Francis Tulloch.
Among my fellow-passengers was an Englishman. François Tulloch[450] had served in the artillery: he was a painter, a musician, a mathematician; he spoke several languages. The Abbé Nagault, Superior of the Sulpicians, had met the Anglican officer and made him a Catholic: he was taking his neophyte to Baltimore.
I became intimate with Tulloch: as I was at that time a profound "Philosopher," I invited him to return to his parents. The spectacle that lay before our eyes transported him with admiration. We used to rise at night, when the deck was given up to the officer of the watch and a few sailors who smoked their pipes in silence: Tuta æquora silent.[451] The vessel rolled at the will of the slow and silent waves, while gleams of fire ran with a white foam along her sides. Thousands of stars shining in the sombre azure of the celestial dome, a boundless sea, infinity in the sky and on the waves! Never has God confused me with His greatness more than during those nights when I had immensity over my head and immensity beneath my feet.
Westerly winds, interspersed with calms, delayed our progress. On the 4th of May, we had reached only the level of the Azores. On the 6th, at about eight o'clock in the morning, we came in sight of the Isle of the Peak; this volcano long commanded unnavigated seas[452]: a useless beacon by night, an unseen landmark by day.
There is something magical in seeing the land rise from the depths of the sea. Christopher Columbus, surrounded by a mutinous crew, preparing to return to Europe without having attained the object of his voyage, perceives a small light upon a beach which the darkness had hidden from him. The flight of the birds had guided him to America; the gleam from the hut of a savage reveals to him the presence of a new world. Columbus must have experienced the sort of feeling which the Scriptures attribute to the Creator when, having out of nothing brought forth the world, He saw that His work was good: "And God saw that it was good[453]." Columbus created a world. One of the first lives of the Genoese pilot is that which Giustiniani[454], when editing a Hebrew psalter, placed in the form of a "note" at the foot of the psalm, Cœli enarrant gloriam Dei.[455]
Vasco da Gama must have marvelled no less when, in 1498, he approached the coast of Malabar. Thereupon all things change on the face of the globe: a new revelation of nature is given; the curtain which for thousands of ages has concealed one part of the earth is raised, discovering the birthplace of the sun, the spot whence he issues each morning "as a bridegroom, as a giant[456];" we see in all its nudity the wise and brilliant East, whose mysterious history was intermixed with the journeys of Pythagoras, the conquests of Alexander, the memory of the Crusades, and whose perfumes came to us across the plains of Arabia and the seas of Greece. Europe sent to the East a poet to salute it: the Swan of Tagus made his sad and beautiful voice heard upon the shores of India; Camoëns[457] borrowed their lustre, their fame and their misfortune; he left them only their riches.
When Gonzalo Villo, Camoëns' maternal grandfather, discovered a portion of the Archipelago of the Azores, he ought, had he foreseen the future, to have reserved for himself a concession of six feet of ground to cover the bones of his grandson.
We anchored in a bad roadstead, with a rocky bottom, in five-and-forty fathoms of water. The island of Graciosa, before which we were moored, displayed its hills a little swollen in outline like the ellipses of an Etruscan amphora; they were draped in the green of their cornfields and emitted an agreeable odour of wheat peculiar to the harvests of the Azores. In the midst of these carpets, one saw the dividing lines of the fields, formed of volcanic stones, half black and half white, piled one upon the other. On the summit of a mound stood an abbey, the monument of an old world upon new soil; at the foot of this mound, the red roofs of the town of Santa-Cruz were mirrored in a pebbly creek. The whole island, with its indentations of bays, capes, bights and promontories, reflected its inverted landscape in the sea. For outer girdle it had a belt of rocks jutting from the surface of the waves. In the background of the picture, the cone of the volcano of the Peak, planted upon a cupola of clouds, pierced the perspective of the air beyond Graciosa.
The isle of Graciosa.
Tulloch, the second mate and I decided to go on land; the long-boat was lowered and rowed towards the shore, which lay about two miles away. We saw some movement on the beach; a pram put out in our direction. So soon as she had come within speaking distance, we distinguished a number of monks. They hailed us in Portuguese, in Italian, in English, in French, and we replied in all four languages. Alarm prevailed, our vessel was the first ship of large tonnage that had ventured to anchor in the dangerous roadstead where we were going with the tide. On the other hand, the islanders now saw the tricolour flag for the first time; they did not know whether we hailed from Tunis or Algiers: Neptune had not recognized the standard so gloriously borne by Cybele. When they saw that we had human shapes and that we understood what was said to us, their delight was extreme. The monks took us up in their boat, and we rowed merrily towards Santa-Cruz, where we landed with some difficulty because of a rather violent surf.