the ocean encircles the ultimate bounds of the inhabited earth, and all beyond it is unknown. No one has been able to verify anything concerning it, on account of its difficult and perilous navigation, its great obscurity, its profound depth and frequent tempests, through fear of its mighty fishes and its haughty winds.
Yet imagination did not fail to fill in the blank left by lack of knowledge, and from the days of Plato, tradition had planted the Western Ocean with mysterious lands. Here, some maintained, the lost continent of Atlantis had sunk to rest, leaving on the surface of the water a sluggish mire impassable for ships; here, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, Ulysses had found his “Isles of the Blest,” the Irish Saint Brandan discovered an earthly Paradise, and Gothic bishops, flying before the Moors, built seven cities.
Such tales stood on the ground of conjecture alone; but, where the mind is set on a project, conjecture will often assume a fictitious value. Columbus had decided, with that finality of purpose that is the hall-mark of genius, that he would sail to the west across the “sea of darkness”; and he gravely accepted all that would make his schemes less fearful in popular estimation. He himself had an underlying conviction that, the earth being round, a passage across its surface must be possible either from west to east or east to west. A study of the voyages of Marco Polo, the great Venetian traveller of the thirteenth century, had excited his fancy with its descriptions of the territories of the Great Khan and the island of Cipango, where gold and jewels, rich stuffs, spices, and perfumes, were the ordinary possession and barter of its inhabitants. To open up those lands of the Orient to easy commerce with Western Europe would be a task to bring the man who accomplished it not only wealth but that still more desirable reward, power.
Columbus’s idea of India, or “the Indies” as the territories of the far East were called in Europe, was distinctly hazy; but his own desires and his acceptance of the views of an eminent Arabian cosmographer, whose calculations had greatly reduced the circumference of the earth, inclined him to the belief that after a short stretch of ocean he would almost certainly land amid the wonders of Cathay and Cipango. Such a theory was not without biblical confirmation; since the Prophet Esdras had plainly stated that God commanded “that the waters should be gathered into the seventh part of the earth,” thus limiting the sea within the bounds of navigable channels.
To pure romance, scripture, and science, were added sailors’ tales of strange debris cast by the sea on the Azores, the westernmost point of African discovery: bits of wood carved but not with metal, canoes made of hollowed barks of trees, corpses even, whose faces bore no European nor negro semblance. All such evidence was carefully collected and, we may be sure, lost none of its significance in the telling, when Columbus rehearsed his project before King John and his Court, begging that monarch to grant him the necessary ships, and to promise him, in the event of success, the office of Admiral over all the lands he might discover, with a viceroy’s share of the spoils and power.
Perhaps King John considered this demand exorbitant, or else the scheme too hare-brained; it is more likely that he believed he had struck a mine of wealth in Western Africa and saw no reason, so long as that source of profit remained unexhausted, to risk ships and lives in a problematical voyage elsewhere. According to one tradition, he and his councillors obtained Columbus’s plans under pledge of secrecy, and then to test their worth hastily dispatched an expedition, whose mariners, quailing before their task, soon returned to pronounce the design impossible. Whether this be true or false, it is certain that, after long delays, the committee especially appointed by King John to inquire into the matter, unanimously decided against Columbus’s schemes.
“I went to take refuge in Portugal,” wrote Christopher himself some years later, relieving his bitterness by what was probably exaggeration as to the length of his sojourn, “since the King of that country was more versed in discovery than any other; but he put to shame his sight, his hearing, and all his faculties, for in fourteen years I could not make him understand what I said.”
From Portugal Columbus passed to Spain in 1485. His wife, it is believed, had died some little time before; and it is likely he was thankful to leave a country whose associations were by this time mainly sad. He took with him his son Diego and settled in Seville, where he succeeded in interesting in his project one of the great territorial lords of the neighbourhood, the Duke of Medina-Celi.
At a first glance it is perhaps curious that Columbus did not find in some rich Castilian noble the patron he required, without being forced to sue the Crown in vain for so many years. It would have been a small matter for the Cardinal of Spain, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, the Duke of Medina-Celi, or the Marquis of Cadiz to equip him with a squadron twice the size of that with which he finally achieved his purpose; but it is not too much to say that such an arrangement would have entirely altered the character of the expedition.
Columbus was a visionary in that he relied on the eye of faith rather than of knowledge; but his visions did not put to sleep the natural shrewdness of an Italian of his class, especially in a matter where his personal interests were so deeply involved. It was not his policy to sow a crop whose harvest he could not to some extent control; and the clue to his object in seeking royal patronage is given in a letter written in 1500, where he says,