IF COLUMBUS HAD KEPT HIS STRAIGHT COURSE WESTWARD
On the morning of the 7th day of October, 1492, Christopher Columbus,
sailing unknown seas in quest of "Cipango," the Indies, and the Grand
Khan, still held resolutely to a course which he had laid out due to the
westward. This course he held in spite of the murmurings of his crew,
who wished to turn back, and contrary to the advice of that skilled and
astute navigator, Martin Alonzo Pinzon, who commanded the _Pinta_.
Pinzon had repeatedly advised that the course be altered to the
southwestward.
Columbus was sailing on a theory. Pinzon, like any other practical
navigator in a strange sea, was feeling his way, and answering the
indications of the waters, the skies, the green grasses that drifted on
the surface of the waves, the flocks of birds that wheeled, and dipped,
and showed their heels to the far-wandered navigators, and seemed to
know their way so well over that remote and uncharted wilderness of the
deep. Columbus had said, "We will sail to the west, and ever to the
west, until the west becomes the east." Which to the men before the mast
was sheer lunacy. But Pinzon had already found strange Afric lands. The
scent of their leaves and flowers seemed to lie in his nostrils.
Martin Alonzo Pinzon put off in a boat, later on that 7th day of
October, and came back to the _Santa Maria_, in which was the Admiral.
He brought the information that he had seen "a great multitude of birds
passing from the north to the southwest; from which cause he deemed it
reasonable to suppose that they (the birds) were going to sleep on land,
or were perhaps flying from winter which must be approaching in the
countries from which they came." The Admiral knew it was by the aid of
the flight of birds that the Portuguese had discovered the greater part
of the new lands which they had found. Columbus hesitated, wavered.
Had the heart of the great theorist, sailing obstinately straight west
in obedience to the call of the land whose presence there he had
reasoned out, misgiven him at last? Had the discouragement and
incredulity of his men affected him? We do not know. But we do know that
finally he heeded Pinzon's oft-repeated demand that the course be
altered.
It looked like common sense to follow the birds. Really it was not. The
theory was his true guide. Columbus betrayed his faith; he resolved, as
his journal recorded, "to turn his prow to the west-southwest, with the
determination of pursuing that course _for two days_." He never resumed
the westward course. He had weakened in his devotion to his own
idea--and had lost a continent for Spain and the Roman Catholic Church.
For in spite of the conclusion reached by John Boyd Thacher, in his
monumental work on Columbus, that even if the Admiral had held the
westward course his fleet would not have passed the northernmost tip of
the Bahamas, there is sufficient ground for the generally accepted
conclusion that his landfall in that case would have been on the coast
of Florida or South Carolina, or even North Carolina. After the
alteration of his course, Columbus continued to sail for four days in a
general southwesterly direction, before, on the 12th of October, he fell
upon Watling's Island. In that time he had sailed, according to his own
reckoning, one hundred and forty-one leagues. This distance, if
persisted in due to the westward, would have brought him in contact with
drift and real bird-flight indications of the continent.
Let us see toward what point his course had been laid. Setting sail from
Gomera, in the Canary Islands, Columbus purposed to go straight to the
west until he reached land. Gomera lies in about the latitude of Cape
Canaveral, or the Indian River, Florida. A line drawn from Gomera to
Cape Canaveral passes to the northward of the Bahamas altogether. No
land lay in the Admiral's path to Florida.
But any supposition that Columbus would not have gone to the northward
of the Indian River ignores the northward drift that the Gulf Stream
would have caused his ships. He had yet, of course, to reach the axis
of that powerful current, which is here comparatively narrow, and runs
very swiftly at the point where the due westward course from Gomera
would have struck it. It is a fair chance that this drift would have
carried Columbus so far north as to land him in the neighborhood of what
is now Charleston, S. C., or even further to the northward, if he had
followed the path he had laid out for himself.
Amazing the consequences that hung upon the flight of those "multitudes
of birds" that wheeled Bahama-ward on that October day! The Admiral's
landfall on the coast even of Florida would have made all temperate
America Spanish, for it would have focused the might of Ferdinand and
Isabella upon our shores. We know that the islands which lay immediately
to the southward of his "Salvador," in the Bahamas, beckoned Columbus in
that direction, and that the Indians were able by signs to make it
clear to him that a greater land, which was Cuba, and which he called
"Cipango," lay in this southerly direction. That way he laid his course,
"in order," as he wrote in his journal, "to go to this other island
which is very large and where all these men whom I am bringing from the
island of San Salvador make signs that there is a great deal of gold and
that they wear bracelets of it on their arms and legs and in their ears
and in their noses and on their breasts."
Reason enough! Only it meant that Spain's energy in this hemisphere was
to be directed to the West Indies, and South America, and Mexico, for as
long a time as it was destined to endure, and that the vast continental
North was to be left as the heritage of another race.
It is true that Florida afterward became Spanish. But it was not a
question of what Florida, merely, was to be. If Columbus had landed
upon the mainland, the northeastward trend of the coast, reaching back
toward Spain by just so much, would have beckoned him northward, not
southward. Even if he had explored southwardly, by some chance, he must
have returned northward when he had reached the point of the Florida
peninsula; and in the northerly direction he would have cruised,
returning Europe-ward. And he would have annexed the land step by step,
as he annexed Cuba, Hispaniola, and all the southern lands as fast as he
touched them.
The Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, would have been the scenes of the
Spaniards' settlement for a hundred years. Though afterward they took
Florida, that was as a mere side issue; it was unconsidered, neglected,
after Cuba and Mexico; and was passed on at length to the race that came
to the mainland more than a hundred years after the landfall at San
Salvador.
Who can estimate the consequences of a fate which should have sent
Columbus straight on his way! Who can compass the thought of the
millions of country-loving Americans of our race unborn here, but
nurtured under skies now foreign to their very nature, but for that
glittering flock of tropical birds whirling southwestwardly? It is no
idle conjecture; von Humboldt, one of the wisest of cosmographers, says
that never in the world's history had the flight of birds such momentous
consequences. "It may be said," he avers, "to have determined the first
settlements in the new continent, and its distribution between the Latin
and Germanic races." He believed that the Gulf Stream would have carried
Columbus around Cape Hatteras. It might indeed have done so.
We of the United States may well believe that the hand of Providence
guided those birds on that October day; but none the less are we
compelled to admit the strange dependence of human events upon
circumstances that are most trifling in themselves.