Young Christopher - 1

Young Christopher - 1

They had lost him, although perhaps they did not realise it; from the moment of his first
voyage the sea claimed him as her own. Widening horizons, slatting of cords and sails in
the wind, storms and stars and strange landfalls and long idle calms, thunder of surges,
tingle of spray, and eternal labouring and threshing and cleaving of infinite waters—these
were to be his portion and true home hereafter. Attendances at Court, conferences with
learned monks and bishops, sojourns on lonely islands, love under stars in the gay, sunsmitten
Spanish towns, governings and parleyings in distant, undreamed-of lands—these
were to be but incidents in his true life, which was to be fulfilled in the solitude of sea
watches.
When he left his home on this first voyage, he took with him one other thing besides the
restless longing to escape beyond the line of sea and sky. Let us mark well this
possession of his, for it was his companion and guiding-star throughout a long and
difficult life, his chart and compass, astrolabe and anchor, in one. Religion has in our
days fallen into decay among men of intellect and achievement. The world has thrown it,
like a worn garment or an old skin, from off its body, the thing itself being no longer real
and alive, and in harmony with the life of an age that struggles towards a different kind of
truth. It is hard, therefore, for us to understand exactly how the religion of Columbus
entered so deeply into his life and brooded so widely over his thoughts.
Hardest of all is it for people whose only experience of religion is of Puritan inheritance
to comprehend how, in the fifteenth century, the strong intellect was strengthened, and
the stout heart fortified, by the thought of hosts of saints and angels hovering above a
man's incomings and outgoings to guide and protect him. Yet in an age that really had the
gift of faith, in which religion was real and vital, and part of the business of every man's
daily life; in which it stood honoured in the world, loaded with riches, crowned with
learning, wielding government both temporal and spiritual, it was a very brave panoply
for the soul of man. The little boy in Genoa, with the fair hair and blue eyes and grave
freckled face that made him remarkable among his dark companions, had no doubt early
received and accepted the vast mysteries of the Christian faith; and as that other mystery
began to grow in his mind, and that idea of worlds that might lie beyond the sea-line
began to take shape in his thoughts, he found in the holy wisdom of the prophets, and the
inspired writings of the fathers, a continual confirmation of his faith. The full conviction
of these things belongs to a later period of his life; but probably, during his first
voyagings in the Mediterranean, there hung in his mind echoes of psalms and prophecies
that had to do with things beyond the world of his vision and experience. The sun, whose
going forth is to the end of heaven, his circuit back to the end of it, and from whose heat
there is nothing hid; the truth, holy and prevailing, that knows no speech nor language
where its voice is not heard; the great and wide sea, with its creeping things innumerable,
and beasts small and great—no wonder if these things impressed him, and if gradually, as
his way fell clearer before him, and the inner light began to shine more steadily, he came
to believe that he had a special mission to carry the torch of the faith across the Sea of
Darkness, and be himself the bearer of a truth that was to go through all the earth, and of
words that were to travel to the world's end.
In this faith, then, and with this equipment, and about the year 1465, Christopher
Columbus began his sea travels. His voyages would be doubtless at first much along the
coasts, and across to Alexandria and the Islands. There would be returnings to Genoa,
and glad welcomings by the little household in the narrow street; in 1472 and 1473 he
was with his father at Savona, helping with the wool-weaving and tavern-keeping;
possibly also there were interviews with Benincasa, who was at that time living in Genoa,
and making his famous sea-charts. Perhaps it was in his studio that Christopher first saw
a chart, and first fell in love with the magic that can transfer the shapes of oceans and
continents to a piece of paper. Then he would be off again in another ship, to the Golden
Horn perhaps, or the Black Sea, for the Genoese had a great Crimean trade. This is all
conjecture, but very reasonable conjecture; what we know for a fact is that he saw the
white gum drawn from the lentiscus shrubs in Chio at the time of their flowering; that
fragrant memory is preserved long afterwards in his own writings, evoked by some
incident in the newly-discovered islands of the West. There are vague rumours and
stories of his having been engaged in various expeditions—among them one fitted out in
Genoa by John of Anjou to recover the kingdom of Naples for King Rene of Provence;
but there is no reason to believe these rumours: good reason to disbelieve them, rather.
The lives that the sea absorbs are passed in a great variety of adventure and experience,
but so far as the world is concerned they are passed in a profound obscurity; and we need
not wonder that of all the mariners who used those seas, and passed up and down, and
held their course by the stars, and reefed their sails before the sudden squalls that came
down from the mountains, and shook them out again in the calm sunshine that followed,
there is no record of the one among their number who was afterwards to reef and steer
and hold his course to such mighty purpose. For this period, then, we must leave him to
the sea, and to the vast anonymity of sea life.