Christopher Columbus and the New World of His Discovery

Christopher Columbus and the New World of His Discovery

This stream of life has grown in force and volume with the passage of ages. It has always
set from shore to sea in countless currents of adventure and speculation; but it has set
most strongly from East to West. On its broad bosom the seeds of life and knowledge
have been carried throughout the world. It brought the people of Tyre and Carthage to the
coasts and oceans of distant worlds; it carried the English from Jutland across cold and
stormy waters to the islands of their conquest; it carried the Romans across half the
world; it bore the civilisation of the far East to new life and virgin western soils; it carried
the new West to the old East, and is in our day bringing back again the new East to the
old West. Religions, arts, tradings, philosophies, vices and laws have been borne, a
strange flotsam, upon its unchanging flood. It has had its springs and neaps, its trembling
high-water marks, its hour of affluence, when the world has been flooded with golden
humanity; its ebb and effluence also, when it has seemed to shrink and desert the
kingdoms set upon its shores. The fifteenth century in Western Europe found it at a pause
in its movements: it had brought the trade and the learning of the East to the verge of the
Old World, filling the harbours of the Mediterranean with ships and the monasteries of
Italy and Spain with wisdom; and in the subsequent and punctual decadence that
followed this flood, there gathered in the returning tide a greater energy and volume
which was to carry the Old World bodily across the ocean. And yet, for all their wisdom
and power, the Spanish and Portuguese were still in the attitude of our primitive man,
standing on the sea-shore and looking out in wonder across the sea.
The flood of the life-stream began to set again, and little by little to rise and inundate
Western Europe, floating off the galleys and caravels of King Alphonso of Portugal, and
sending them to feel their way along the coasts of Africa; a little later drawing the mind
of Prince Henry the Navigator to devote his life to the conquest and possession of the
unknown. In his great castle on the promontory of Sagres, with the voice of the Atlantic
thundering in his ears, and its mists and sprays bounding his vision, he felt the full force
of the stream, and stretched his arms to the mysterious West. But the inner light was not
yet so brightly kindled that he dared to follow his heart; his ships went south and south
again, to brave on each voyage the dangers and terrors that lay along the unknown
African coast, until at length his captains saw the Cape of Good Hope. South and West
and East were in those days confusing terms; for it was the East that men were thinking
of when they set their faces to the setting sun, and it was a new road to the East that they
sought when they felt their way southward along the edge of the world. But the rising tide
of discovery was working in that moment, engaging the brains of innumerable sages,
stirring the wonder of innumerable mariners; reaching also, little by little, to quarters less
immediately concerned with the business of discovery. Ships carried the strange tidings
of new coasts and new islands from port to port throughout the Mediterranean; Venetians
on the lagoons, Ligurians on the busy trading wharves of Genoa, were discussing the
great subject; and as the tide rose and spread, it floated one ship of life after another that
was destined for the great business of adventure. Some it inspired to dream and speculate,
and to do no more than that; many a heart also to brave efforts and determinations that
were doomed to come to nothing and to end only in failure. And among others who felt
the force and was swayed and lifted by the prevailing influence, there lived, some four
and a half centuries ago, a little boy playing about the wharves of Genoa, well known to
his companions as Christoforo, son of Domenico the wool-weaver, who lived in the Vico
Dritto di Ponticello.