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.
CHAPTER XIII
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—”