V
A. D. 1492 COLUMBUS
Columbus was blue-eyed, red-haired and tall, of a sunny honesty, humane and panic-proof. In other words he came of the Baltic and not of the Mediterranean stock, although his people lived in Italy and he was born in the suburbs of Genoa. By caste he was a peasant, and by trade, up to the age of twenty-eight, a weaver, except at times when his Northern blood broke loose and drove him to sea for a voyage. He made himself a scholar and a draftsman, and when at last he escaped from an exacting family, he earned his living by copying charts at Lisbon. A year later, as a navigating officer, he found his way, via the wine trade, to Bristol. There he slouched dreaming about the slums, dressed like a foreign monk. He must needs pose to himself in some ideal character, and was bound to dress the part. The artistic temperament is the mainspring of adventure.
In our own day we may compare Boston, that grand old home of the dying sailing ship, with New York, a bustling metropolis for the steam liners. In the days of Columbus Genoa was an old-fashioned, declining, but still splendid harbor of the oared galleys, while Lisbon was the up-to-date metropolis of the new square-rigged sailing ships.
From these two greatest seaports of his age, Columbus came to Bristol, the harbor of England, in the Middle Ages, of the slow, scholarly, artistic, stately English. They were building that prayer in stone, Saint Mary Redcliffe, a jewel of intricate red masonry, the setting for Portuguese stained glass which glowed like precious gems.
“In the month of February,” says Columbus, “and in the year 1477, I navigated as far as the Island of Tile (Thule is Iceland) a hundred leagues, and to this island which is as large as England, the English, especially those of Bristol, go with merchandise. And at the time that I was there the sea was not frozen over, although there were very high tides.”
Here, then, is the record of Columbus himself that in his long inquiry concerning the regions beyond the Atlantic, he actually visited Iceland. A scholar himself, he was able to converse with the learned Icelanders in Latin, the trade jargon of that age. From them he surely must have known how one hundred thirty years ago the last timber ship had come home from Nova Scotia, and twenty-nine years since, within his own lifetime, the Greenland trade had closed. The maps of the period showed the American coast as far south as the Carolines,—the current geography book was equally clear:
“From Biameland (Siberia) the country stretches as far as the desert regions in the north until Greenland begins. From Greenland lies southerly Helluland (Labrador and Newfoundland), then Markland (Nova Scotia); thence it is not far from Vinland (New England), which some believe goes out from Africa. England and Scotland are one island, yet each country is a kingdom by itself. Ireland is a large island, Iceland is also a large island north of Ireland.” Indeed Columbus seems almost to be quoting this from memory when he says of Iceland, “this island, which is as large as England.” I strongly suspect that Columbus when in Iceland, took a solemn oath not to “discover” America.
The writers of books have spent four centuries in whitewashing, retouching, dressing up and posing this figure of Columbus. The navigator was indeed a man of powerful intellect and of noble character, but they have made him seem a monumental prig as well as an insufferable bore. He is the dead and helpless victim, dehumanized by literary art until we feel that we really ought to pray for him on All Prigs’ Day in the churches.
Columbus came home from his Icelandic and Guinea expeditions with two perfectly sound ideas. “The world is a globe, so if I sail westerly I shall find Japan and the Indies.” For fifteen bitter years he became the laughing-stock of Europe.
