IT was a strange thing how utterly favoring now was the wind! It blew
with a great steady push always from the east, and always we ran before
it into the west. Day after day we experienced this warm and steadfast
driving; day after day we never shifted sail. The rigging sang a
steady song, day and night. The crowned woman, our figurehead, ran,
light-footed, over a green and blue plain, and where the plain ended no
man might know! “Perhaps it does not end!” said the mariners.
Of the hidalgos aboard I like best Diego de Arana who had cast off his
melancholy. He was a man of sense, candid and brave. Roderigo Sanchez
sat and moved a dull, good man. Roderigo de Escobedo had courage, but
he was factious, would take sides against his shadow if none other were
there. Pedro Gutierrez had been a courtier, and had the vices of that
life, together with a daredevil recklessness and a kind of wild wit.
I had liking and admiration for Fray Ignatio, but careful indeed was I
when I spoke with him!
The wind blew unchanging, the stark blue shield of sea, a water-world,
must be taken in the whole, for there was no contrasting point in it to
catch the eye. Sancho, forward, in a high sweet voice like a jongleur’s
voice, was singing to the men an endless ballad. Upon the poop deck
Escobedo and Gutierrez, having diced themselves to an even wealth or
poverty, turned to further examination of the Admiral’s ways. Endlessly
they made him and his views subject of talk. Roderigo Sanchez listened
with a face like an owl, Diego de Arana with some irony about his lips.
I came and stood beside the latter.
They were upon the beggary of Christopherus Columbus. “How did the Prior
of La Rabida--?”
“I’ll tell you, for I heard it. One evening at vesper bell comes our
Admiral--no less a man!--to Priory gate with a young boy in his hand.
Not Fernando his love-child, but Diego the elder, who was born in
Lisbon. All dusty with the road, like any beggar you see, and not much
better clad, foot-sore and begging bread for himself and the boy. And
because of his white hair, and because he carried himself in that absurd
way that makes the undiscerning cry, ‘Ah, my lord king in disguise!’
the porter must have him in, and by and by comes the prior and stands to
talk with him, ‘From where?’ ‘From Cordova.’ ‘Whither?’ ‘To Portugal.’
‘For why?’ ‘To speak again with King John!’ ‘Are you in the habit of
speaking with kings?’ ‘Aye, I am!’ ‘About what, may I ask?’ ‘About
the finding of India by way of Ocean-Sea, the possession of idolatrous
countries and the great wealth thereof, and the taking of Christ to the
heathen who else are lost!’”
“Ha, ha! Ha, ha!” This was Escobedo.
“The prior thinks, ‘This is an interesting madman.’ And being a
charitable good man and lacking entertainment that evening, he brings
the beggar in to supper and sits by him.”
Roderigo Sanchez opened his mouth. “All Andalusia knows Fray Juan Perez
is a kind of visionary!”
“Aye, like to like! ‘Have you been to our Queen and the King?’ ‘Aye, I
have!’ saith the beggar, ‘but they are warring with the Moors and will
pull Granada down and do not see the greater glory!’”
All laughed at that, and indeed Gutierrez could mimic to perfection. We
got, full measure, the beggar’s loftiness.
“So the siren sings and the prior leaps to meet her, or tarantula stings
him and he dances! ‘I am growing mad too,’ thinks Fray Juan Perez, and
begins presently to tell that last week he dreamed of Prester John. The
end is that he and the beggar talk till midnight and the next morning
they talk again, and the prior sends for his friends Captain Martin
Alonzo Pinzon and the physician Garcia Fernandez. The beggar gains them
all!”
“Do you think a beggar can do that?” I said. “Only a giver can do that.”
Pedro Gutierrez turned black eyes upon Juan Lepe, whom he resented there
on the poop deck. “How could you have learned so much, Doctor, while you
were making sail and washing ship?” He was my younger in every way, and
I answered equably, “I learned in the same way that the Admiral learned
while he begged.”
“Touched!” said Diego de Arana. “So that is the way the prior came into
the business?”
“He enters with such vigor,” said Gutierrez, “that what does he do but
write an impassioned letter to the Queen, having long ago, for a time,
been her confessor? What he tells her, God knows, but it seems that it
changes the world! She answers that for herself she hath grieved for
Master Columbus’s departure from the court and the realm, and that if
he will turn and come to Santa Fe, his propositions shall at last be
thoroughly weighed. Letter finds the beggar with his boy honored guest
of La Rabida, touching heads with Martin Pinzon over maps and charts
and the ‘Book of Travels’ of Messer Marco Polo. There is great joy! The
beggar hath the prior’s own mule and his son a jennet, and here we go
to Santa Fe! That was last year. Now the boy that whimpered for bread
at convent gate is Don Diego Colon, page to Prince Juan, and the Viceroy
sails on the _Santa Maria_ for the countries he will administer!”
Gutierrez shook the dice in the box. “Oh, Queen Luck, that I have served
for so long! Why do you not make me viceroy?”
Said Escobedo, “Viceroy of the continent of water and Admiral of seaweed
and fishes!”
Diego de Arana took that up. “We are obliged to find something! No
sensible man can think like some of those forward that this goes on
forever and we shall sail till the wood rots and sails grow ragged and
wind carries away their shreds or they fall into dust!”
“Who knows anything of River-Ocean? We may not find the western shore,
if there be such a thing, for a year! By that time storm will sink us
ten times over, or plague will take us--”
“There’s not needed plague nor storm. Just say, food won’t last, and
water is already half gone!”
“That’s the undeniable truth,” quoth Roderigo Sanchez, and looked with a
perturbed face at the too-smooth sea.
Smooth blue sea continued, wind continued, pushing like a great, warm
hand, east to west. The Admiral spent hours alone in his sleeping cabin.
There were men who said that he studied there a great book of magic. He
had often a book in his hand, it is true, but Juan Lepe the physician
knew what he strove to keep from others, that the gout that at times
threatened crippling was upon him and was easier to bear lying down.
Sunset, vesper prayer and _Salve Regina_. As the strains died, there
became evident a lingering on the part of the seamen. The master spoke
to the Admiral. “They’ve found out about the needle, sir! Perhaps you’d
better hear them and answer them.”
Almost every day he heard them and answered them. To make his seamen,
however they groaned and grumbled and plotted, yet abide him and his
purpose was a day-after-day arising task! “Now,” he said equably, in the
tone almost of a father, “What is it to-day, men?”
The throng worked and put forward a spokesman, who looked from the
Admiral to the clear north. “It is the star, sir! The needle no longer
points to it! We thought you might explain to us unlearned--What we
think is that distance is going to widen and widen! What’s to keep
needle from swinging right south? Then will we never get home to Palos
and our wives and children--never and never and never!”
Said the Admiral, “It will not change further, or if it does a very
little further!” In his most decisive, most convincing voice he
explained why the needle no longer pointed precisely to the star. The
deviation marked and allowed for, it was near enough for practical
purposes, and the reasons for the wandering--
I do not know if the wisdom of our descendants will confirm his
explanation. It is so often to explain the explanation! But one as well
as another might do here. What the _Santa Maria_ wanted was reassurance,
general and large, stretching from the Canaries to India and Cathay and
back again. He knew that, and after no great time spent with compass
needle and circularly traveling polar star, he began to talk gold and
estate, and the pearls and silk and spices they would surely take for
gifts to their family and neighbors, Palos or Huelva or Fishertown!
It was truly the hope that upheld many on a voyage that they chose to
think a witches’ one. He talked now out of Marco Polo and he clad what
that traveler had said in more gorgeous attire. He meant nothing false;
his exalted imagination saw it so. He was painter of great pageants,
heightening and remodeling, deepening and purifying colors, making
humdrum and workaday over to his heart’s desire. The Venetian in his
book, and other travelers in their books, had related wonders enough.
These grew with him, it might be said--and indeed in his lifetime was
often said--into wonders without a foot upon earth. But if one took as
figures and symbols his gold roofs and platters, temples and gardens,
every man a merchant in silks and spices, strange fruit-dropping trees
and pearls in carcanets, the Grand Khan and Prester John--who could say
that in the long, patient life of Time the Admiral was over-esteeming?
The pity of it was that most here could not live in great lengths of
time. They wanted riches now, now! And they wanted only one kind of
riches; here and now, or at the most in another month, in the hands and
laps of Pedro and Fernando and Diego.