The Fire Kindles -3

The Fire Kindles -3

 The pilot's story, in so far as it has been preserved, and taking the mean of four

contemporary accounts of it, was as follows. This man, whose name is doubtful, but is

given as Alonso Sanchez, was sailing on a voyage from one of the Spanish ports to

England or Flanders. He had a crew of seventeen men. When they had got well out to sea

a severe easterly gale sprung up, which drove the vessel before it to the westward. Day

after day and week after week, for twenty-eight days, this gale continued. The islands

were all left far behind, and the ship was carried into a region far beyond the limits of the

ocean marked on the charts. At last they sighted some islands, upon one of which they

landed and took in wood and water. The pilot took the bearings of the island, in so far as

he was able, and made some observations, the only one of which that has remained being

that the natives went naked; and, the wind having changed, set forth on his homeward

voyage. This voyage was long and painful. The wind did not hold steady from the west;

the pilot and his crew had a very hazy notion of where they were; their dead reckoning

was confused; their provisions fell short; and one by one the crew sickened and died until

they were reduced to five or six—the ones who, worn out by sickness and famine, and the

labours of working the ship short-handed and in their enfeebled condition, at last made

the island of Madeira, and cast anchor in the beautiful bay of Funchal, only to die there.

All these things we may imagine the dying man relating in snatches to his absorbed

listener; who felt himself to be receiving a pearl of knowledge to be guarded and used,

now that its finder must depart upon the last and longest voyage of human discovery.

Such observations as he had made—probably a few figures giving the bearings of stars,

an account of dead reckoning, and a quite useless and inaccurate chart or map—the pilot

gave to his host; then, having delivered his soul of its secret, he died. This is the story;

not an impossible or improbable one in its main outlines. Whether the pilot really landed

on one of the Antilles is extremely doubtful, although it is possible. Superstitious and

storm-tossed sailors in those days were only too ready to believe that they saw some of

the fabled islands of the Atlantic; and it is quite possible that the pilot simply announced

that he had seen land, and that the details as to his having actually set foot upon it were

added later. That does not seem to me important in so far as it concerns Columbus.

Whether it were true or not, the man obviously believed it; and to the mind of Columbus,

possessed with an idea and a blind faith in something which could not be seen, the whole

incident would appear in the light of a supernatural sign. The bit of paper or parchment

with the rude drawing on it, even although it were the drawing of a thing imagined and

not of a thing seen, would still have for him a kind of authority that he would find it hard

to ignore. It seems unnecessary to disbelieve this story. It is obviously absurd to regard it

as the sole origin of Columbus's great idea; it probably belongs to that order of accidents,

small and unimportant in themselves, which are so often associated with the beginnings

of mighty events. Walking on the shore at Madeira or Porto Santo, his mind brooding on

the great and growing idea, Columbus would remember one or two other instances

which, in the light of his growing conviction and know ledge, began to take on a

significant hue. He remembered that his wife's relative, Pedro Correa, who had come

back from Porto Santo while Columbus was living in Lisbon, had told him about some

strange flotsam that came in upon the shores of the island. He had seen a piece of wood

of a very dark colour curiously carved, but not with any tool of metal; and some great

canes had also come ashore, so big that, every joint would hold a gallon of wine. These

canes, which were utterly unlike any thing known in Europe or the islands of the Atlantic,

had been looked upon as such curiosities that they had been sent to the King at Lisbon,

where they remained, and where Columbus himself afterwards saw them. Two other

stories, which he heard also at this time, went to strengthen his convictions. One was the

tale of Martin Vincenti, a pilot in the Portuguese Navy, who had found in the sea, four

hundred and twenty leagues to the west of Cape St. Vincent, another piece of wood,

curiously carved, that had evidently not been laboured with an iron instrument. Columbus

also remembered that the inhabitants of the Azores had more than once found upon their

coasts the trunks of huge pine-trees, and strangely shaped canoes carved out of single

logs; and, most significant of all, the people of Flares had taken from the water the bodies

of two dead men, whose faces were of a strange broad shape, and whose features differed

from those of any known race of mankind. All these objects, it was supposed, were

brought by westerly winds to the shores of Europe; it was not till long afterwards, when

the currents of the Atlantic came to be studied, that the presence of such flotsam came to

be attributed to the ocean currents, deflected by the Cape of Good Hope and gathered in

the Gulf of Mexico, which are sprayed out across the Atlantic.

The idea once fixed in his mind that there was land at a not impossible distance to the

west, and perhaps a sea-road to the shores of Asia itself, the next thing to be done, was to

go and discover it. Rather a formidable task for a man without money, a foreigner in a

strange land, among people who looked down upon him because of his obscure birth, and

with no equipment except a knowledge of the sea, a great mastery of the art and craft of

seamanship, a fearless spirit of adventure, and an inner light! Some one else would have

to be convinced before anything could be done; somebody who would provide ships and

men and money and provisions. Altogether rather a large order; for it was not an unusual

thing in those days for master mariners, tired of the shore, to suggest to some grandee or

other the desirability of fitting out a ship or two to go in search of the isle of St. Brandon,

or to look up Antilia, or the island of the Seven Cities. It was very hard to get an audience

even for such a reasonable scheme as that; but to suggest taking a flotilla straight out to

the west and into the Sea of Darkness, down that curving hill of the sea which it might be

easy enough to slide down, but up which it was known that no ship could ever climb

again, was a thing that hardly any serious or well-informed person would listen to. A

young man from Genoa, without a knowledge either of the classics or of the Fathers, and

with no other argument except his own fixed belief and some vague talk about bits of

wood and shipwrecked mariners, was not the person to inspire the capitalists of Portugal.

Yet the thing had to be done. Obviously it could not be done at Porto Santo, where there

were no ships and no money. Influence must be used; and Columbus knew that his

proposals, if they were to have even a chance of being listened to, must be presented in

some high-flown and elaborate form, giving reasons and offering inducements and

quoting authorities. He would have to get some one to help him in that; he would have to

get up some scientific facts; his brother Bartholomew could help him, and some of those

disagreeable relatives-in-law must also be pressed into the service of the Idea. Obviously

the first thing was to go back to Lisbon; which accordingly Columbus did, about the year

1483.