Columbus sought first a new way to India and glory for Spain, and then his followers sought gold and gems. Spain made a rapid transit in Time. For, as a young man has visions and the mature seek fame, so the old and disillusioned turn cynically to gold as the only substance which in the end will not disappoint its possessor.
Spain became old suddenly. Was it rapacity bred decay, or decay rapacity? Even the Indians, who admired all else, laughed at the Spanish lust for gold.
It was given to "the most faithful son of the Church" to discover America; given to the conqueror of the Moors to despoil it. In a time of growing heresy, word-of-mouth heresy, mathematical heresy, Spain in action wrought out one of the greatest of heresies, proving by discovery the existence of a new world.
Yet Spain reposed spiritually on a medieval faith, and the spirit of protestantism rising at that time was the negation of that faith, saying "No" to the sword of the Lord and the triumphs of the Saints. And Spain could not partake of the new—for she had not that Teutonic self-questioning about conscience that stirred the North. Scandals did not scandalize Spain. And the pother about Indulgences was merely disloyalty to God's vicegerent. Spain had no quest after Truth. It was enough to apprehend the beautiful and the true. For the rest, she had the blind faith of the Church. Hence the ferocity of the Inquisition; hence, at a later time, the rise of the Jesuits ready to give their undivided wills to St. Peter in charge for God.
New history mocked the old when Spain began to prove that the world was round and that the little old sheepfold and pasture and Mediterranean lake made only a particle of God's creation, and that the first fifteen centuries of the Christian era had been blind to half the world.
Mankind was groping through the medieval forms toward a life more unconfined. On the one hand, was the anchorite in his cell in the wall of the Church; on the other, Columbus sailing to the West. The navigator seemed a daring free thinker to his sailors, an impious man who ought to be restrained. Nevertheless in a spirit of profound religiosity Columbus and his crew found first land and named it San Salvador—the Holy Savior.
Devout wonder, devouring curiosity, fantastic credulity, lust for treasure, quickly followed one another in the Spanish mind. The vision ruled in the heart of Columbus, glory rose in the eyes of the monarch behind him, cupidity itched the fingers of the multitude. But the world wondered; the Old World paused whilst a new idea entered it and a new seed of life was sown.
Four voyages in sailing ships, tempestuous, troublesome, anxious, with ever more credulous and violent crews—but Columbus clung to the last to the hope of a new way East. How mysterious, how haunting and pathetic, and yet visionary, the fumbling and nosing of Columbus's vessels along the coasts of Panama and Darien in that last voyage of his, sensing a place where a passage must be made. It is like the trouble of Nature before sunrise, a thought before dawn.
2
San Salvador is a long strip of low-lying shore, a platform above the sea, and at night a lighthouse beaming over the dark ocean. It is a shore and it is a light. That is what it was then, "the other side," and the light of Salvation.