There was a newer belief linked with this hope of Paradise. All this wondrous life and salubrity which Columbus saw and felt, if it had not been able to restore his health, could only come from his progress up a swelling apex of the earth, which buttressed the Garden of Eden. It was clear to his mind that instead of being round the earth was pear-shaped, and that this great eminence, up which he had been going, was constantly lifting him into purer air. The great fountain which watered the spacious garden of the early race had discharged its currents down these ethereal slopes, and sweetened all this gulf that had held him so close within its embaying girth. If such were the wonders of these outposts of the celestial life, what must be the products to be seen as one journeyed up, along the courses of such celestial streams? As he steered for Española, he found the currents still helped him, or he imagined they did. Was it not that he was slipping easily down this wonderful declivity?
Columbus and Vespucius.
That he had again discovered the mainland he was convinced by such speculations. He had no conception of the physical truth. The vagaries of his time found in him the creature of their most rampant hallucinations. This aberration was a potent cause in depriving him of the chance to place his own name on this goal of his ambition. It accounts much for the greater impression which Americus Vespucius, with his clearer instincts, was soon to make on the expectant and learned world. The voyage of that Florentine merchant, one of those trespassers that Columbus complained of, was, before the Admiral should see Spain again, to instigate the publication of a narrative, which took from its true discoverer the rightful baptism of the world he had unwittingly found. The wild imaginings of Columbus, gathered from every resource of the superstitious past, moulded by him into beliefs that appealed but little to the soberer intelligence of his time, made known in tumultuous writings, and presently to be expressed with every symptom of mental wandering in more elaborate treatises, offered to his time an obvious contrast to the steadier head of Vespucius. The latter's far more graphic description gained for him, as we shall see, the position of a recognized authority. While Columbus was puzzling over the aberration of the pole star and misshaping the earth, Vespucius was comprehending the law of gravitation upon our floating sphere, and ultimately representing it in the diagram which illustrated his narrative. We shall need to return on a later page to these causes which led to the naming of America.
1498. August 19. Columbus sees Española.
His observations of nature.
Meets the Adelantado.
For four days Columbus had sailed away to the northwest, coming to the wind every night as a precaution, before he sighted Española on August 19, being then, as he made out, about fifty leagues west of the spot where he supposed the port had been established for the mines of Hayna. He thought that he had been steering nearer that point, but the currents had probably carried him unconsciously west by night, as they were at that moment doing with the relief ships that he had parted with off Ferro. As Columbus speculated on this steady flow of waters with that keenness of observation upon natural phenomena which attracted the admiration of Humboldt, and which is really striking, if we separate it from his turbulent fancies, he accounted by its attrition for the predominating shape of the islands which he had seen, which had their greatest length in the direction of the current. He knew that its force would, perhaps, long delay him in his efforts to work eastward, and so he opened communication with the shore in hopes to find a messenger by whom to dispatch a letter to the Adelantado. This was easily done, and the letter reached its destination, whereupon Bartholomew started out in a caravel to meet the little fleet. It was with some misgiving that Columbus resumed his course, for he had seen a crossbow in the hands of a native. It was not an article of commerce, and it might signify another disaster like that of La Navidad. He was accordingly relieved when he shortly afterwards saw a Spanish caravel approaching, and, hailing the vessel, found that the Adelantado had come to greet him.
There was much interchange of news and thought to occupy the two in their first conference; and Columbus's anxiety to know the condition of the colony elicited a wearisome story, little calculated to make any better record in Spain than the reports of his own rule in the island.