr. Vignaud seems to me to stand higher
than all modern workers in this field in the patient and fearless
discovery of the truth regarding certain very controversial matters,
and also in ability to give a sound and reasonable interpretation to
those obscurer facts or deductions in Columbus’s life that seem doomed
never to be settled by the aid of documents alone. It may be unseemly in
me not to acknowledge indebtedness to Washington Irving, but I cannot
conscientiously do so. If I had been writing ten or fifteen years ago I
might have taken his work seriously; but it is impossible that anything
so one-sided, so inaccurate, so untrue to life, and so profoundly dull
could continue to exist save in the absence of any critical knowledge or
light on the subject. All that can be said for him is that he kept the
lamp of interest in Columbus alive for English readers during the period
that preceded the advent of modern critical research. Mr. Major’s
edition’ of Columbus’s letters has been freely consulted by me, as it
must be by any one interested in the subject. Professor Justin Winsor’s
work has provided an invaluable store of ripe scholarship in matters of
cosmography and geographical detail; Sir Clements Markham’s book, by far
the most trustworthy of modern English works on the subject, and a
valuable record of the established facts in Columbus’s life, has proved a
sound guide in nautical matters; while the monograph of Mr. Elton, which
apparently did not promise much at first, since the author has followed
some untrustworthy leaders as regards his facts, proved to be full of a
fragrant charm produced by the writer’s knowledge of and interest in
sub-tropical vegetation; and it is delightfully filled with the names of
gums and spices. To Mr. Vignaud I owe special thanks, not only for the
benefits of his research and of his admirable works on Columbus, but also
for personal help and encouragement. Equally cordial thanks are due to
Mr. John Boyd Thacher, whose work, giving as it does so large a
selection of the Columbus documents both in facsimile, transliteration,
and translation, is of the greatest service to every English writer on
the subject of Columbus. It is the more to be regretted, since the
documentary part of Mr. Thacher’s work is so excellent, that in his
critical studies he should have seemed to ignore some of the more
important results of modern research. I am further particularly indebted
to Mr. Thacher and to his publishers, Messrs. Putnam’s Sons, for
permission to reproduce certain illustrations in his work, and to avail
myself also of his copies and translations of original Spanish and
Italian documents. I have to thank Commendatore Guido Biagi, the keeper
of the Laurentian Library in Florence, for his very kind help and letters
of introduction to Italian librarians; Mr. Raymond Beazley, of Merton
College, Oxford, for his most helpful correspondence; and Lord Dunraven
for so kindly bringing, in the interests of my readers, his practical
knowledge of navigation and seamanship to bear on the first voyage of
Columbus. Finally my work has been helped and made possible by many
intimate and personal kindnesses which, although they are not specified,
are not the less deeply acknowledged.
September 1906.
CONTENTS
THE INNER LIGHT
I THE STREAM OF THE WORLD
II THE HOME IN GENOA
III YOUNG CHRISTOPHER
IV DOMENICO
V SEA THOUGHTS
VI IN PORTUGAL
VII ADVENTURES BODILY AND SPIRITUAL
VIII THE FIRE KINDLES
IX WANDERINGS WITH AN IDEA
X OUR LADY OF LA RABIDA
XI THE CONSENT OF SPAIN
XII THE PREPARATIONS AT PALOS
XIII EVENTS OF THE FIRST VOYAGE
XIV LANDFALL
THE NEW WORLD
I THE ENCHANTED ISLANDS
II THE EARTHLY PARADISE
III THE VOYAGE HOME
IV THE HOUR OF TRIUMPH
V GREAT EXPECTATIONS
VI THE SECOND VOYAGE
VII THE EARTHLY PARADISE REVISITED
DESPERATE REMEDIES
I THE VOYAGE TO CUBA
II THE CONQUEST OF ESPANOLA
III UPS AND DOWNS
IV IN SPAIN AGAIN
V THE THIRD VOYAGE
VI AN INTERLUDE
VII THE THIRD VOYAGE (continued)
TOWARDS THE SUNSET
I DEGRADATION
II CRISIS IN THE ADMIRAL’S LIFE
III THE LAST VOYAGE
IV HEROIC ADVENTURES BY LAND AND SEA
V THE ECLIPSE OF THE MOON
VI RELIEF OF THE ADMIRAL
VII THE HERITAGE OF HATRED
VIII THE ADMIRAL COMES HOME
IX THE LAST DAYS
X THE MAN COLUMBUS
THY WAY IS THE SEA,
AND THY PATH IN THE GREAT WATERS,
AND THY FOOTSTEPS ARE NOT KNOWN.
THE INNER LIGHT
BOOK I.
CHAPTER I
THE STREAM OF THE WORLD
A man standing on the sea-shore is perhaps as ancient and as primitive a
symbol of wonder as the mind can conceive. Beneath his feet are the
stones and grasses of an element that is his own, natural to him, in some
degree belonging to him, at any rate accepted by him. He has place and
condition there. Above him arches a world of immense void, fleecy
sailing clouds, infinite clear blueness, shapes that change and dissolve;
his day comes out of it, his source of light and warmth marches across
it, night falls from it; showers and dews also, and the quiet influence
of stars. Strange that impalpable element must be, and for ever
unattainable by him; yet with its gifts of sun and shower, its furniture
of winged life that inhabits also on the friendly soil, it has links and
partnerships with life as he knows it and is a complement of earthly
conditions. But at his feet there lies the fringe of another element,
another condition, of a vaster and more simple unity than earth or air,
which the primitive man of our picture knows to be not his at all. It is
fluent and unstable, yet to be touched and felt; it rises and falls,
moves and frets about his very feet, as though it had a life and entity
of its own, and was engaged upon some mysterious business. Unlike the
silent earth and the dreaming clouds it has a voice that fills his world
and, now low, now loud, echoes throughout his waking and sleeping life.
Earth with her sprouting fruits behind and beneath him; sky, and larks
singing, above him; before him, an eternal alien, the sea: he stands
there upon the shore, arrested, wondering. He lives,--this man of our
figure; he proceeds, as all must proceed, with the task and burden of
life. One by one its miracles are unfolded to him; miracles of fire and
cold, and pain and pleasure; the seizure of love, the terrible magic of
reproduction, the sad miracle of death. He fights and lusts and endures;
and, no more troubled by any wonder, sleeps at last. But throughout the
days of his life, in the very act of his rude existence, this great
tumultuous presence of the sea troubles and overbears him. Sometimes in
its bellowing rage it terrifies him, sometimes in its tranquillity it
allures him; but whatever he is doing, grubbing for roots, chipping
experimentally with bones and stones, he has an eye upon it; and in his
passage by the shore he pauses, looks, and wonders. His eye is led from
the crumbling snow at his feet, past the clear green of the shallows,
beyond the furrows of the nearer waves, to the calm blue of the distance;
and in his glance there shines again that wonder, as in his breast stirs
the vague longing and unrest that is the life-force of the world.
What is there beyond? It is the eternal question asked by the finite of
the infinite, by the mortal of the immortal; answer to it there is none
save in the unending preoccupation of life and labour. And if this old
question was in truth first asked upon the sea-shore, it was asked most
often and with the most painful wonder upon western shores, whence the
journeying sun was seen to go down and quench himself in the sea. The
generations that followed our primitive man grew fast in knowledge, and
perhaps for a time wondered the less as they knew the more; but we may be
sure they never ceased to wonder at what might lie beyond the sea. How
much more must they have wondered if they looked west upon the waters,
and saw the sun of each succeeding day sink upon a couch of glory where
they could not follow? All pain aspires to oblivion, all toil to rest,
all troubled discontent with what is present to what is unfamiliar and
far away; and no power of knowledge and scientific fact will ever prevent
human unhappiness from reaching out towards some land of dreams of which
the burning brightness of a sea sunset is an image. Is it very hard to
believe, then, that in that yearning towards the miracle of a sun
quenched in sea distance, felt and felt again in human hearts through
countless generations, the westward stream of human activity on this
planet had its rise? Is it unreasonable to picture, on an earth spinning
eastward, a treadmill rush of feet to follow the sinking light? The
history of man’s life in this world does not, at any rate, contradict us.
Wisdom, discovery, art, commerce, science, civilisation have all moved
west across our world; have all in their cycles followed the sun; have
all, in their day of power, risen in the East and set in the West.
This stream of life has grown in force and volume with the passage of
ages. It has always set from shore to sea in countless currents of
adventure and speculation; but it has set most strongly from East to
West. On its broad bosom the seeds of life and knowledge have been
carried throughout the world. It brought the people of Tyre and Carthage
to the coasts and oceans of distant worlds; it carried the English from
Jutland across cold and stormy waters to the islands of their conquest;
it carried the Romans across half the world; it bore the civilisation of
the far East to new life and virgin western soils; it carried the new
West to the old East, and is in our day bringing back again the new East
to the old West. Religions, arts, tradings, philosophies, vices and laws
have been borne, a strange flotsam, upon its unchanging flood. It has
had its springs and neaps, its trembling high-water marks, its hour of
affluence, when the world has been flooded with golden humanity; its ebb
and effluence also, when it has seemed to shrink and desert the kingdoms
set upon its shores. The fifteenth century in Western Europe found it at
a pause in its movements: it had brought the trade and the learning of
the East to the verge of the Old World, filling the harbours of the
Mediterranean with ships and the monasteries of Italy and Spain with
wisdom; and in the subsequent and punctual decadence that followed this
flood, there gathered in the returning tide a greater energy and volume
which was to carry the Old World bodily across the ocean. And yet, for
all their wisdom and power, the Spanish and Portuguese were still in the
attitude of our primitive man, standing on the sea-shore and looking out
in wonder across the sea.
The flood of the life-stream began to set again, and little by little to
rise and inundate Western Europe, floating off the galleys and caravels
of King Alphonso of Portugal, and sending them to feel their way along
the coasts of Africa; a little later drawing the mind of Prince Henry the
Navigator to devote his life to the conquest and possession of the
unknown. In his great castle on the promontory of Sagres, with the voice
of the Atlantic thundering in his ears, and its mists and sprays bounding
his vision, he felt the full force of the stream, and stretched his arms
to the mysterious West. But the inner light was not yet so brightly
kindled that he dared to follow his heart; his ships went south and south
again, to brave on each voyage the dangers and terrors that lay along the
unknown African coast, until at length his captains saw the Cape of Good
Hope. South and West and East were in those days confusing terms; for it
was the East that men were thinking of when they set their faces to the
setting sun, and it was a new road to the East that they sought when they
felt their way southward along the edge of the world. But the rising
tide of discovery was working in that moment, engaging the brains of
innumerable sages, stirring the wonder of innumerable mariners; reaching
also, little by little, to quarters less immediately concerned with the
business of discovery. Ships carried the strange tidings of new coasts
and new islands from port to port throughout the Mediterranean; Venetians
on the lagoons, Ligurians on the busy trading wharves of Genoa, were
discussing the great subject; and as the tide rose and spread, it floated
one ship of life after another that was destined for the great business
of adventure. Some it inspired to dream and speculate, and to do no more
than that; many a heart also to brave efforts and determinations that
were doomed to come to nothing and to end only in failure. And among
others who felt the force and was swayed and lifted by the prevailing
influence, there lived, some four and a half centuries ago, a little boy
playing about the wharves of Genoa, well known to his companions as
Christoforo, son of Domenico the wool-weaver, who lived in the Vico
Dritto di Ponticello.