THERE grew at times an excited feeling that he was a prophet, and that
there were fabulously great things before us. As I doctored some small
ill one day in the forecastle, a great fellow named Francisco from
Huelva would tell me his dream of the night before. He had already
told it, it seemed, to all who would listen, and now again he had
considerable audience, crowding at the door. He said that he dreamed
he was in Cipango. At first he thought it was heaven, but when he saw
golden roofs he knew it must be Cipango, for in heaven where it
never rained and there were no nights, we shouldn’t need roofs. One
interrupted, “We’d need them to keep the flying angels from looking in!”
“It was Cipango,” persisted Francisco, “for the Emperor himself came
and gave me a rope of pearls. There were five thousand of them, and each
would buy a house or a fine horse or a suit of velvet. And the Emperor
took me by the hand, and he said, ‘Dear Brother--’ You might have
thought I was a king--and by the mass, I was a king! I felt it right
away! And then he took me into a garden, and there were three beautiful
women, and one of them would push me to the other, and that one to the
third, and that to the first again, as though they were playing ball,
and they all laughed, and I laughed. Then there came a great person with
five crowns on his head, and all the light blazed up gold and blue, and
somebody said, ‘It’s Prester John’!”
His dream kept a two-days’ serenity upon the ship. It came to the ear
of the Admiral, who said, “‘In dreams will I instruct thee.’--I have had
dreams far statelier than his.”
Pedro Gutierrez too began to dream,--fantastic things which he told with
an idle gusto. They were of wine and gold and women, though often these
were to be guessed through strange, jumbled masks and phantasies. “Those
are ill dreams,” said the Admiral. “Dream straight and high!” Fray
Ignatio, too, said wisely, “It is not always God who cometh in dreams!”
But the images of Gutierrez’s dreams seemed to him to be seated
in Cathay and India. They bred in him belief that he was coming to
happiness by that sea road that glistered before us. He and Roderigo de
Escobedo began to talk with assurance of what they should find. Having
small knowledge of travelers’ tales they made application to the Admiral
who, nothing loth, answered them out of Marco Polo, Mandeville and Pedro
de Aliaco.
But the ardor of his mind was such that he outwent his authors. Where
the Venetian said “gold” the Genoese said “Much gold.” Where the one saw
powerful peoples with their own customs, courts, armies, temples, ships
and trade, the other gave to these an unearthly tinge of splendor.
Often as he sat in cabin or on deck, or rising paced to and fro, we who
listened to his account, listened to poet and enthusiast speaking
of earths to come. Besides books like those of Marco Polo and John
Mandeville and the Bishop of Cambrai he had studied philosophers and
the ancients and Scripture and the Fathers. He spoke unwaveringly of
prophecies, explicit and many, of his voyage, and the rounding out of
earth by him, Christopherus Columbus. More than once or twice, in
the great cabin, beneath the swinging lantern, he repeated to us
such passages, his voice making great poetry of old words. “Averroes
saith--Albertus Magnus saith--Aristotle saith--Seneca saith--Saint
Augustine saith--Esdras in his fourth book saith--” Salt air sweeping
through seemed to fall into a deep, musical beat and rhythm. “After
the council at Salamanca when great churchmen cried Irreligion and even
Heresy upon me, I searched all Scripture and drew testimony together.
In fifty, yea, in a hundred places it is plain! King David saith--job
saith--Moses saith--Thus it reads in Genesis--”
Diego de Arana smote the table with his hand. “I am yours, senor, to
find for the Lord!” Fray Ignatio lifted dark eyes. “I well believe that
nothing happens but what is chosen! I will tell you that in my cell at
La Rabida I heard a cry, ‘Come over, Ignatio the Franciscan!’”
And I, listening, thought, “Not perhaps that ancient spiritual singing
of spiritual things! But in truth, yes, it is chosen. Did not the Whole
of Me that I can so dimly feel set my foot upon this ship?” And going
out on deck before I slept, I looked at the stars and thought that we
were like the infant in the womb that knows not how nor where it is
carried.
We might be four hundred leagues from Spain. Still the wind drove us,
still we hardly shifted canvas, still the sky spread clear, of a vast
blue depth, and the blue glass plain of the sea lay beneath. It was too
smooth, the wind in our rigging too changeless of tune. At last, all
would have had variety spring. There began a veritable hunger for some
change, and it was possible to feel a faint horror. _What if this is the
horror--to go on forever and ever like this_?
Then one morning when the sun rose, it lit a novel thing. Seaweed or
grass or herbage of some sort was afloat about us. Far as the eye might
reach it was like a drowned meadow, vari-colored, awash. All that day we
watched it. It came toward us from the west; we ran through it from the
east. Now it thinned away; now it thickened until it seemed that the
sea was strewn with rushes like a castle floor. With oars we caught and
brought into ship wreaths of it. All night we sailed in this strange
plain. A yellow dawn showed it still on either side the _Santa Maria_,
and thicker, with fewer blue sea straits and passes than on yesterday.
The Pinta and the Nina stood out with a strange, enchanted look, as
ships crossing a plain more vast than the plain of Andalusia. Still that
floating weed thickened. The crowned woman at our prow pushed swathes of
it to either side. Our mariners hung over rail, talking, talking. “What
is it--and where will it end? Mayhap presently we can not plough it!”
I was again and again to admire how for forty years he had stored
sea-knowledge. It was not only what those gray eyes had seen, or those
rather large, well molded ears had heard, or that powerful and nervous
hand had touched. But he knew how to take, right and left, knowledge
that others gathered, as he knew that others took and would take what
he gathered. He knew that knowledge flows. Now he stood and told that no
less a man than Aristotle had recorded such a happening as this. Certain
ships of Gades--that is our Cadiz--driven by a great wind far into
River-Ocean, met these weeds or others like them, distant parents of
these. They were like floating islands forever changing shape, and those
old ships sailed among them for a while. They thought they must have
broken from sea floor and risen to surface, and currents brought other
masses from land. Tunny fish were caught among them.
And that very moment, as the endless possibilities of things would have
it, one, leaning on the rail, cried out that there were tunnies. We all
looked and saw them in a clear canal between two floating masses. It
brought the Admiral credence. “Look you all!” he said, “how most things
have been seen before!”
“But Father Aristotle’s ship--Was he ‘Saint’ or ‘Father’?”
“He was a heathen--he believed in Mahound.”
“No, he lived before Mahound. He was a wise man--”
“But his ships turned back to Cadiz. They were afraid of this
stuff--that’s the point!”
“They turned back,” said the Admiral. “And the splendor and the gold
were kept for us.”
A thicker carpet of the stuff brushed ship side. One of the boys cried,
“Ho, there is a crab!” It sat indeed on a criss-cross of broken reeds,
and it seemed to stare at us solemnly. “Do not all see that it came from
land, and land to the west?”
“But it is caught here! What if we are caught here too? These weeds may
stem us--turn great crab pincers and hold us till we rot!”
“If--and if--and if” cried the Admiral. “For Christ, His sake, laugh at
yourselves!”
On, on, we went before that warm and potent wind, so steadfast that
there must be controlling it some natural law. Ocean-Sea spread around,
with that weed like a marsh at springtide. Then, suddenly, just as the
murmuring faction was murmuring again, we cleared all that. Open sea,
blue running ocean, endlessly endless!
The too-steady sunshine vanished. There broke a cloudy dawn followed by
light rain. It ceased and the sky cleared. But in the north held a mist
and a kind of semblance of far-off mountains. Startled, a man cried
“Land!” but the next moment showed that it was cloud. Yet all day the
mist hung in this quarter. The _Pinta_ approached and signaled, and
presently over to us put her boat, in it Martin Pinzon. The Admiral met
him as he came up over side and would have taken him into great cabin.
But, no! Martin Pinzon always spoke out, before everybody! “Senor, there
is land yonder, under the north! Should not we change course and see
what is there?”
“It is cloud,” answered the Admiral. “Though I do not deny that such a
haze may be crying, ‘Land behind!’”
“Let us sail then north, and see!”
But the Admiral shook his head. “No, Captain! West--west--arrow
straight!”
Pinzon appeared about to say, “You are very wrong, and we should see
what’s behind that arras!” But he checked himself, standing before
Admiral and Don and Viceroy, and all those listening faces around. “I
still think,” he began.
The other took him up, but kept considerate, almost deferring manner.
“Yes, if we had time or ships to spare! But now it is, do not stray from
the path. Sail straight west!”
“We are five hundred leagues from Palos.”
“Less than that, by our reckoning. The further from Palos, the nearer
India!”
“We may be passing by our salvation!”
“Our salvation lies in going as we set forth to go.” He made his gesture
of dismissal of that, and asked after the health of the _Pinta_. The
health held, but the stores were growing low. Biscuit enough, but bacon
almost out, and not so many measures of beans left. Oil, too, approached
bottom of jars. The Nina was in the same case.
“Food and water will last,” said the Admiral. “We have not come so far
without safely going farther.”
Martin Alonso Pinzon was the younger man and but captain of the Pinta_,
while the other stood Don and Admiral, appointed by Majesty, responsible
only to the Crown. But he had been Master Christopherus the dreamer, who
was shabbily dressed, owed money, almost begged. He owed large money now
to Martin Pinzon. But for the Pinzons, he could hardly have sailed. He
should listen now, take good advice, that was clearly what the captain
of the _Pinta thought! Undoubtedly Master Christopherus dreamed true to
a certain point, but after that was not so followable! As for Cristoforo
Colombo, Italian shipmaster, he had, it was true, old sea wisdom. But
Martin Pinzon thought Martin Pinzon was as good there!--Captain Martin
Alonso said good-by with some haughtiness and went stiffly back over
blue sea to the Pinta.
The sun descended, the sea grew violet, all we on the _Santa Maria_
gathered for vesper prayer and song. Fray Ignatio’s robe and back-thrown
cowl burned brown against the sea and the sail. One last broad gold
shaft lighted the tall Admiral, his thick white hair, his eagle nose,
his strong mouth. Diego de Arana was big, alert and soldierly; Roderigo
Sanchez had the look of alcalde through half a lifetime. I had seen
Roderigo de Escobedo’s like in dark streets in France and Italy and
Castile, and Pedro Gutierrez wherever was a court. Juan de la Cosa, the
master, stood a keen man, thin as a string. Out of the crowd of mariners
I pick Sancho and Beltran the cook, Ruiz the pilot, William the Irishman
and Arthur the Englishman, and two or three others. And Luis Torres.
The latter was a thinker, and a Jew in blood. He carried it in his face,
considerably more markedly than I carried my grandmother Judith. But his
family had been Christian for a hundred years. Before I left forecastle
for poop I had discovered that he was learned. Why he had turned sailor
I did not then know, but afterwards found that it was for disappointed
love. He knew Arabic and Hebrew, Aristotle and Averroes, and he had a
dry curiosity and zest for life that made for him the wonder of this
voyage far outweigh the danger.
There was a hymn that Fray Ignatio taught us and that we sang at times,
beside the Latin chant. He said that a brother of his convent had
written it and set it to music.
Thou that art above us,
Around us, beneath us,
Thou who art within us,
Save us on this sea!
Out of danger,
Teach us how we may
Serve thee acceptably!
Teach us how we may
Crown ourselves, crowning Thee!
Beltran the cook’s voice was the best, and after him Sancho, and then a
sailor with a great bass, William the Irishman. Fray Ignatio sang like a
good monk, and Pedro Gutierrez like a troubadour of no great weight.
The Admiral sang with a powerful and what had once been a sweet voice.
Currents and eddies of sweetness marked it still. All sang and it made
together a great and pleasurable sound, rolling over the sea to the
_Pinta_ and the Nina, and so their singing, somewhat less in volume,
came to us. All grew dusk, the ships were bat wings sailing low; out
sprang the star to which the needle no longer pointed. The great star
Venus hung in the west like the lantern of some ghostly air ship, very
vast.
Thou that art above us,
Around us, beneath us,
Thou that art within us,
Save us on this sea!