The Man Columbus - 2

The Man Columbus - 2

In all active matters Columbus was what we call a lucky man. It was luck that brought

him to Guanahani; and throughout his life this element of good luck continually helped

him. He was lucky, that is to say, in his relation with inanimate things; but in his relations

with men he was almost as consistently unlucky. First of all he was probably a bad judge

of men. His humble origin and his lack of education naturally made him distrustful. He

trusted people whom he should have regarded with suspicion, and he was suspicious of

those whom he ought to have known he could trust. If people pleased him, he elevated

them with absurd rapidity to stations far beyond their power to fill, and then wondered

that they sometimes turned upon him; if they committed crimes against him, he either

sought to regain their favour by forgiving them, or else dogged them with a nagging,

sulky resentment, and expected every one else to punish them also. He could manage

men if he were in the midst of them; there was something winning as well as

commanding about his actual presence, and those who were devoted to him would have

served him to the death. But when he was not on the spot all his machineries and affairs

went to pieces; he had no true organising ability; no sooner did he take his hand off any

affair for which he was responsible than it immediately came to confusion. All these

defects are to be attributed to his lack of education and knowledge of the world. Mental

discipline is absolutely necessary for a man who would discipline others; and knowledge

of the world is essential for one who would successfully deal with men, and distinguish

those whom he can from those whom he cannot trust. Defects of this nature, which

sometimes seem like flaws in the man's character, may be set down to this one

disability—that he was not educated and was not by habit a man of the world.

All his sins of misgovernment, then, may be condoned on the ground that governing is a

science, and that Columbus had never learned it. What we do find, however, is that the

inner light that had led him across the seas never burned clearly for him again, and was

never his guide in the later part of his life. Its radiance was quenched by the gleam of

gold; for there is no doubt that Columbus was a victim of that baleful influence which has

caused so much misery in this world. He was greedy of gold for himself undoubtedly; but

he was still more greedy of it for Spain. It was his ambition to be the means of filling the

coffers of the Spanish Sovereigns and so acquiring immense dignity and glory for

himself. He believed that gold was in itself a very precious and estimable thing; he knew

that masses and candles could be bought for it, and very real spiritual privileges; and as

he made blunder after blunder, and saw evil after evil heaping itself on his record in the

New World, he became the more eager and frantic to acquire such a treasure of gold that

it would wipe out the other evils of his administration. And once involved in that circle,

there was no help for him.

The man himself was a simple man; capable, when the whole of his various qualities

were directed upon one single thing, of that greatness which is the crown of simplicity.

Ambition was the keynote of his life; not an unworthy keynote, by any means, if only the

ambition be sound; but one serious defect of Columbus's ambition was that it was

retrospective rather than perspective. He may have had, before he sailed from Palos, an

ambition to be the discoverer of a New World; but I do not think he had. He believed

there were islands or land to be discovered in the West if only he pushed on far enough;

and he was ambitious to find them and vindicate his belief. Afterwards, when he had read

a little more, and when he conceived the plan of pretending that he had all along meant to

discover the Indies and a new road to the East, he acted in accordance with that pretence;

he tried to make his acts appear retrospectively as though they had been prompted by a

design quite different from that by which they had really been prompted. When he found

that his discovery was regarded as a great scientific feat, he made haste to pretend that it

had all along been meant as such, and was in fact the outcome of an elaborate scientific

theory. In all this there is nothing for praise or admiration. It indicates the presence of

moral disease; but fortunately it is functional rather than organic disease. He was right

and sound at heart; but he spread his sails too readily to the great winds of popular

favour, and the result was instability to himself, and often danger of shipwreck to his

soul.

The ultimate test of a man's character is how he behaves in certain circumstances when

there is no great audience to watch him, and when there is no sovereign close at hand

with bounties and rewards to offer. In a word, what matters most is a man's behaviour,

not as an admiral, or a discoverer, or a viceroy, or a courtier, but as a man. In this respect

Columbus's character rings true. If he was little on little occasions, he was also great on

great occasions. The inner history of his fourth voyage, if we could but know it and could

take all the circumstances into account, would probably reveal a degree of heroic

endurance that has never been surpassed in the history of mankind. Put him as a man face

to face with a difficulty, with nothing but his wits to devise with and his two hands to act

with, and he is never found wanting. And that is the kind of man of whom discoverers are

made. The mere mathematician may work out the facts with the greatest accuracy and

prove the existence of land at a certain point; but there is great danger that he may be

knocked down by a club on his first landing on the beach, and never bring home any

news of his discovery. The great courtier may do well for himself and keep smooth and

politic relations with kings; the great administrator may found a wonderful colony; but it

is the man with the wits and the hands, and some bigness of heart to tide him over

daunting passages, that wins through the first elementary risks of any great discovery.

Properly considered, Columbus's fame should rest simply on the answer to the single

question, "Did he discover new lands as he said he would?" That was the greatest thing

he could do, and the fact that he failed to do a great many other things afterwards, failed

the more conspicuously because his attempts were so conspicuous, should have no effect

on our estimate of his achievement. The fame of it could no more be destroyed by

himself than it can be destroyed by us.