When it came to health it was he who had most to endure.
The gout possessed him often. His brow knotted with pain; his voice, by nature measured and deep, a rolling music, became sharp and dry. He moved with difficulty, now and then must stay in bed, or if on deck in a great chair which we lashed to the mast. But now a trouble seized his eyes. They gave him great pain; at times he could barely see. Bathe them with a soothing medicine, rest them. But when had he rested them, straining over the ocean since he was a boy? He was a man greatly patient under adversity, whether of the body or of the body’s circumstance, but this trouble with the eyes shook him. “If I become blind—and all that’s yet to do and find! Blessed Mother of God, let not that happen to me!”
I thought that he should go to Hispaniola, where in the Adelantado’s house in San Domingo he might submit to bandaging, light and sea shut out.
At last, “Well, well, we will turn! But first we must leave this gulf and try it out for some distance westward!”
We left this water by a way as narrow as the entering strait, as narrow and presenting the like rough confusion of waters, wall against wall. We called it the Mouth of the Dragon. Mouth of the Dragon, Mouth of the Serpent, and between them the Gulf of the Whale or of Paria. Now was open sea, and south of us ran still that coast that he would have mount to the Equator and to that old, first Garden Land where all things yet were fair and precious! “I can not stay now, but I will come again! I will find the mighty last things!” His eyes gave him great pain. He covered them, then dropped his hands and looked, then must again cover.
A strange thing! We were borne westward ever upon a vast current of the sea, taking us day and night, so that though the winds were light we went as though every sail was wholly filled.
Christopherus Columbus talked of these rivers in ocean. “A day will come when they will be correctly marked. Aye, in the maps of our descendants! Then ships will say, ‘Now here is the river so and so,’ as to-day the horseman says, ‘Here is the Tagus, or the Guadalquiver!’”
Another thing he said was that to his mind all the islands that we had found in six years, from San Salvador to Cubagua, had once been joined together. Land from this shore to Cuba and beyond. So the peoples were scattered.
He talked to us much upon this voyage of the great earth and the shape of it, and its destinies; of the stars, the needle, the Great Circle and the lesser ones, and the Ocean. He had our time’s learning, gained through God knows how many nights of book by candle! And he had a mind that took eagle flights with spread of eagle wings, and in many ways he had the eagle’s eye.
It was not Cipango and Cathay that now he talked of, but of this great land-mass before us which he would have rise to Equator and all Wonder. And he talked also of some water passage, some strait lying to the westward, by which we might sail between lands and islands to the further Indian Ocean, and so across to the Sea of Araby, and then around Africa by Good Hope and then northward, northward, to Spain, coming into Cadiz with banners, having sailed around the world!