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1492

by Mary Johnston · English · Gutenberg #1692 · 573,626 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: 1492

Author: Mary Johnston


        
Release date: March 1, 1999 [eBook #1692]
                Most recently updated: October 22, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1692

Credits: Produced by Charles Keller, Martin Robb, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1492 ***




Produced by Charles Keller, and Martin Robb





1492

By Mary Johnson




1492

CHAPTER I

THE morning was gray and I sat by the sea near Palos in a gray mood. I
was Jayme de Marchena, and that was a good, _old Christian_ name. But
my grandmother was Jewess, and in corners they said that she never truly
recanted, and I had been much with her as a child. She was dead, but
still they talked of her. Jayme de Marchena, looking back from the
hillside of forty-six, saw some service done for the Queen and the folk.
This thing and that thing. Not demanding trumpets, but serviceable. It
would be neither counted nor weighed beside and against that which Don
Pedro and the Dominican found to say. What they found to say they made,
not found. They took clay of misrepresentation, and in the field
of falsehood sat them down, and consulting the parchment of malice,
proceeded to create. But false as was all they set up, the time would
cry it true.

It was reasonable that I should find the day gray.

Study and study and study, year on year, and at last image a great
thing, just under the rim of the mind’s ocean, sending up for those who
will look streamers above horizon, streamers of colored and wonderful
light! Study and reason and with awe and delight take light from above.
Dream of good news for one and all, of life given depth and brought into
music, dream of giving the given, never holding it back, which would be
avarice and betraying! Write, and give men and women to read what you
have written, and believe--poor Deluded!--that they also feel inner
warmth and light and rejoice.

Oh, gray the sea and gray the shore!

But some did feel it.

The Dominican, when it fell into his hands, called it perdition.
A Jewess for grandmother, and Don Pedro for enemy. And now the
Dominican--the Dominicans!

The Queen and the King made edict against the Jews, and there sat the
Inquisition.

I was--I am--Christian. It is a wide and deep and high word. When you
ask, “What is it--Christian?” then must each of us answer as it is given
to him to answer. I and thou--and the True, the Universal Christ give us
light!

To-day all Andalusia, all Castile and all Spain to me seemed gray, and
gray the utter Ocean that stretched no man knew where. The gray was the
gray of fetters and of ashes.

The tide made, and as the waves came nearer, eating the sand before
me, they uttered a low crying. _In danger--danger--in danger, Jayme de
Marchena!_

I had been in danger before. Who is not often and always in danger, in
life? But this was a danger to daunt.

Mine were no powerful friends. I had only that which was within me. I
was only son of only son, and my parents and grandparents were dead,
and my distant kindred cold, seeing naught of good in so much study and
thinking of that old, dark, beautiful, questionable one, my grandmother.
I had indeed a remote kinsman, head of a convent in this neighborhood,
and he was a wise man and a kindly. But not he either could do aught
here!

All the Jews to be banished, and Don Pedro with a steady forefinger,
“That man--take him, too! Who does not know that his grandmother was
Jewess, and that he lived with her and drank poison?” But the Dominican,
“No! The Holy Office will take him. You have but to read--only you must
not read--what he has written to see why!”

Gray Ocean, stretching endlessly and now coming close, were it not well
if I drowned myself this gray morning while I can choose the death I
shall die? Now the great murmur sang _Well_, and now it sang Not well.

Low cliff and heaped sand and a solitary bird wide-winging toward the
mountains of Portugal, and the Ocean gray-blue and salt! The salt savor
entered me, and an inner zest came forward and said No, to being
craven. In banishment certainly, in the House of the Inquisition more
doubtfully, the immortal man might yet find market from which to buy! If
the mind could surmount, the eternal quest need not be interrupted--even
there!

Blue Ocean sang to me.

A vision--it came to me at times, vision--set itself in air. I saw
A People who persecuted neither Jew nor thinker. It rose one Figure,
formed of an infinite number of small figures, but all their edges met
in one glow. The figure stood upon the sea and held apart the clouds,
and was free and fair and mighty, and was man and woman melted together,
and it took all colors and made of them a sun for its brow. I did not
know when it would live, but I knew that it should live. Perhaps it was
the whole world.

It vanished, leaving sky and ocean and Andalusia. But great visions
leave great peace. After it, for this day, it seemed not worth while to
grieve and miserably to forebode. Through the hours that I lay there by
the sea, airs from that land or that earth blew about me and faint songs
visited my ears, and the gray day was only gray like a dove’s breast.

Jayme de Marchena stayed by the lonely sea because that seemed the
safest place to stay. At hand was the small port of Palos that might
not know what was breeding in Seville, and going thither at nightfall I
found lodging and supper in a still corner where all night I heard the
Tinto flowing by.

I had wandered to Palos because of the Franciscan convent of Santa Maria
de la Rabida and my very distant kins-man, Fray Juan Perez. The day
after the gray day by the shore I walked half a league of sandy road
and came to convent gate. The porter let me in, and I waited in a little
court with doves about me and a swinging bell above until the brother
whom he had called returned and took me to Prior’s room. At first Fray
Juan Perez was stiff and cold, but by littles this changed and he
became a good man, large-minded and with a sense for kindred. Clearly he
thought that I should not have had a Jewish grandmother, nor have lived
with her from my third to my tenth birthday, and most clearly that I
should not have written that which I had written. But his God was an
energetic, enterprising, kindly Prince, rather bold himself and tolerant
of heathen. Fray Juan Perez even intimated a doubt if God wanted the
Inquisition. “But that’s going rather far!” he said hastily and sat
drumming the table and pursing his lips. Presently he brought out, “But
you know I can’t do anything!”

I did know it. What could he do? I suppose I had had a half-hope of
something. I knew not what. Without a hope I would not have come to
La Rabida. But it was maimed from the first, and now it died. I made a
gesture of relinquishment. “No, I suppose you cannot--”

He said after a moment that he was glad to see that I had let my beard
grow and was very plainly dressed, though I had never been elaborate
there, and especially was he glad that I was come to Palos not as Jayme
de Marchena, but under a plain and simple name, Juan Lepe, to wit. His
advice was to flee from the wrath to come. He would not say flee from
the Holy Office--that would be heinous!--but he would say absent myself,
abscond, be banished, Jayme de Marchena by Jayme de Marchena. There were
barques in Palos and rude seamen who asked no question when gold just
enough, and never more than enough, was shown. He hesitated a moment and
then asked if I had funds. If not--

I thanked him and said that I had made provision.

“Then,” said he, “go to Barbary, Don Jayme! An intelligent and prudent
man may prosper at Ercilla or at Fez. If you must study, study there.”

“You also study,” I said.

“In fair trodden highways--never in thick forest and mere fog!” he
answered. “Now if you were like one who has been here and is now before
Granada, at Santa Fe, sent for thither by the Queen! That one hath
indeed studied to benefit Spain--Spain, Christendom, and the world!”

I asked who was that great one, but before he could tell me came
interruption. A visitor entered, a strong-lipped, bold-eyed man named
Martin Pinzon. I was to meet him again and often, but at this time I did
not know that. Fray Juan Perez evidently desiring that I should go, I
thought it right to oblige him who would have done me kindness had he
known how. I went without intimate word of parting and after only a
casual stare from Martin Pinzon.

But without, my kinsman came after me. “I want to say, Don Jayme, that
if I am asked for testimony I shall hold to it that you are as good
Christian as any--”

It was kinsman’s part and all that truly I could have hoped for, and
I told him so. About us was quiet, vacant cloister, and we parted more
warmly than we had done within.

The white convent of La Rabida is set on a headland among vineyards and
pine trees. It regards the ocean and, afar, the mountains of Portugal,
and below it runs a small river, going out to sea through sands with the
Tinto and the Odiel. Again the day was gray and the pine trees sighing.
The porter let me out at gate.

I walked back toward Palos through the sandy ways. I did not wish to go
to Africa.

It is my belief that that larger Self whom they will call protecting
Saint or heavenly Guardian takes hand in affairs oftener than we think!
Leaving the Palos road, I went to the sea as I had done yesterday and
again sat under heaped sand with about me a sere grass through which the
wind whined. At first it whined and then it sang in a thin, outlandish
voice. Sitting thus, I might have looked toward Africa, but I knew now
that I was not going to Africa. Often, perhaps, in the unremembered past
I had been in Africa; often, doubtless, in ages to come its soil
would be under my foot, but now I was not going there! To-day I looked
westward over River-Ocean, unknown to our fathers and unknown to
ourselves. It was unknown as the future of the world.

Ocean piled before me. From where I lay it seemed to run uphill to one
pale line, nor blue nor white, set beneath the solid gray. Over that
hilltop, what? Only other hills and plains, water, endlessly water,
until the waves, so much mightier than waves of that blue sea we knew
best, should beat at last against Asia shore! So high, so deep, so vast,
so real, yet so empty-seeming save for strange dangers! No sails over
the hilltop; no sails in all that Vast save close at hand where mariners
held to the skirts of Mother. Europe. Ocean vast, Ocean black, Ocean
unknown. Yet there, too, life and the knowing of life ran somehow
continuous.

It wiled me from my smaller self. How had we all suffered, we the whole
earth! But we were moving, we the world with none left out, moving
toward That which held worlds, which was conscious above worlds. Long
the journey, long the adventure, but it was not worth while fearing, it
was not worth while whining! I was not alone Jayme de Marchena, nor Juan
Lepe, nor this name nor that nor the other.

There was now a great space of quiet in my mind. Suddenly formed there
the face and figure of Don Enrique de Cerda whose life I had had
the good hap to save. He was far away with the Queen and King who
beleaguered Granada. I had not seen him for ten years. A moment before
he had rested among the host of figures in the unevenly lighted land of
memory. Now he stood forth plainly and seemed to smile.

I took the leading. With the inner eye I have seen lines of light like
subtle shining cords running between persons. Such a thread stretched
now between me and Enrique de Cerda. I determined to make my way, as
Juan Lepe, through the mountains and over the plain of Granada to Santa
Fe.



CHAPTER II

SET will to an end and promptly eyes open to means! I did not start for
Granada from Palos but from Huelva, and I quitted Andalusia as a porter
in a small merchant train carrying goods of sorts to Zarafa that was a
mountain town taken from the Moors five years back. I was to these folk
Juan Lepe, a strong, middle-aged man used to ships but now for some
reason tired of them. My merchants had only eyes for the safety of their
persons and their bales, plunged the third day into mountainous wild
country echoing and ghastly with long-lasting war. Their servants and
muleteers walked and rode, lamented or were gay, raised faction,
swore, laughed, traveled grimly or in a dull melancholy or mirthfully;
quarreled and made peace, turn by turn, day by day, much alike. One who
was a bully fixed a quarrel upon me and another took my part. All leaped
to sides. I was forgotten in the midst of them; they could hardly have
told now what was the cause of battle. A young merchant rode back to
chide and settle matters. At last some one remembered that Diego had
struck Juan Lepe who had flung him off. Then Tomaso had sprung in and
struck Diego. Then Miguel--“Let Juan Lepe alone!” said my merchant.
“Fie! a poor Palos seafaring child, and you great Huelva men!” They
laughed at that, and the storm vanished as it had come.

I liked the young man.

How wild and without law, save “Hold if you can!” were these mountains!
“Hold if you can to life--hold if you can to knowledge--hold if you can
to joy!” Black cliff overhung black glen and we knew there were dens of
robbers. Far and near violence falls like black snow. This merchant
band gathered to sleep under oaks with a great rock at our back. We had
journeyers’ supper and fire, for it was cold, cold in these heights. A
little wine was given and men fell to sleep by the heaped bales; horses,
asses and mules being fastened close under the crag. Three men watched,
to be relieved in middle night by other three who now slept. A muleteer
named Rodrigo and Juan Lepe and the young merchant took the first turn.
The first two sat on one side of the fire and the young merchant on the
other.

The muleteer remained sunken in a great cloak, his chin on his arms
folded upon his knees, and what he saw in the land within I cannot tell.
But the young merchant was of a quick disposition and presently must
talk. For some distance around us spread bare earth set only with shrubs
and stones. Also the rising moon gave light, and with that and our own
strength we did not truly look for any attack. We sat and talked at
ease, though with lowered voices, Rodrigo somewhere away and the rest of
the picture sleeping. The merchant asked what had been my last voyage.

I answered, after a moment, to England.

“You do not seem to me,” he said, “a seaman. But I suppose there are all
kinds of seamen.”

I said yes, the sea was wide.

“England now, at the present moment?” he said, and questioned me as to
Bristol, of which port he had trader’s knowledge. I answered out of a
book I had read. It was true that, living once by the sea, I knew how to
handle a boat. I could find in memory sailors’ terms. But still he said,
“You are not a seaman such as we see at Palos and San Lucar.”

It is often best not to halt denial. Let it pass by and wander among the
wild grasses!

“I myself,” he said presently, “have gone by sea to Vigo and to
Bordeaux.” He warmed his hands at the fire, then clasped them about his
knees and gazed into the night. “What, Juan Lepe, is that Ocean we look
upon when we look west? I mean, where does it go? What does it strike?”

“India, belike. And Cathay. To-day all men believe the earth to be
round.”

“A long way!” he said. “O Sancta Maria! All that water!”

“We do not have to drink it.”

He laughed. “No! Nor sail it. But after I had been on that voyage I
could see us always like mice running close to a wall, forever and
forever! Juan Lepe, we are little and timid!”

I liked his spirit. “One day we shall be lions and eagles and bold
prophets! Then our tongue shall taste much beside India and Cathay!”

“Well, I hope it,” he said. “Mice running under the headlands.”

He fell silent, cherishing his knees and staring into the fire. It was
not Juan Lepe’s place to talk when master merchant talked not. I, too,
regarded the fire, and the herded mountains robed in night, and the
half-moon like a sail rising from an invisible boat.

The night went peacefully by. It was followed by a hard day’s travel
and the incident of the road. At evening we saw the walls of Zarafa in a
sunset glory. The merchants and their train passed through the gate and
found their customary inn. With others, Juan Lepe worked hard, unlading
and storing. All done, he and the bully slept almost in each other’s
arms, under the arches of the court, dreamlessly.

The next day and the next were still days of labor. It was not until
the third that Juan Lepe considered that he might now absent himself and
there be raised no hue and cry after strong shoulders. He had earned his
quittance, and in the nighttime, upon his hands and knees, he crept from
the sleepers in the court. Just before dawn the inn gate swung open. He
had been waiting close to it, and he passed out noiselessly.

In the two days, carrying goods through streets to market square and up
to citadel and pausing at varying levels for breath and the prospect, I
had learned this town well enough. I knew where went the ascending and
descending ways. Now almost all lay asleep, antique, shaded, Moorish,
still, under the stars. The soldiery and the hidalgos, their officers,
slept; only the sentinels waked before the citadel entry and on the town
walls and by the three gates. The town folk slept, all but the sick and
the sorrowful and the careful and those who had work at dawn. Listen,
and you might hear sound like the first moving of birds, or breath of
dawn wind coming up at sea. The greater part now of the town folk
were Christian, brought in since the five-year-gone siege that still
resounded. Moors were here, but they had turned Christian, or were
slaves, or both slave and Christian. I had seen monks of all habits and
heard ring above the inn the bells of a nunnery. Now again they rang.
The mosque was now a church. It rose at hand,--white, square, domed. I
went by a ladder-like lane down toward Zarafa wall and the Gate of the
Lion. At sunrise in would pour peasants from the vale below, bringing
vegetables and poultry, and mountaineers with quails and conies, and
others with divers affairs. Outgoing would be those who tilled a few
steep gardens beyond the wall, messengers and errand folk, soldiers and
traders for the army before Granada.

It was full early when I came to the wall. I could make out the heavy
and tall archway of the gate, but as yet was no throng before it. I
waited; the folk began to gather, the sun came up. Zarafa grew rosy. Now
was clatter enough, voices of men and brutes, both sides the gate. The
gate opened. Juan Lepe won out with a knot of brawny folk going to the
mountain pastures. Well forth, he looked back and saw Zarafa gleaming
rose and pearl in the blink of the sun, and sent young merchantward a
wish for good. Then he took the eastward way down the mountain, toward
lower mountains and at last the Vega of Granada.



CHAPTER III

THE day passed. I had adventures of the road, but none of consequence.
I slept well among the rocks, waked, ate the bit of bread I had with me,
and fell again to walking.

Mountains were now withdrawing to the distant horizon where they stood
around, a mighty and beautiful wall. I was coming down into the plain of
Granada, that once had been a garden. Now, north, south, east, west,
it lay war-trampled. Old owners were dead, men and women, or were
_mudexares_, vassals, or were fled, men and women, all who could flee,
to their kindred in Africa. Or they yet cowered, men and women, in the
broken garden, awaiting individual disaster. The Kingdom of Granada had
sins, and the Kingdom of Castile, and the Kingdom of Leon. The Moor was
stained, and the Spaniard, the Moslem and the Christian and the Jew. Who
had stains the least or the most God knew--and it was a poor inquiry.
Seek the virtues and bind them with love, each in each!

If the mountain road had been largely solitary, it was not so of this
road. There were folk enough in the wide Vega of Granada. Clearly, as
though the one party had been dressed in black and the other in red,
they divided into vanquished and victor. Bit by bit, now through years,
all these towns and villages, all these fertile fields and bosky places,
rich and singing, had left the hand of the Moor for the hand of the
Spaniard.

In all this part of his old kingdom the Moor lay low in defeat. In had
swarmed the Christian and with the Christian the Jew, though now the Jew
must leave. The city of Granada was not yet surrendered, and the Queen
and King held all soldiery that they might at Santa Fe, built as it were
in a night before Granada walls. Yet there seemed at large bands enough,
licentious and loud, the scum of soldiery. Ere I reached the village
that I now saw before me I had met two such bands, I wondered, and then
wondered at my own wonder.

The chief house of the village was become an inn. Two long tables stood
in the patio where no fountain now flowed nor orange trees grew nor
birds sang in corners nor fine awning kept away the glare. Twenty of
these wild and base fighting men crowded one table, eating and drinking,
clamorous and spouting oaths. At the other table sat together at an end
three men whom by a number of tokens might be robbers of the mountains.
They sat quiet, indifferent to the noise, talking low among themselves
in a tongue of their own, kin enough to the soldiery not to fear them.
The opposite end of the long table was given to a group to which I now
joined myself. Here sat two Franciscan friars, and a man who seemed a
lawyer; and one who had the air of the sea and turned out to be master
of a Levantine; and a brisk, talkative, important person, a Catalan, and
as it presently appeared alcalde once of a so-so village; and a young,
unhealthy-looking man in black with an open book beside him; and a
strange fellow whose Spanish was imperfect.

I sat down near the friars, crossed myself, and cut a piece of
bread from the loaf before me. The innkeeper and his wife, a gaunt,
extraordinarily tall woman, served, running from table to table. The
place was all heat and noise. Presently the soldiers, ending their meal,
got up with clamor and surged from the court to their waiting horses.
After them ran the innkeeper, appealing for pay. Denials, expostulation,
anger and beseeching reached the ears of the patio, then the sound
of horses going down stony ways. “O God of the poor!” cried the gaunt
woman. “How are we robbed!”

“Why are they not before Granada?” demanded the lawyer and alertly
provided the answer to his own question. “Take locusts and give them
leave to eat, being careful to say, ‘This fellow’s fields only!’ But the
locusts have wings and their nature is to eat!”

The mountain robbers, if robbers they were, dined quietly, the gaunt
woman promptly and painstakingly serving them. They were going to pay, I
was sure, though it might not be this noon.

The two friars seemed, quiet, simple men, dining as dumbly as if
they sat in Saint Francis’s refectory. The sometime alcalde and the
shipmaster were the talkers, the student sitting as though he were in
the desert, eating bread and cheese and onions and looking on his book.
The lawyer watched all, talked to make them talk, then came in and
settled matters. The alcalde was the politician, knowing the affairs
of the world and speaking familiarly of the King and the Queen and the
Marquis of Cadiz.

The shipmaster said, “This time last year I was in London, and I saw
their King. His name is Henry. King Henry the Seventh, and a good
carrier of his kingship!”

“That for him!” said the alcalde. “Let him stay in his foggy island! But
Spain is too small for King Ferdinand.” “All kings find their lands too
small,” said the lawyer.

The shipmaster spoke again. “The King of Portugal’s ship sails ahead of
ours in that matter. He’s stuck his banner in the new islands, Maderia
and the Hawk Islands and where not! I was talking in Cadiz with one who
was with Bartholomew Diaz when he turned Africa and named it Good Hope.
Which is to say, King John has Good Hope of seeing Portugal swell.
Portugal! Well, I say, ‘Why not Spain’?”

The student looked up from his book. “It is a great Age!” he said and
returned to his reading.

When we had finished dinner, we paid the tall, gaunt woman and leaving
the robbers, if robbers they were, still at table, went out into
the street. Here the friars, the alcalde and the lawyer moved in the
direction of the small, staring white and ruined mosque that was to be
transformed into the church of San Jago the Deliverer. That was the one
thing of which the friars had spoken. A long bench ran by inn wall and
here the shipmaster took his seat and began to discourse with those
already there. Book under arm, the student moved dreamily down the
opposite lane. Juan Lepe walked away alone.

Through the remainder of this day he had now company and adventure
without, now solitude and adventure within. That night he spent in a
ruined tower where young trees grew and an owl was his comrade and he
read the face of a glorious moon. Dawn. He bathed in a stream that ran
by the mound of the tower and ate a piece of bread from his wallet and
took the road.

The sun mounted above the trees. A man upon a mule came up behind me and
was passing. “There is a stone wedged in his shoe,” I said. The rider
drew rein and I lifted the creature’s foreleg and took out the pebble.
The rider made search for a bit of money. I said that the deed was
short and easy and needed no payment, whereupon he put up the coin and
regarded me out of his fine blue eyes. He was quite fair, a young man
still, and dressed after a manner of his own in garments not at all new
but with a beauty of fashioning and putting on. He and his mule looked a
corner out of a great painting. And I had no sooner thought that than
he said, “I see in you, friend, a face and figure for my ‘Draught of
Fishes.’ And by Saint Christopher, there is water over yonder and just
the landscape!” He leaned from the saddle and spoke persuasively, “Come
from the road a bit down to the water and let me draw you! You are not
dressed like the kin of Midas! I will give you the price of dinner.”
 As he talked he drew out of a richly worked bag a book of paper and
pencils. I thought, “This beard and the clothes of Juan Lepe. He can
hardly make it so that any may recognize.” It was resting time and the
man attracted. I agreed, if he would take no more than an hour.

“The drawing, no!--Bent far over, gathering the net strongly--Andrew or
Mark perhaps, since, traditionally, John must have youth.”

He had continued to study me all this time, and now we left the road and
moved over the plain to the stream that here widened into a pool fringed
with rushes and a few twisted trees. An ancient, half-sunken
boat drowsing under the bank he hailed again in the name of Saint
Christopher. Dismounting, he fastened his mule to a willow and proceeded
to place me, then himself found a root of a tree, and taking out his
knife fell to sharpening pencil. This done, he rested book against knee
and began to draw.

Having made his figure in one posture he rose and showed me another and
drew his fisherman so. Then he demonstrated a third way and drew again.
Now he was silent, working hard, and now he dropped his hand, threw
back his head and talked. He himself made a picture, paly gold of locks,
subtle and quick of face, plastered against a blue shield with a willow
wreath going around.

I stood so or so, drawing hard upon the net with the fishes. Then at
his command I approached more nearly, and he drew full face and
three-quarter and profile. It was between these accomplishings that he
talked more intimately.

“Seamen go to Italy,” he said. “Were you ever in Milan? But that is
inland.”

I answered that I had been from Genoa to Milan.

“It is not likely that you saw a great painter there Messer Leonardo?”

It happened that I had done this, and moreover had seen him at work and
heard him put right thought into most right words. I was so tired
of lying that after a moment I said that I had seen and heard Messer
Leonardo.

“Did you see the statue?”

“The first time I saw him he was at work upon it. The next time he
was painting in the church of Santa Maria. The third time he sat in a
garden, sipped wine and talked.”

“I hold you,” he said, “to be a fortunate fisherman! Just as this fisher
I am painting, and whether it is Andrew or Mark, I do not yet know, was
a most fortunate fisherman!” He ended meditatively, “Though whoever it
is, probably he was crucified or beheaded or burned.”

I felt a certain shiver of premonition. The day that had been warm and
bright turned in a flash ashy and chill. Then it swung back to its first
fair seeming, or not to its first, but to a deeper, brighter yet. The
Fisherman by Galilee was fortunate. Whoever perceived truth and beauty
was fortunate, fortunate now and forever!

We came back to Messer Leonardo. “I spent six months at the court in
Milan,” said the fair man. “I painted the Duke and the Duchess and two
great courtiers. Messer Leonardo was away. He returned, and I visited
him and found a master. Since that time I study light and shadow and
small things and seek out inner action.”

He worked in silence, then again began to speak of painters, Italian and
Spanish. He asked me if I had seen such and such pictures in Seville.

“Yes. They are good.”

“Do you know Monsalvat?”

I said that I had climbed there one day. “I dream a painting!” he said,
“The Quest of the Grail. Now I see it running over the four walls of a
church, and now I see it all packed into one man who rides. Then again
it has seemed to me truer to have it in a man and woman who walk, or
perhaps even are seated. What do you think?”

I was thinking of Isabel who died in my arms twenty years ago. “I would
have it man and woman,” I said. “Unless, like Messer Leonardo, you can
put both in one.”

He sat still, his mind working, while in a fair inner land Isabel and I
moved together; then in a meditative quiet he finished his drawing. He
himself was admirable, fine gold and bronze, sapphire-eyed, with a face
where streams of visions moved the muscles, and all against the blue and
the willow tree.

At last he put away pencil, and at his gesture I came from the boat and
the reeds. I looked at what he had drawn, and then he shut book and, the
mule following us, we moved back to the road.

“My dear fisherman,” he said, “you are trudging afoot and your dress
exhibits poverty. Painters may paint Jove descending in showers of
golden pesos and yet have few pesos in purse. I have at present ten. I
should like to share them with you who have done me various good turns
to-day.”

I said that he was generous but that he had done me good turns. Moreover
I was not utterly without coin, and certainly the hour had paid for
itself. So he mounted his mule and wished me good fortune, and I wished
him good fortune.

“Are you going to Santa Fe?”

“Yes. I have a friend in the camp.”

“I go there to paint her Highness the Queen for his Highness the King.
Perhaps we shall meet again. I am Manuel Rodriguez.”

“I guessed that,” I answered, “an hour ago! Be so good, great painter,
as not to remember me. It will serve me better.”

The light played again over his face. “_The Disguised Hidalgo_.
Excellent pictures come to me like that, in a great warm light, and
excellent names for pictures.--Very good. In a way, so to speak, I shall
completely forget you!”

Two on horseback, a churchman and a knight, with servants following,
came around a bend of the dusty road and recognizing Manuel Rodriguez,
called to him by name. Away he rode upon his mule, keeping company with
them. The dozen in their train followed, raising as they went by such a
dust cloud that presently all became like figures upon worn arras. They
rode toward Santa Fe, and I followed on foot.



CHAPTER IV

SANTA Fe rose before me, a camp in wood, plaster and stone, a camp
with a palace, a camp with churches. Built of a piece where no town had
stood, built that Majesty and its Court and its Army might have roofs
and walls, not tents, for so long a siege, it covered the plain, a city
raised in a night. The siege had been long as the war had been long.
Hidalgo Spain and simple Spain were gathered here in great squares
and ribbons of valor, ambition, emulation, desire of excitement and
of livelihood, and likewise, I say it, in pieces not small, herded and
brought here without any “I say yes” of their own, and to their misery.
There held full flavor of crusade, as all along the war had been
preached as a crusade. Holy Church had here her own grandees, cavaliers
and footmen. They wore cope and they wore cowl, and on occasion many
endued themselves with armor and hacked and hewed with an earthly sword.
At times there seemed as many friars and priests as soldiers. Out and in
went a great Queen and King. Their court was here. The churchmen pressed
around the Queen. Famous leaders put on or took off armor in Santa
Fe,--the Marquis of Cadiz and many others only less than he in
estimation, and one Don Gonsalvo de Cordova, whose greater fame was yet
to come. Military and shining youth came to train and fight under these.
Old captains-at-arms, gaunt and scarred, made their way thither from
afar. All were not Spaniard; many a soldier out at fortune or wishful
of fame came from France and Italy, even from England and Germany. Women
were in Santa Fe. The Queen had her ladies. Wives, sisters and daughters
of hidalgos came to visit, and the common soldiery had their mates. Nor
did there lack courtesans.

Petty merchants thronged the place. All manner of rich goods were bought
by the flushed soldiers, the high and the low. And there dwelled here a
host of those who sold entertainment,--mummers and jugglers and singers,
dwarfs and giants. Dice rattled, now there were castanets and dancing,
and now church bells seemed to rock the place. Wine flowed.

Out of the plain a league and more away sprang the two hills of Granada,
and pricked against the sky, her walls and thousand towers and noble
gates. Between them and Santa Fe stretched open and ruined ground, and
here for many a day had shocked together the Spaniard and the Moor.
But now there was no longer battle. Granada had asked and been granted
seventy days in which to envisage and accept her fate. These were
nearing the end. Lost and beaten, haggard with woe and hunger and
pestilence, the city stood over against us, above the naked plain, all
her outer gardens stripped away, bare light striking the red Alhambra
and the Citadel. When the wind swept over her and on to Santa Fe it
seemed to bring a sound of wailing and the faint and terrible odor of a
long besieged place.

I came at eve into Santa Fe, found at last an inn of the poorer sort,
ate scant supper and went to bed. Dawn came with a great ringing of
church bells.

Out of the inn, in the throbbing street, I began my search for Don
Enrique de Cerda. One told me one thing and one another, but at last I
got true direction. At noon I found him in a goodly room where he made
recovery from wounds. Now he walked and now he sat, his arm in a sling
and a bandage like a turban around his head. A page took him the word I
gave. “Juan Lepe. From the hermitage in the oak wood.” It sufficed. When
I entered he gazed, then coming to me, put his unbound hand over mine.
“Why,” he asked, “‘Juan Lepe’?”

I glanced toward the page and he dismissed him, whereupon I explained
the circumstances.

We sat by the window, and again rose for us the hermitage in the oak
wood at foot of a mountain, and the small tower that slew in ugly
fashion. Again we were young men, together in strange dangers, learning
there each other’s mettle. He had not at all forgotten.

He offered to go to Seville, as soon as Granada should fall, and find
and fight Don Pedro. I shook my head. I could have done that had I seen
it as the way.

He agreed that Don Pedro was now the minor peril. It is evil to chain
thought! In our day we think boldly of a number of things. But touch
King or touch Church--the cord is around your neck!

I said that I supposed I had been rash.

He nodded. “Yes. You were rash that day in the oak wood. Less rash, and
my bones would be lying there, under tree.” He rose and walked the room,
then came to me and put his unhurt arm about my shoulders. “Don Jayme,
we swore that day comrade love and service--and that day is now;
twilight has never come to it, the leaves of the oak wood have never
fallen! The Holy Office shall not have thee!”

“Don Enrique--”

We sat down and drank each a little wine, and fell to ways and means.

I rested Juan Lepe in the household of Don Enrique de Cerda, one figure
among many, involved in the swarm of fighting and serving men. There
was a squire who had served him long. To this man, Diego Lopez, I was
committed, with enough told to enlist his intelligence. He managed for
me in the intricate life of the place with a skill to make god Mercury
applaud. Don Enrique and I were rarely together, rarely were seen by men
to speak one to the other. But in the inner world we were together.

Days passed. We found nothing yet to do while all listening and doing at
Santa Fe were bound up in the crumbling of Granada into Spanish hands.
It seemed best to wait, watching chances.

Meantime the show glittered, and man’s strong stomach cried “Life! More
life!” It glittered at Santa Fe before Granada, and it was a dying ember
in Granada before Santa Fe. The one glittered and triumphed because the
other glittered and triumphed not. And who above held the balances even
and neither sorrowed nor was feverishly elated but went his own way
could only be seen from the Vega like a dream or a line from a poet.

For the most part the nobles and cavaliers in Santa Fe spent as though
hard gold were spiritual gold to be gathered endlessly. One might say,
“They go into a garden and shake tree each morning, which tree puts
forth again in the night.” None seemed to see as on a map laid down
Spain and the broken peasant and the digger of the gold. None seemed to
feel that toil which or soon or late they must recognize for their own
toil. Toil in Spain, toil in other and far lands whence came their rich
things, toil in Europe, Arabia and India! Apparel at Santa Fe was a
thing to marvel at. The steed no less than his rider went gorgeous. The
King and Queen, it was said, did not like this peacocking, but might not
help it.

They themselves were pouring gold into the lap of the Church. It was a
capacious lap.

Wars were general enough, God knew! But not every year could one find a
camp where the friar was as common as the archer or the pikeman, and the
prelate as the plumed chieftain.

Santa Fe was court no less than camp, court almost as though it were
Cordova. This Queen and King at least did not live at ease in palaces
while others fought their wars. North, south, east and west, through
the ten years, they had been the moving springs. It was an able King
and Queen, a politic King and a sincere and godly Queen, even a loving
Queen. If only--if only--

I had been a week and more in Santa Fe when King Boabdil surrendered
Granada. He left forever the Alhambra. Granada gates opened; he rode out
with a few of his emirs and servants to meet King Ferdinand and Queen
Isabella. The day shone bright. Spain towered, a figure dressed in gold
and red.

Santa Fe poured out to view the spectacle, and with the rest went Diego
Lopez and Juan Lepe. So great festival, so vivid the color, so echoing
the sound, so stately and various the movement! Looking at the great
strength massing there on the plain I said aloud, as I thought, to Diego
Lopez, “Now they might do some worthy great thing!”

The squire not answering, I became aware that a swirl in the throng had
pushed him from me. Still there came an answer in a deep and peculiarly
thrilling voice. “That is a true saying and a good augury!”

I learn much by voices and before I turned I knew that this was an
enthusiast’s voice, but not an enthusiast without knowledge. Whoever
spoke was strong enough, real enough. I liked the voice and felt a
certain inner movement of friendship. Some shift among the great actors,
some parting of banners, kept us suspended and staring for a moment,
then the view closed against us who could only behold by snatches.
Freed, I turned to see who had spoken and found a tall, strongly made,
white-haired man. The silver hair was too soon; he could hardly have
been ten years my elder. He had a long, fair face that might once have
been tanned and hardened by great exposure. His skin had that look, but
now the bronze was faded, and you could see that he had been born very
fair in tint. Across the high nose and cheek bones went a powdering of
freckles. His eyes were bluish-gray and I saw at once that he habitually
looked at things afar off.

He was rather poorly dressed and pushed about as I was. When the surge
again gave him footing, he spoke beside me. “‘Now that this is over,
they might do some great, worthy thing!’ Very true, friend, they might!
I take your words for good omen.” The throng shot out an arm and we were
parted. The same action brought back to me Diego Lopez. Speaking to him
later of the tall man, he said that he had noticed him, and that it was
the Italian who would go to India by way of Ocean-Sea.

King Boabdil gave up his city to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.
Over Granada, high against the bright sky, rose and floated the banners.
Cannon, the big lombards, roared. Mars’ music crashed out, then the
trumpets ceased their crying and instead spread a mighty chanting. _Te
Deum Laudamus!_

At last the massed brightness out in the plain quivered and parted. The
pageantry broke, wide curving and returning with some freedom but
with order too, into Santa Fe. I saw the Queen and the King with their
children, and the Grand Cardinal, and prelates and prelates, and the
Marquis of Cadiz, and many a grandee and famous knight. Don Enrique de
Cerda and his troop came by.

Diego Lopez and I returned to the town. I saw again the man who would
find India by a way unpassed, as far as one knew, since the world began!
He was entering a house with a friar beside him. Something came into my
mind of the convent of La Rabida.



CHAPTER V

SOME days went by. The King and the Queen with the court and a great
train of prelates and grandees and knights rode in state through
Granada. Don Enrique, returning, told me of it in his room at night, of
the Christian service in the mosque and the throning in the Alhambra.

“Now,” he said, “after great affairs, our affairs! I have had speech
with the Marchioness of Moya.”

“That is the Queen’s friend?”

“Yes. Dona Beatrix de Boabdilla. We stood together by a fountain,
and when she said, ‘What can I do for you?’ I answered, ‘There is
something.’ Then while all went in pageantry before us, I told her of
the hermitage in the oak wood and of the unhappy small tower, and of you
and me and those others, and what was done that day. Don Jayme, I told
it like a minstrel who believes what he sings! And then I spoke of
to-day. She is no puny soul, nor is she in priest’s grip. She acts from
her own vision, not from that of another. The Queen is no weak soul
either! She also has vision, but too often she lets the churchmen take
her vision from her. But Dona Beatrix is stronger there. Well, she
promises help if we can show her how to help.”

I said, “I have been thinking. It seems to me that it was wrong to come
here and put my weight upon you.”

“No!” he answered. “Did we not swear then, when we were young men? And
we needed no oaths neither. Let such thoughts be.--I am going to the
palace to-morrow, and you with me. The King and the Queen ride with
a great train into Granada. But Dona Beatrix will excuse herself from
going. The palace will be almost empty, and we shall find her in the
little gallery above the Queen’s garden.”

The next morning we went there, Don Enrique de Cerda and his squire,
Juan Lepe. The palace rose great and goodly enough, with the church at
hand. All had been built as by magic, silken pavilions flying away and
stout houses settling themselves down. Sunk among the walls had been
managed a small garden for the Queen and her ladies. A narrow, latticed
and roofed gallery built without the Queen’s rooms looked down upon
orange and myrtle trees and a fountain. Here we found the Marchioness de
Moya, with her two waiting damsels whom she set by the gallery door. Don
Enrique kissed her hand and then motioned to me. Don Jayme de Marchena
made his reverence.

She was a strong woman who would go directly to the heart of things.
Always she would learn from the man himself. She asked me this and I
answered; that and the other and I answered. “Don Pedro--?” I told the
enmity there and the reason for it. “The Jewish rabbi, my great-grand
father?” I avowed it, but by three Castilian and Christian
great-grandfathers could not be counted as Jew! Practise Judaism? No. My
grandmother Judith had been Christian.

She drove to the heart of it. “You yourself are Christian. What do you
mean by that? What the Queen means? What the Grand Cardinal and the
Archbishop of Granada means? What the Holy Office means?”

I kept silence for a moment, then I told her as well as I might, without
fever and without melancholy, what I had written and of the Dominican.

“You have been,” she said, “an imprudent cavalier.”

The fountain flashed below us, a gray dove flew over garden. I said,
“There is a text, ‘With all thy getting, get understanding.’ There
is another, ‘For God so loved the world’--that He wished to impart
understanding.”

She sat quiet, seeming to listen to the fountain. Then she said, “Are
you ready to avow when they ask you that in every particular to which
the Grand Inquisitor may point you are wrong, and that all that Holy
Church through mouth of Holy Office says is right?”

I said, “No, Madam! Present Church is not as large as Truth, nor as fair
as Beauty.”

“You may think that, but will you say the other?”

“Say that church or kingdom exactly matches Truth and Beauty?”

“That is what I am sure you will have to say.”

“Then, no!”

“I do not see,” she said, “that I can do anything for you.”

There was a chair beside her. She sat down, her chin on her hand and her
eyes lowered. Silence held save for the fountain plashing. Don Enrique
stood by the railing, and Jayme de Marchena felt his concern. But he
himself walked just then--Don Jayme or Juan Lepe--into long patience,
into greater steadfastness. Into the inner fields came translucence,
gold light; came and faded, but left strength.

Dona Beatrix raised her eyes and let them dwell upon me. “Spain breeds
bold knights,” she said, “but not so many after all who are bold within!
Not so many, I think, as are found in Italy or in France.” She paused a
moment, looking at the sky above the roofs, then came back to me. “It is
hopeless, and you must see it, to talk in those terms to the only powers
that can lead the Holy Office to forget that you live! It is hopeless
to talk to the Queen, telling her that. She would hold that she had
entertained heresy, and her imagination would not let her alone. I see
naught in this world for you to do but to go out of it into another!
There are other lands--”

A damsel hurried to her from the door. “There’s a stir below, Madam!
Something has brought the Queen home earlier than we thought--”

The Marchioness de Moya rose. Don Enrique kissed her hand, and Jayme de
Marchena kissed it and thanked her. “I would help if I could!” she said.
“But in Spain to-day it is deadly dangerous to talk or write as though
there were freedom!”

She passed from the gallery, Don Enrique and I following. We came upon
a landing with a great stair before us. Quick as had been her maidens,
they were not quick enough. Many folk were coming up the broad steps.
Dona Beatrix glanced, then opened a door giving into a great room,
apparently empty. She pointed to an opposite door. “The little stair!
Go that way!” Don Enrique nodded comprehension. We were in the room; the
door closed.

At first it seemed an empty great chamber. Then from behind a square of
stretched cloth came a man’s head, followed by the figure pertaining to
it. The full man was clad after a rich fancy and he held in his hand a
brush and looked at us at first dreamily and then with keenness.

He knew me, differently arrayed though I was, and looked from me to Don
Enrique. “Master Manuel Rodriguez,” said the latter, “I would stop for
good talk and to admire the Queen’s likeness, but duty calls me out of
palace! Adios!” He made toward the door across from that by which we had
entered. The painter spoke after us. “That door is bolted, Don Enrique,
on the other side. I do not know why! It is not usually so.”

Don Enrique, turning, hurried to the first door and very slightly opened
it. A humming entered the large, quiet room. He closed the door. “The
Queen is coming up the great stair. The Archbishop of Granada is with
her and a whole train beside!” He spoke to the painter. “I have no
audience, and for reasons would not choose this moment as one in which
to encounter the least disfavor! I will stay here before your picture
and admire until landing and stairways are bare.”

“If to be invisible is your desire,” answered Manuel Rodriguez, “you
have walked into trouble! The Queen is coming here.”

Don Enrique exclaimed. Juan Lepe turned eyes to the painter. The blue
eyes met mine--there rose the rushy pool, there dozed the broken boat.
Manuel Rodriguez spoke in his voice that was at once cool and fine and
dry and warm. “It is best to dare thoroughly! Perhaps I may help you--as
thus! Wishing to speak with Don Enrique of an altar painting for the
Church of Saint Dominic, I asked him here and he came. We talked, and
he will give the picture. Then, hearing the Queen’s approach, he would
instantly have been gone, but alack, the small door is barred!--As for
fisherman yonder, few look at squire when knight is in presence!”

No time to debate his offer, which indeed was both wise and kind!
Chamberlains flung open the door. In came the Queen, with her the
Princess Juana and several of her ladies. Beside her walked Fernando de
Talavera, Her Highness’s confessor, yesterday Bishop of Avila but now
Archbishop of Granada. Behind him moved two lesser ecclesiastics, and
with these Don Alonzo de Quintanella, Comptroller-General of Castile.
Others followed, nobles and cavaliers, two soberly clad men who looked
like secretaries, a Franciscan friar, three or four pages. The room was
large and had a table covered with a rich cloth, two great chairs and a
few lesser ones.

The painter and Don Enrique bent low to the Majesty of Castile. In the
background Juan Lepe made squire’s obeisance. I was bearded and my face
stained with a Moorish stain, and I was in shadow; it was idle to fear
recognition that might never come. The Queen seated herself, and her
daughter beside her, and with her good smile motioned the Archbishop to
a chair. The two ecclesiastics, both venerable men, were given seats.
The rest of the company stood. The Queen’s blue eyes rested on Don
Enrique. She spoke in a clear, mild voice, threaded with dignity. “Were
you summoned thither, Don Enrique de Cerda?”

He answered, “No, Highness! I came to the palace to seek Master Manuel
Rodriguez who is to paint for me an altarpiece for the Church of Saint
Dominic. You and the King, Madam, I thought were in Granada. Not finding
him in his own lodging, I made bold to come here. Then at once, before I
could hasten away, you returned!”

The true nature of this Queen was to think no evil. Her countenance
remained mild. He had done valiant service, and she was sisterly-minded
toward the greater part of the world. Now she said with serenity, “There
is no fault, Don Enrique. Stay with us now that you are here.”

Bowing deeply, he joined a brother-in-arms, Don Miguel de Silva. His
squire stood in the shadow behind him, but found a chance-left lane of
vision down which much might be seen.

The Queen composed herself, in her chair. “This is the position, Master
Manuel?” The fair man, so fine and quick that I loved to look at him,
bowed and stepped back to his canvas, where he took up his brush and
fell to work. The Queen and the Archbishop began to speak earnestly
together. Words and sentences floated to Juan Lepe standing by the
arras. The Queen made thoughtful pauses, looking before her with steady
blue eyes and a somewhat lifted face. I noted that when she did this
Manuel Rodriguez painted fast.

There fell a pause in their talk. Something differing from the subject
of discourse, whatever in its fullness that might be, seemed to come
into her mind. She sent her glance across the room.

“Don Enrique de Cerda--”

The tone summoned. When he was before her, “It was in my mind,” said the
Queen, “to send for you within a day or two. But now you are here, and
this moment while we await the King is as good as another. We have had
letters from the Bishop of Seville whom we reverence, and from Don Pedro
Enriquez to whom we owe much. They have to do with Jayme de Marchena who
has long been suspect by the Holy Office. He has fled Seville, gone none
know where! Don Pedro informs us, Don Enrique, that years ago this man
stood among your friends. He does not think it probable that this is yet
so--nor do I, Don Enrique, knowing that you must hold in abhorrence
the heretic!” She looked mildly upon him. “In youth we make chance
friendships thick as May, but manhood weeds the garden! And yet we think
it possible that this man may in his heart trade on old things and make
his way to you or send you appeal.” She paused, then said in a quiet
voice, “Should that happen, Don Enrique, on your allegiance, and as a
good Christian, you will do all that you can to put him in the hands of
the Holy Office.”

She waited with her blue eyes upon him. He said, and said quietly, “It
was long ago, Madam, when I was a young man and careless. I will do all
that lies in me to do. But Spain is wide and there are ships to Africa
and other shores.”

She said, “Yes, I do not see such an one daring to come to Santa Fe! But
they say that ten demons possess a heretic, and that he crosses streams
upon a hair or walks edges of high walls.”

With her ringed hand she made gesture of dismissal. He bowed low and
stepped back to his former place.

The sun flooded in at window. Manuel Rodriguez painted steadily. The
Queen sat still, with lifted face and eyes strained into distance. She
sighed and came back from wastes where she would be Christian, oh, where
she would be Christian! and began with a tender, maternal look to talk
with her daughter.



CHAPTER VI

THE door giving upon the great corridor opened. One said, “The King,
Madam!” King Ferdinand entered quietly, in the sober fashion of a
sober and able man. He was cool and balanced, true always to his own
conception of his own dues. The Queen rose and stepped to meet him. They
spoke, standing together, after which he handed her to her chair and
took beside her the other great chair which the pages had swiftly
placed. After greeting his daughter and the Archbishop he looked across
to the painter. “Master Manuel Rodriguez, good day!”

There fell a moment of sun-drenched quiet in which they all sat for
their picture. Then said the King, “Madam, we are together, and here are
those who have been our chief advisers in this affair of discoveries.
Master Christopherus is below. We noted him in the court. Let us have
him here and see this too-long-dragging matter finished! Once for all
abate his demands, or once for all let him go!”

They sent a page. Again there was sunny silence, then in at the door
came the tall, muscular, gray-eyed, silver-haired man whom I had met the
day King Boabdil surrendered Granada.

He made reverence to the Queen and the King and to the Archbishop. It
was the Queen who spoke to him and that gently.

“Master Christopherus, we have had a thousand businesses, and so our
matter here has waited and waited. Today comes unaware this quiet hour
and we will give it to you. Here with us are the Archbishop and others
who have been our counsellors, and here is Don Alonzo de Quintantella
who hath always stood your friend. In all the hurly-burly we yet took
time, two days ago, to sit in council and come to conclusion. And now we
give you our determination. In all reason it should give you joy!” She
smiled upon him. “How many years since first you laid your plan before
us?”

He answered her in a deep voice, thrilling and crowded with feeling.
“Seven years, Madam your Highness! Like an infant laid at your feet. And
winter has blown upon it, and sunshine carrying hope has walked around
it, and then again the cold wind rises--”

The King spoke. “Master Christopherus, in war much else has to cease! In
much we have had to find patience, and you have to find it.”

“My lord King, yes!” replied the tall man. “It is eighteen years since
in Lisbon, looking upon the sea one day, I said to myself, ‘Is there a
question that is not to be answered? This ocean is to be crossed. Then
why do not I cross it? There is Cipango, Cathay and India! Gold and
spices are there, and here lie ships, and between, when all is said, is
only sea! God made the sea to be sailed! Yonder they worship idols, here
we worship Christ. There are idols, here is Christ. Once a Christopherus
carried Christ across water!’ Eighteen years ago. I said, ‘I can do it!’
I say it to-day, my lord and my lady. I can do it!”

Of the seated great ones only the Queen’s spirit appeared to answer his.
He seemed to enchant her, to take her with him. But the King’s cool face
regarded him with something like dislike. He spoke in an edged voice.
“Saint Christopher asked no great wage. That is the point, Master
Christopherus, so let us to it! At last the Queen and I say ‘We agree’
to this enterprise, which may bring forth fruit or may not, or may mean
mere empty loss of ships and men and of our monies! Yet we say ‘yea.’
But we do not say ‘yea ‘, Master Christopherus, to the too great ferry
fee which you ask! I say ‘ask’, but verily the tone is of command!”

The man whom they called Master Christopherus made a slow, wide gesture
of deprecation. The Archbishop took the word. “Too much! You ask a
hundred times too much! I must say to you that it is unchristianly
arrogance. You talk like a soldan!” An assenting murmur came from the
other ecclesiastics.

The Queen spoke. “Master Christopherus, if it be a great thing to do, is
not the doing it and thereby blessing yourself no less than others--is
not that reward? Not that Castile shall deny you reward, no! Trust me
that if you bring us the key of India you shall not find us niggardly!
But we and they who advise us stumble at your prescribing wealth, honors
and gifts that they say truly are better fitting a great prince! Trust
us for enrichment and for honor do you come back with the great thing
done! Leave it all now to Time that brings to pass. So you will be
clearer to go forth to the blessed carrying of Christ!”

She spoke earnestly, a Queen, but with much about her of womanly,
motherly sweetness. I saw that she greatly liked the man and somewhere
met his spirit. But the King was gathering hardness. He spoke to a
secretary standing behind him. “Have you it there written down, the
Italian’s demand?”

The man produced a paper. “Read!” But before it could be unfolded,
Master Christopherus spoke.

“‘Italian!’ Seven years in Spain and ten in Portugal, and a good while
in Porto Santo that belongs to Portugal, a little in England and in
Ultima Thule or Iceland, and long, long years upon ships decked and
undecked in all the seas that are known--fourteen years, childhood and
boyhood, in Genoa and at Pavia where I went to school, and all my years
of hope in Christ’s Kingdom, and in the uplands of great doers-and
your Highness says to me for a slighting word, ‘Italian!’ I was born
in Italy, but to-day, for this turn, King Ferdinand, you should call me
‘Spaniard’! As, if King John sends me forth be will call me Portuguese!
Or King Henry will say, ‘Christopher the Englishman’ or King Charles, to
whom verily I see that I may go, shall say, ‘Frenchman, to whom all owe
the marriage of East and West, but France owes Empire!”’

The King said, “It may be so, or it may not be so, Master
Christopherus.--Read!”

The secretary read: The Genoese, Cristoforo Colombo, called in Spain
Cristobal Colon, and in the Latin Christopherus Columbus, states and
demands in substance as follows: Sailing westward he will discover for
the King and Queen of the Spains the Indies and Cathay and Cipango,
to the great glory and enrichment of these Sovereigns and the passing
thereby of Spain ahead of Portugal, and likewise and above all to the
great glory of Christ and of Holy Church. He will do this, having seen
it clear for many years that it is to be done, and he the instrument.
And for the finding by going westward of the said India and all the gain
of the world and the Kingdom of God and of our Sovereigns the King Don
Ferdinand and the Queen Dona Isabella, he bargaineth thus:

“He shall be named Admiral of the Ocean-Sea, whereby he means the
whole water west of the line drawn by the Holy Father for the King of
Portugal. He shall be made Viceroy and Governor of all continents and
islands that he may discover, claim and occupy for the Sovereigns. And
the said Christopherus Columbus’s eldest son shall hold these offices
after him, and the heir of his son, and his heir, down time. He shall be
granted one tenth of all gold, pearls, precious stones, spices, or
other merchandise found or bought or exchanged within his admiralty and
viceroyship, and this tithe is likewise to be taken by his heirs from
generation to generation. He or one that he shall name shall be judge in
all disputes that arise in these continents and islands, so be it that
the honor of the Sovereigns of Spain is not touched. He shall have the
salary that hath the High Admiral of Castile. He and his family shall
be ennobled and henceforth be called Don and Dona. And for the immediate
sailing of ships he may, if he so desire, be at an eighth of the expense
of outfitting, for which he shall be returned an eighth of all the
profit of this the first voyage.”

The secretary did not make the terms less sounding by his reading.
Wind in leaves, went a stir through the room. I heard a page near me
whispering, “O Sancta Maria! The hanger-on, the needy one! Since the
beginning of time I’ve seen him at doors, sunny and cloudy days, the
big, droning bee!” Manuel Rodriguez painted on. I felt his thought. “I
should like to paint _you_, Admiral of the Ocean-Sea!”

The room recomposed itself. Out of silence came the King’s voice, chill
and dry. “We abate so vast a claim for so vast reward! But we would be
naught else but just, and in our ability lavish. Read now what we will
do!”

The secretary read. It had a certain largeness and goodliness, as go
rewards for adventure, even for great adventure, what the sovereigns
would do. The room thought it should answer. The King spoke, “We
can promise no more nor other than this. It contents you, Master
Christopherus?”

The long-faced, high-nosed, gray-eyed man answered, “No, my lord King.”

“Your own terms or none?”

“Mine or none, your Highness.”

The King’s voice grew a cutting wind. “To that the Queen and I answer,
‘Ours or none!’” Pushing back his chair, he glanced at sun out of
window. “It is over. I incline to think that it was at best but an empty
vision. You are dismissed, Master Christopherus!”

The Genoese, bowing, stepped backward from the table. In his face and
carriage was nothing broken. He kept color. The Queen’s glance went
after him, “What will you do now, Master Christopherus?”

He answered, “My lady, your Highness, I shall take horse to-morrow for
France.”

The King said, “France?--King Charles buys ever low, not high!”

The Sovereigns and the great churchmen and the less great went away
together. After them flowed the high attendance. All went, Don Enrique
among the last. Following him, I turned head, for I wished to observe
again two persons, the painter Manuel Rodriguez and the Admiral of the
Ocean-Sea. The former painted on. The latter walked forth quite alone,
coming behind the grinning pages.

In the court below I saw him again. The archway to street sent toward us
a deep wedge of shadow. He had a cloak which he wrapped around him and
a large round hat which he drew low over his gray-blue eyes. With a firm
step he crossed to the archway where the purple shadow took him.

Juan Lepe must turn to his own part which now must be decided. I walked
behind Don Enrique de Cerda through Santa Fe. With him kept Don Miguel
de Silva, who loved Don Enrique’s sister and would still talk of
_devoir_ and of plans, now that the war was ended. When the house was
reached he would enter with us and still adhere to Don Enrique. But at
the stair foot the latter spoke to the squire. “Find me in an hour, Juan
Lepe. I have something to say to thee!” His tone carried, “Do you think
the place there makes any difference? No, by the god of friends!”

I let him go thinking that I would come to him presently. But I, too,
had to act under the god of friends. In Diego Lopez’s room I found
quill and ink and paper, and there I wrote a letter to Don Enrique, and
finding Diego gave it to him to be given in two hours into Don Enrique’s
hand. Then Juan Lepe the squire changed in his own room, narrow and bare
as a cell, to the clothing of Juan Lepe the sailor.



CHAPTER VII

DUSK was drawing down as I stole with little trouble out of the house
into the street and thence into the maze of Santa Fe. That night I slept
with minstrels and jugglers, and at sunrise slipped out of Cordova gate
with muleteers. They were for Cordova and I meant to go to Malaga. I
meant to find there a ship, maybe for Africa, maybe for Italy, though in
Italy, too, sits the Inquisition. But who knows what it is that turns
a man, unless we call it his Genius, unless we call it God? I let
the muleteers pass me on the road to Cordova, let them dwindle in the
distance. And still I walked and did not turn back and find the Malaga
road. It was as though I were on the sea, and my bark was hanging in a
calm, waiting for a wind to blow. A man mounted on a horse was coming
toward me from Santa Fe. Watching the small figure grow larger, I said,
“When he is even with me and has passed and is a little figure again in
the distance, I will turn south.”

He came nearer. Suddenly I knew him to be that Master Christopherus who
had entered the wedge of shadow yesterday in the palace court. He was
out of it now, in the broad light, on the white road--on the way to
France. He approached. The ocean before Palos came and stood again
before me, salt and powerful. The keen, far, sky line of it awoke and
drew!

Christopherus Columbus came up with me. I said, “A Palos sailor gives
you good morning!”

Checking the horse, he sat looking at me out of blue-gray eyes. I saw
him recollecting. “Dress is different and poorer, but you are the squire
in the crowd! ‘Sailor Palos sailor’--There’s some meaning there too!”

He seemed to ponder it, then asked if I was for Cordova.

“No. I am going to Malaga where I take ship.”

“This is not the Malaga road.”

“No. But I am in no hurry! I should like to walk a mile with you.”

“Then do it,” he answered. “Something tells me that we shall not be ill
travelers together.”

I felt that also and no more than he could explain it. But the reason, I
know, stands in the forest behind the seedling.

He walked his horse, and I strode beside. He asked my name and I gave
it. Juan Lepe. We traveled Cordova road together. Presently he said, “I
leave Spain for France, and do you know why?”

Said Juan Lepe, “I have been told something, and I have gathered
something with my own eyes and ears. You would reach Asia by going
west.”

He spoke in the measured tone of a recital often made alike to himself
and to others. “I hold that the voyage from Palos, say, first south
to the Canaries and then due west would not exceed three months. Yet
I began to go west to India full eighteen years ago! I have voyaged
eighteen years, with dead calms and head winds, with storms and
back-puttings, with pirates and mutinies, with food and water lacking,
with only God and my purpose for friend! I have touched at the court of
Portugal and at the court of Spain, and, roundabout way, at the court of
England, and at the houses of the Doges of Venice and of Genoa. They
all kept me swinging long at anchor, but they have never given me
a furthering wind. Eighteen years going to India! But why do I say
eighteen? The Lord put me forth from landside the day I was born. Before
I was fourteen, at the school in Pavia, He said, ‘Go to sea. Sail under
thy cousin Colombo and learn through long years all the inches of salt
water.’ Later He said, one day when we were swinging off Alexandria,
‘Study! Teach thyself! Buy books, not wine nor fine clothes nor favor
of women. Study on land and study at sea. Look at every map that comes
before you. Learn to make maps. When a world map comes before you, look
at the western side of it and think how to fill it out knowingly. Listen
to seamen’s tales. Learn to view the invisible and to feel under foot
the roundness of my earth!’

“And He said that same year off Aleppo, ‘Learn to command ships. Learn
in King Reinier’s war and in what other war Genoa makes. Learn to direct
men and patiently to hear them, winding in and out of their counsels,
keeping thyself always wiser than they.’ Well, I studied, and learned,
and can command a ship or ships, and know navigation, and can make maps
and charts with the best, and can rule seamen, loving them the while.
Long ago, I went to that school which He set, and came forth _magister!_
Long after His first speaking, I was at Porto Santo, well named, and
there He said, ‘Seek India, going westward.’” He turned his face to the
sun. “I have been going to India fifty-six years.”

Juan Lepe asked, “Why, on yesterday, were you not content with the King
and Queen’s terms? They granted honor and competence. It was the estate
of a prince that you asked.”

Some moments passed before he answered. The sun was shining, the road
white and dusty, the mountains of Elvira purple to the tops and there
splashed with silver. When he spoke, his voice was changed. Neither now
nor hereafter did he discourse of money-gold and nobility flowing from
earthly kings with that impersonal exaltation with which he talked of
his errand from God to link together east and west. But he drew them
somehow in train from the last, hiding here I thought, an earthly
weakness from himself, and the weakness so intertwined with strength
that it was hard to divide parasite from oak.

“Did you see,” he asked, “a boy with me? That was my son Diego whom I
have left with a friend in Santa Fe. Fernando, his half-brother, is but
a child. I shall see him in Cordova. I have two brothers, dear to me
both of them, Diego and Bartholomew. My old father, Dominico Colombo,
still lives in Genoa. He lives in poverty, as I have lived in poverty
these many years. And there is Pedro Correo, to whom I owe much, husband
of my wife’s sister. My wife is dead. The mother of Fernando is not my
wife, but I love her, and she is poor though beautiful and good. I would
have her less poor; I would give her beautiful things. I have love for
my kindred,--love and yearning and care and desire to do them good,
alike those who trust me and those who think that I had failed them. I
do not fail them!”

We padded on upon the dusty road. I felt his inner warmth, divined his
life. But at last I said, “What the Queen and King promise would give
rich care--”

“I have friends too, for all that I ride out of Spain and seem so poor
and desolate! I would repay--ay, ten times over--their faith and their
help.”

“Still--”

“There are moreover the poor, and those who study and need books
and maps that they cannot purchase. There are convents--one convent
especially--that befriended me when I was alone and nigh hopeless and
furthered my cause. I would give that convent great gifts.” Turning in
the saddle he looked southwest. “Fray Juan Perez--”

Palos shore spread about me, and rose La Rabida, white among vineyards
and pines. Doves flew over cloister. But I did not say all I knew.

“There are other things that I would do. I do not speak of them to many!
They would say that I was mad. But great things that in this age none
else seems inclined to do!”

“As what?” I asked. “I have been called mad myself. I am not apt to
think you so.”

He began to speak of a mighty crusade to recover the Holy Sepulchre.

The road to Cordova stretched sunny and dusty. Above the mountains of
Elvira the sky stood keen blue. Juan Lepe said slowly, “Admiral of
the Ocean-Sea and Viceroy and Governor of continents and islands in
perpetuity, sons and sons’ sons after you, and gilded deep with a tenth
of all the wealth that flows forever from Asia over Ocean-Sea to
Spain, and you and all after you made nobles, grandees and wealthy from
generation to generation! Kings almost of the west, and donors to the
east, arousers of crusades and freers of the Sepulchre! You build a high
tower!”

Carters and carts going by pushed us to the edge of road and covered
all with dust. He waited until the cloud sank, then he said, “Do you
know--but you cannot know what it is to be sent from pillar to post and
wait in antechambers where the air stifles, and doff cap--who have
been captain of ships!--to chamberlain, page and lackey? To be called
dreamer, adventurer, dicer! To hear the laugh and catch the sneer! To be
the persuader, the beggar of good and bad, high and low--to beg year
in and year out, cold and warmth, summer and winter, sunrise, noon and
sunset, calm and storm, beg of galleon and beg of carrack, yea, beg of
cockboat! To see your family go needy, to be doubted by wife and child
and brethren and friends and acquaintance! To have them say, ‘While you
dream we go hungry!’ and ‘What good will it do us if there is India,
while we famish in Spain?’ and ‘You love us not, or you would become a
prosperous sea captain!’--Not one year but eighteen, eighteen, since I
saw in vision the sun set not behind water but behind vale and hill and
mountain and cities rich beyond counting, and smelled the spice draught
from the land!”

I saw that he must count upon huge indemnity. We all dream indemnity.
But still I thought and think that there was here a weakness in him. Far
inward he may have known it himself, the outer self was so busy finding
grounds! After a moment he spoke again, “Little things bring little
reward. But to keep proportion and harmony, great thing must bring great
things! You do not know what it is to cross where no man hath crossed
and to find what no man hath found!”

“Yes, it is a great thing!”

“Then,” said he, “what is it, that which I ask, to the grandeur of
time!”

He spoke with a lifted face, eyes upon the mountain crests and the blue
they touched. They were nearer us than they had been; the Pass of Elvira
was at hand. Yet on I walked, and before me still hung the far ocean
west of Palos. I said, “I know something of the guesses, the chances and
the dangers, but I have not spent there years of study--”

He kindled, having an auditor whom he chose to think intelligent. He
checked his horse, that fell to grazing the bit of green by the way. “As
though,” he said, “I stood in Cipango beneath a golden roof, I know that
it can be done! Twelve hundred leagues at the most. Look!” he said. “You
are not an ignoramus like some I have met; nor if I read you right are
you like others who not knowing that True Religion is True Wonder up
with hands and cry, ‘Blasphemy, Sacrilege and Contradiction!’ Earth
and water make an orb. Place ant on apple and see that orbs may be
gone around! Travel far enough and east and west change names! Straight
through, beneath us, are other men.”

“Feet against feet. Antipodes,” I said. “All the life of man is taking
Wonder in and making Her at home!”

“So!” he answered. “Now look! The largeness of our globe is at the
equator. The great Ptolemy worked out our reckoning. Twenty-four hours,
fifteen degrees to each, in all three hundred and sixty degrees. It is
held that the Greeks and the Romans knew fifteen of these hours. They
stretched their hand from Gibraltar and Tangier, calling them Pillars
of Hercules, to mid-India. Now in our time we have the Canaries and the
King of Portugal’s new islands--another hour, mark you! Sixteen from
twenty-four leaves eight hours empty. How much of that is water and how
much is earth? Where ends Ocean-Sea and where begins India and Cathay,
of which the ancients knew only a part? The Arabian Alfraganus thinks
that Ptolemy’s degrees should be less in size. If that be right, then
the earth is smaller than is thought, and India nearer! I myself incline
to hold with Alfraganus. It may be that less than two months’ sailing,
calm and wind, would bring us to Cipango. Give me the ships and I will
do it!”

“You might have had them yesterday.”

To a marked extent he could bring out and make visible his inner
exaltation. Now, tall, strong, white-haired, he looked a figure of an
older world. “The spheres and all are set to harmony!” he said. “I would
have fitness. Great things throughout! Diamonds and rubies without flaw
in the crown.--We will talk no more about abating just demand!”

I agreed with a nod, and indeed there was never any shaking him here.
Beneath his wide and lofty vision of a world filled out to the eternal
benefit of all rested always this picture which I knew he savored like
wine and warmth. His family, his sons, his brothers and kindred, the
aged father in Genoa, all friends and backers--and he a warm sun in the
midst of them, all their doubts of him dispelled, shining out upon them,
making every field rich, repaying a thousand, thousandfold every trust
shown him.

The day sang cool and high and bright, the mountains of Elvira had light
snow atop. Master Christopherus began again to speak.

“There came ashore at Porto Santo some years ago a piece of wood long as
a spar but thicker. Pedro Correo, who is my brother-in-law, saw it. It
was graved all over, cut by something duller than our knives with beasts
and leaves and a figure that Pedro thought was meant for an idol. He and
another saw it and agree in their description. They left it on the beach
at twilight, well out of water reach. But in the night came up a great
storm that swept it away. It came from the west, the wind having blown
for days from that quarter. I ask you will empty billows fell a tree and
trim it and carve it? It is said that a Portuguese pilot picked up one
like it off Cape Bojador when the wind was southwest. I have heard a
man of the Azores tell of giant reeds pitched upon his shore _from the
west_. There is a story of the finding on the beach of Flores the bodies
of two men not like any that we know either in color or in feature. For
days a west wind had driven in the seas. And I know of other findings.
Whence do these things come?

“May there not be unknown islands west of Azores? They might come from
there, and still to the west of them stream all Ocean-Sea, violent and
unknown! The learned think the earth of such a size. Your Arabian holds
it smaller. What if it is larger than the largest calculation?”

He said with disdain, “All the wise men at Salamanca before whom the
King set me six years ago thought it had no end! Large or small, they
called it blasphemy for me, a poor, plain seaman, son of a wool-comber
and not even a Spanish wool-comber, to try to stretch mind over it!
Ocean-Sea had never been overpassed, and by that token could not be
overpassed! None had met its dangers, so dangers there must be of a most
strange and fearful nature! But if you were put to sea at fourteen and
have lived there long, water becomes water! A speck on the horizon will
turn out ship or land. Wave carries you on to wave, day to night and
night to day. At last there is port!”

All this time his horse had been cropping the scanty herbage. Now he
raised his head. In a moment we too heard the horsemen and looking back
toward Santa Fe saw four approaching. As they came nearer we made out
two cavaliers talking together, followed by serving men. When they were
almost at hand one of the leaders said something, whereat his fellow
laughed. It floated up Cordova road, a wide, deep, rich laugh. Master
Christopherus started. “That is the laugh of Don Luis de St. Angel!”

Don Luis de St. Angel was, I knew, Receiver of the Ecclesiastical
Revenues for Aragon, a man who stood well with the King. The horsemen
were close upon us. Suddenly the laugher cried, “Saint Jago! Here he
is!”

We were now five mounted men and a trudger afoot. The cavalier who had
laughed, a portly, genial person with a bold and merry eye, laughed
again. “Well met, Don Cristoval. Well met, Admiral! I looked to find you
presently! You sailed out of port at sunrise and I two hours later with
a swifter ship and more canvas--”

“‘Don’ and ‘Admiral’!” answered Master Christopherus, and he spoke with
anger. “You jest in Spain! But in France it shall be said soberly--”

“No, no! Don and Admiral here! Viceroy and Governor here--as soon as you
find the lands! Wealthy here--as soon as you put hand on the gold!” Don
Luis de St. Angel’s laughter ceased. He became with portentous swiftness
a downright, plain man of business. He talked, all of us clustered
together on the Cordova road.

“The Archbishop kept me from that audience yesterday, leaving Don Alonso
de Quintanella your only friend there! The Queen was tired, the King
fretted. They thought they had come a long way, and there you stood,
Master Christopherus, shaking your head! Don Alonso told me about it,
and how hopeless it seemed! But I said, ‘If you conquer a land don’t you
put in a viceroy? I don’t see that Don Cristoval isn’t as good as
Don This One, or Don That One! I’ve a notion that the first might not
oppress and flay the new subjects as might the last two! That is a point
to be made to the Queen! As for perpetuity of office and privileges down
the ages, most things get to be hereditary. If it grows to be a swollen
serpent something in the future will fall across and cut it in two. Let
time take care of it! As for wealth, in any land a man who will bear an
eighth of the cost may fairly expect an eighth of the gain. This setting
out is to cost little, after all. He says he can do it with three small
ships and less than a hundred and fifty men. If the ships bring back no
treasure, he will not be wealthy. If there is a little gain, the Spains
need not grudge him his handful of doubloons. If there is huge gain, the
King and Queen but for him would not have their seven eighths. The same
reasoning applies to his tenth of all future gain from continents and
islands. You will say that some one else will arise to do it for us on
easier terms. Perhaps--and perhaps not for a century, and another Crown
may thrust in to-morrow! France, probably. It is not impossible
that England might do it. As for what is named overweening pride and
presumption, at least it shows at once and for altogether. We are not
left painfully to find it out. It goes with his character. Take it or
leave it together with his patience, courage and long head. Leave it,
and presently we may see France or England swallow him whole. He
will find India and Cathay and Cipango, and France or England will be
building ships, ships, ships! Blessed Virgin above us!’ said I, ‘If I
could talk alone to the Sovereigns, I think I could clench it!’”

“‘Then let us go now to the palace,’ says Don Alonso, ‘and beg
audience!’

“That did we, Don Cristoval, and so I hail you ‘Don’ and ‘Admiral’, and
beg you to turn that mule and reenter Santa Fe! In a few days you and
the King and Queen may sign capitulations.”

“Was it the Queen?”

“Just. The King said the treasury was drained. She answered, ‘I will
pawn my jewels but he shall sail!’ Luis de St. Angel says, ‘It does not
need. There is some gold left in the coffers of Aragon. After all,
the man asks but three little ships and a few score seamen and offers
himself to furnish one of the ships.’”

“With Martin Alonso Pinzon’s help, I will!”

“‘Never,’ said I to their majesties, ‘was so huge a possible gain
matched against so small a sending forth! And as for this Genoese who
truly hath given and gives and will give his life for his vision, saith
not Scripture that a laborer is worthy of his hire?’ At which the Queen
said with decision, ‘We will do it, Don Luis! And now go and find Master
Christopherus and comfort him, whose heart must be heavy, and indeed
mine,’ she saith, ‘was heavy when he went forth to-day, and a voice
seemed to say within me, “What have you done, Isabella? How may you have
hindered!”’”

The Gatherer of Ecclesiastical Revenues laughed again with that
compelling laughter. “So forth we go, and Don Alonso sends for you to
his house. But you could not be found. Early this morning came one and
informed us that the ship had put out of harbor, whereupon my nephew and
I set sail after!”

The Admiral of the Ocean-Sea turned his face to the west. Not knowing,
I think, what he did, he raised his arm, outstretched it, and the hand
seemed to close in greeting. His face was the face of a man who sees the
Beloved after long and sorrowful absence. So did thought and passion
and vision charge his frame and his countenance, that for a moment truly
there was effulgence. It startled. Don Luis held his speech suspended,
in his eyes wonder. Master Christopherus let fall his arm. He sighed.
The out-pushing light faltered, vanished. One might say, if one chose,
“A Genoese sea captain, willing to do an adventurous thing and make a
purse thereby!”



CHAPTER VIII

JUAN LEPE, quitting the Vega of Granada, recrossed the mountains. I was
at wander. I did not go to Malaga. I did not then go to Palos. I went to
San Lucar. I had adventures, but I will not draw them here. The ocean by
Palos continued with me in sight and sound and movement. But I did not
go to Palos. I went to the strand of San Lucar, and there I found a
small bark trading not to Genoa but to Marseilles. Seamen lacked, and
the master took me gladly. I freshened knowledge upon this voyage.

The master was a dour, quiet Catalan; his three sons favored him and
their six sailors more or less took the note. The sea ran quiet and blue
under a quiet blue heaven. At night all the stars shone, or only light
clouds went overhead. It was a restful boat and Jayme de Marchena
rested. Even while his body labored he rested. The sense of Danger in
every room, walking on every road, took leave. Yet was there throughout
that insistent sight of Palos beach and the gray and wild Atlantic. All
the birds cried from the west; the salt, stinging wind flung itself upon
me from the west. Once a voice, faint and silvery, made itself heard.
“Were it not well to know those other, those mightier waters, and find
the strange lands, the new lands?” I answered myself, “They are the old
lands taken a new way.” But still the voice said, “The new lands!”

We made Marseilles and unladed, and were held there a fortnight. I might
have left the bark and found work and maybe safety in France, or I might
have taken another ship for Italy. I did neither. I clung to this bark
and my Cata-lans. We took our lading and quitted Marseilles, and came
after a tranquil voyage to San Lucar. Again we unladed and laded, and
again voyaged to Marseilles. Spring became summer; young summer, summer
in prime. We left Marseilles and voyaged once more San Lucar-ward.
There rushed up a fearful storm and we were wrecked off Almeria. One lad
drowned. The rest of us somehow made shore. A boat took us to Algeciras,
and thence we trudged it to San Lucar.

My Catalans were not wholly depressed. Behind their wrecked ship stood
merchants who would furnish another bark. The master would have had me
wait at San Lucar until he went forth again. But I was bound for the
strand by Palos and the gray, piling Atlantic.

August was the month and the day warm. The first of August in the year
1492. Two leagues east of Palos I overtook three men trudging that
way, and talking now loudly and angrily and now in a sullen, dragging
fashion. I had seen between this road and ocean a fishing hamlet and I
made out that they were from this place. They were men of small
boats, men who fished, but who now and again were gathered in by some
shipmaster, when they became sailors.

In me they saw only a poorly clad, sea-going person. When I gave
greeting they greeted me in return. “For Palos?” I asked, and the one
who talked the most and the loudest gave groaning assent. “Aye, for
Palos. You too, brother, are flopping in the net?”

I did not understand and said as much. He gave an angry laugh and
explained his figure. “Why, the Queen and the King and the law and
Martin Pinzon, to whom we, are bound for a year, are pressing us! Which
is to say they’ve cast a net and here we are, good fish, beating against
the meshes and finding none big enough to slip through! Haven’t you been
pressed too, scooped in without a ‘By your leave, Palos fish!’ A hundred
fish and more in this net and one by one the giant will take us out and
broil us!”

The second man spoke with a whine. “I had rather a Barbary pirate were
coming aboard! I had rather be took slave and row a galley!”

The third, a young man, had a whimsical, dark, fearless face. “But we be
going to see strange things and serve the Queen! That’s something!”

“The Queen is just a lady. She don’t know anything about deep and
fearful seas!”

“Where are you going,” I asked, “and with whom?”

The angry man answered, “The last of that is the easiest, mate! With an
Italian sorcerer who has bewitched the great! He ought to be burned, say
I, with the Jews and heretics! We are going with him, and we are going
with Captain Martin Pinzon, whom he hath bewitched with the rest! And we
are going with three ships, the _Santa Maria_, the Pinta and the Nina.”

The third said, “The Santa Maria’s a good boat.”

“There isn’t any boat, good or bad,” the first answered him, “that can
hold together when you come to heat that’ll melt pitch and set wood
afire! There isn’t any boat, good or bad, that can stand it when a
lodestone as big as Gibraltar begins to draw iron!”

The second, whose element was melancholy, sighed, “I’ve been north of
Ireland, Pedro, and that was bad enough! The lookout saw a siren and the
_Infanta Isabella_ was dashed on the rocks and something laughed at us
all night!”

“Ireland’s nothing at all to it!” answered the angry man, whose name was
Pedro. “I’ve heard men that know talk! The Portuguese going down Africa
coast got to Cape Bojador, but they’ve never truly gotten any further,
though I hear them say they have! They sent a little carrack further
down, and it had to come back because the water fell to boiling! There
wasn’t any land and there wasn’t any true sea, but it was all melted up
together in fervent heat! Like hot mud, so to speak. It’s hell, that’s
what I say; it’s hell down there! Moreover, there ain’t any heaven
stretched over it.”

“What does it mean by that?” asked the second.

“It means, Fernando, that there wouldn’t be any sky, blue nor gray nor
black, nor clouds, nor air to breathe! There wouldn’t be any thunder and
lightning nor rain nor wind, and at night there wouldn’t be stars, no
north star, nor any! It would just be--I don’t know what! Fray Ignatio
told me, and he said the name was ‘chaos’.”

“That was south. That wasn’t west.”

“West is just as bad!”

Fernando also addressed the young man, the third, calling him Sancho.
“If there were anything west for Christian men, wouldn’t the Holy Father
at Rome have sent long ago? We are all going to die!”

“But they didn’t know it was round,” said Sancho. “Now we do, and that’s
the difference! If you started a little manikin just here on an orange
and told him to go straight ahead, he’d come around home, wouldn’t he?”

“You weary me, Sancho!” cried the first. “And what if you did that
and it took so long that you come back to Fishertown old and bald and
driveling, and your wife is dead and all the neighbors! Much good you’d
have from knowing it was round!”

“When you got right underfoot wouldn’t you fall; that’s what I want to
know?”

“Fall! Fall where?”

“Into the sky! My God, it’s deep! And there wouldn’t be any boat to pick
you up nor any floating oar to catch by--”

The vision seemed to appall them. Fernando drew back of hand across
eyes.

I came in. “You wouldn’t do that any more than the ant falls off the
orange! Men have come back who have been almost underfoot, so far to the
east had they traveled. They found there men and kingdoms and ways not
so mightily unlike ours.”

“They went that way,” answered Pedro, jerking his hand eastward, “over
good land! And maybe, whatever they said, they were lying to us! I’m
thinking most of the learned do that all the time!”

“Well,” said Sancho, “if we do come back, we’ll have some rare good
tales to tell!”

There fell a pause at that, a pause of dissent and exasperation, but
also one of caught fancy. It would undoubtedly be a glory to tell those
tales to a listening, fascinated Fishertown!

Juan Lepe said, “For months I’ve been with a trader running from San
Lucar to Marseilles. I’ve had no news this long while! What’s doing at
Palos?”

They were ready for an audience, any audience, and forthwith I had the
story of the Admiral fairly straight--or I could make it straight--from
that day when we parted on the Cordova road. These men did not know what
had happened in March or in April, but they knew something of May. In
May he came to Palos and settled down with Fray Juan Perez in La Rabida,
and to see him went Captain Martin Pinzon who knew him already, and the
physician Garcia Fernandez and others, and they all talked together
for a day and a night. After that the alcalde of Palos and others in
authority had letters and warrants from the Queen and the King, and they
overbore everything, calling him Don and _El Almirante_ and saying that
he must be furnished forth. Then came a day when everybody was gathered
in the square before the church of Saint George, and the alcalde that
had a great voice read the letters.

“I was there!” said Fernando. “I brought in fish that morning.”

“I, too!” quoth Sancho. “I had to buy sailcloth.”

It was Pedro chiefly who talked. “They were from the King and Queen, and
the moral was that Palos must furnish Don Cristoval Colon, Admiral of
the Ocean-Sea--and we thought that was a curious thing to be admiral
of!--two ships and all seamen needed and all supplies. A third ship
could be enterprised, and any in and around Palos was to be encouraged
to put in fortune and help. Ships and those who went in them were to
obey the said Don Cristoval Colon or Columbus as though he were the
Queen and the King, the Bishop of Seville and the Marquis of Cadiz!
It didn’t say it just that way but that was what it meant. We were to
follow him and do as he told us, or it would be much the worse for us!
We weren’t to put in at St. George la Mina on the coast of Africa, nor
touch at the King of Portugal’s islands, and that was the whole of it!”

“All seamen were to be given good pay,” said Sancho. “And if anybody
going was in debt, or even if he had done a crime--so that it wasn’t
treason or anything the Holy Office handles--he couldn’t be troubled
or held back, seeing it was royal errand. That is very convenient for
some.”

Pedro lost patience. “You’d make the best of Hell itself!”

“He’d deny,” put in Fernando, “Holy Writ that says there shall be
sorrows!”

They embarked upon loud blame of Sancho, instance after instance. At
last I cut them across. “What further happened at Palos?”

They put back to that port. “Oh, it didn’t seem so bad that day! One and
another thought, ‘Perhaps I’ll go!’ Him they call The Admiral is a big
figure of a man, and of course we that use the sea get to know how a
good captain looks. We knew that he had sailed and sailed, and had had
his own ship, maybe two or three of them! Then too the Pinzons and the
Prior of La Rabida answered for him. A lot of us almost belong to the
Pinzons, having signed to fish and voyage for them, and the Prior is
a well-liked man. The alcalde folds up the letter as though he were in
church, and they all come down the steps and go away to the alcalde’s
house which is around the corner. It wasn’t until they were gone that
Palos began to ask, ‘Where were three ships and maybe a hundred and
fifty men _going_?’”

“We found out next day,” said Fernando. “The tide went out, but it came
back bearing the sound of where we were going!”

“Then what happened in Palos?”

“What happened was that they couldn’t get the ships and they couldn’t
get the men! Palos wouldn’t listen. It was too wild, what they wanted
to do! It wouldn’t listen to the Prior and it wouldn’t listen to Doctor
Garcia Fernandez, and it wouldn’t even listen to Captain Martin Alonso
Pinzon. And when that happens--! So for a long time there was a kind
of angry calm. And then, lo you! we find that they have written to the
Queen and the King. There come letters to Palos, and they are harsh
ones!”

“I never heard harsher from any King and Queen!” said Fernando.

“There weren’t only the letters, but they’d sent also a great man, Senor
Juan de Penelosa, to see that they got obedience. Upshot is we’ve got to
go, ships and men, or else be laid by the heels! As for Palos, her old
sea privileges would be taken from her, and she couldn’t face that. Get
those ships ready and stock them and pipe sailors aboard, or there’d be
our kind Queen and King to deal with!”

“Wherever it is, we’re going. Great folk are too tall and broad for us!”

“So there comes another crowd in the square, before the church. Out
steps Captain Martin Pinzon, and he cries, ‘Men of Palos, for all you
doubt it, ‘tis a glorious thing that’s doing! Here is the _Nina_ that my
brothers and I own. She’s going with Don Cristoval the Admiral, and the
men who are bound to me for fishing and voyaging are going, and more
than that, there is going Martin Alonso Pinzon, for I’ll ask no man to
go where I will not go!’

“Then up beside him starts his brothers Vicente and Francisco, and they
say they are going too. Fray Ignatio stands on the church steps and
cries that there are idolaters there, and he will go to tell them
about our Lord Jesus Christ! Then the alcalde gets up and says that
the Sovereigns must be obeyed, and that the _Santa Maria_ and the Pinta
shall be made ready. Then the pilots Sancho Ruiz and Pedro Nino and
Bartolomeo Roldan push out together and say they’ll go, and others
follow, seeing they’ll have to anyhow! So it went that day and the next
and the next, until now they’ve pressed all they need. So I say, we are
here, brother, flopping in the net!”

“When does he sail?”

“Day after to-morrow, ‘tis said. But we who don’t live in Palos have our
orders to be there to-night. Aren’t you going too, mate?”

I answered that I hadn’t thought of it, and immediately, out of the
whole, there rose and faced me, “You have thought of it all the time!”

Sancho spoke. “If you’ll go with us to Captain Martin Pinzon, he’ll
enter you. He’d like to get another strong man.”

I said, “I don’t know. I’ll have to think of it. Here is Palos, and
yonder the headland with La Rabida.”

We entered the town. They would have had me go with them wherever they
must report themselves. But I said that I could not then, and at the
mouth of their street managed to leave them. I passed through Palos and
beyond its western limit came again to that house of the poorest where
I had lodged six months before and waking all night had heard the Tinto
flowing by like the life of a man. Long ago I had had some training in
medicine, and in mind’s medicine, and three years past I had brought a
young working man living then in Marchena out of illness and melancholy.
His parents dwelled here in this house by the Tinto and they gave me
shelter.



CHAPTER IX

RISING at dawn, I walked to the sea and along it until I came at last to
those dunes beneath which I had stretched myself that day of grayness.
Now it was deep summer, blue and gold, and the air all balm and
caressing. The evening before I had seen the three ships where they
rode in river mouth. They were caravels, and only the _Santa Maria_, the
largest, was fully decked. Small craft with which to find India, over
a road of a thousand leagues--or no road, for road means that men have
toiled there and traveled there--no road, but a wilderness plain, a
water desert! The Arabians say that Jinn and Afrits live in the desert
away from the caravans. If you go that way you meet fearful things and
never come forth again. The Santa Maria, the _Pinta_ and the Nina. The
Santa Maria could be Master Christopherus’s ship. Bright point that was
his banner could be made out at the fore.

Palos waterside, in a red-filtered dusk, had been a noisy place, but the
noise did not ring genially. I gathered that this small port was more
largely in the mood of Pedro and Fernando than in that of Sancho. It
looked frightened and it looked sullen and it looked angry.

The old woman by the Tinto talked garrulously. Thankful was she that her
son Miguel dwelled ten leagues away! Else surely they would have taken
him, as they were taking this one’s son and that one’s son! To hear
her you would think of an ogre--of Polyphemus in the cave--reaching out
fatal hand for this or that fattened body. Nothing then, she said, to do
but to pinch and save so that one might pay the priest for masses! She
told me with great eyes that a hundred leagues west of Canaries one came
to a sea forest where all the trees were made of water growing up high
and spreading out like branches and leaves, and that this forest was
filled with sea wolves and serpents and strange beasts all made of sea
water, but they could sting and rend a man very ghastly. After that you
came to sirens that you could not help leaping to meet, but they put
lips to men’s breasts and sucked out the life. Then if the wind drove
you south, you smelled smoke and at night saw flames, and if you could
not get the ship about--

In mid-afternoon I left the sands and took the road to La Rabida. By
the walled vineyard that climbs the hill I was met by three mounted
men coming from the monastery. The first was Don Juan de Penelosa, the
second was the Prior of La Rabida, the third was the Admiral of the
Ocean-Sea.

Fray Juan Perez first saw me clearly, drawn up by wall. He had been
quoting Latin and he broke at _Dominus et magister_. The Admiral
turned gray eyes upon me. I saw his mind working. He said, “The road to
Cordova--Welcome, Juan Lepe!”

“Welcome, Excellency!”

I gave him the name, seeing him for a moment somewhat whimsically as
Viceroy of conquered great India of the elephants and the temples filled
with bells. His face lighted. He looked at me, and I knew again that he
liked me. I liked him.

My kinsman the Prior had started to speak to me, but then had shot a
look at Juan de Penelosa and refrained. The Queen’s officer spoke, “Why,
here’s another strong fellow, not so tall as some but powerfully knit!
Are you used to the sea?”

I answered that I had been upon a Marseilles bark that was wrecked off
Almeria, and that I had walked from San Lucar. He asked my name and I
gave it. “Juan Lepe.” “I attach you then, Juan Lepe, for the service of
the Queen! Behold your admiral, Don Cristoval Colon! His ships are the
_Santa Maria_, the Pinta and the Nina, his destination the glorious
finding of the Indies and Cipango where the poorest man drinks from a
golden cup! Princes, I fancy, drink from hollowed emeralds! You will
sail to-morrow at dawn. In which ship shall we put him, Senor?”

“In the Santa Maria,” answered the Admiral.

So short as that was it done! And yet--and yet--it had been doing for a
long time, for how long a time I have no way of measuring!

Juan de Penelosa continued to speak: “Follow us into Palos where
Sebastian Jaurez will give you wine and a piece of money. Thence you
will go to church where indeed we are bound, all who sail being
gathered there for general confession and absolution. This voyage begins
Christianly!”

Said Fray Juan Perez, “Not to do that, Juan Lepe, were to cry aloud for
another shipwreck!”

He used the tone of priest, thrusting in speech as priests often do,
where there is no especial need of speech. But I understood that that
was a mask, and could read kinsmanly anxiety in a good man’s heart. I
said, “I will find Sebastian Jaurez, and I will go to church, Senors. A
ship is a ship, and a voyage a voyage!”

“This, Juan Lepe,” said the Admiral in that peculiarly warm and
thrilling voice of his, “is such a voyage as you have never been!”

I made reply, “So be it! I would have every voyage greater than the
last.” And as they put their steeds into motion, walked behind them
downhill and over sandy ways into Palos. There I found Sebastian Jaurez
who signed me in. I put into my pocket the coin he gave me and drank
with him a stoup of wine, and then I went to church.

It was a great shadowy church and I found it full. Jaurez piloted me to
where just under pulpit were ranged my fellow mariners, a hundred plain
sailormen, no great number with which to widen the world! A score or so
of better station were grouped at the head of these, and in front of all
stood Christopherus Columbus. I saw again Martin Alonso Pinzon who had
entered the Prior’s room at La Rabida, and with him his two brothers
Francisco and Vicente. Martin Pinzon would be captain of the _Pinta_
and Vicente of the Nina. And there were Roderigo Sanchez of Segovia,
Inspector-General of Armament, and Diego de Arana, chief alguazil of the
expedition, and Roderigo de Escobedo, royal notary, and with these three
or four young men of birth, adventuring for India now that the war with
the Moor was done. And there were two physicians, Garcia Fernandez and
Berardino Nunez. And there was the Franciscan, Fray Ignatio, who would
convert the heathen and preach before the Great Khan.

The Admiral of Ocean-Sea stood a taller man than any there, tall,
muscular, a great figure. He was richly dressed, for as soon as he could
he dressed richly. A shaft of light struck his brow and made his hair
all glowing silver. His face was lifted. The air about him to my eyes
swam and quivered and was faintly colored.

Fray Juan Perez preached the sermon and he used great earnestness and
now and again his voice broke. He talked of God’s gain that we went
forth upon, reaping in a field set us. One thing came forth here that I
had not before heard.

“And the unthinkable wealth that surely shall be found and gained,
for these countries to which you sail have eight-tenths of the world’s
riches, shall put Castile and Leon where of old stood Pagan Rome, and
shall make, God willing, of this very Palos a new Genoa or Venice! And
this man, your Admiral, how hath he proposed to the Sovereigns to use
first fruits? Why, friends, by taking finally and forever from Mahound,
and for Holy Church and her servant the Spains, the Holy Sepulchre!”

In the end, we the going forth, kneeling, made general confession and
the priest’s hands in the dusk above absolved us. There was solemnity
and there was tenderness. A hundred and twenty, we came forth from
church, and around us flowed the hundreds of Palos, men and women and
children. All was red under a red sunset, the boats waiting to take us
out to the _Santa Maria_, the Pinta and the Nina.

We marched to waterside. Priests and friars moved with us, singing
loudly the hymn to the Virgin, Lady of all seamen. Great tears ran down
Fray Juan Perez’s checks. It was a red sunset and the west into which we
were going looked indeed blood-flecked. Don Juan de Penelosa, harking us
on, had an inspiration. “You see the rubies of Cipango!”

It is not alone “great” men who bring about things in this world. All of
us are in a measure great, as all are on the way to greater greatness.
Sailors are brave and hardy men; that is said when it is said that they
are sailors. In many hearts hung dread of this voyage and rebellion
against being forced to it. But they had not to be lashed to the boats;
they went with sailors’ careless air and dignity. By far the most went
thus. Even Fernando ceased his wailing and embarked. The red light, or
for danger or for rubies in which still might be danger, washed us all,
washed the town, the folk and the sandy shore, and the boats that would
take us out to the ships, small in themselves, and small by distance,
riding there in the river-mouth like toys that have been made for
children.

The hundred and twenty entered the boats. It was like a little fishing
fleet going out together. The rowers bent to the oars, a strip of water
widened between us and Spain. Loud chanted the friars, but over their
voices rose the crying of farewell, now deep, now shrill. “_Adios!_”
 The sailors cried back, “Adios! Adios!” From the land it must have had
a thin sound like ghosts wailing from the edge of the world. That, the
sailors held and Palos held, was where the ships were going, over the
edge of the world. It was the third day of August, in the year fourteen
hundred and ninety-two.



CHAPTER X

PALOS vanished, we lost the headland of La Rabida, a haze hid Spain.
By nightfall all was behind us. We were set forth from native land,
set forth from Europe, set forth from Christendom, set forth from sea
company and sailors’ cheer of other ships. That last would not be wholly
true until we were gone from the Canaries, toward which islands, running
south, we now were headed. We might hail some Spanish ship going to,
coming from, Grand Canary. We might indeed, before we reached these
islands, see other sails, for a rumor ran that the King of Portugal was
sending ships to intercept us, sink us and none ever be the wiser, it
not being to his interest that Spain should make discoveries! Pedro it
was who put this into my ear as we hauled at the same rope. I laughed.
“Here beginneth the marvelous tale of this voyage! If all happens that
all say may happen, not the Pope’s library can hold the books!”

The _Santa Maria_ was a good enough ship, though fifty men crowded it.
It was new and clean, a fair sailer, though not so swift as the Pinta.
We mariners settled ourselves in waist and forecastle. The Admiral, Juan
de la Cosa, the master, Roderigo Sanchez, Diego de Arana and Roderigo de
Escobedo, Pedro Gutierrez, a private adventurer, the physician Bernardo
Nunez and Fray Ignatio had great cabin and certain small sleeping cabins
and poop deck. In the forecastle almost all knew one another; all ran
into kinships near or remote. But the turn of character made the real
grouping. Pedro had his cluster and Sancho had his, and between swayed
now to the one and now to the other a large group. Fernando, I feel
gladness in saying, had with him but two or three. And aside stood
variations, individuals. Beltran the cook was such an one, a bold,
mirthful, likable man. We had several dry thinkers, and a braggart and
two or three who proved miserably villainous. We had weathercocks and
men who faced forward, no matter what the wind that blew.

The Admiral knew well that he must have, if he could, a ship patient,
contented and hopeful. I bear him witness that he spared no pains.

We had aboard trumpet and drum and viol, and he would have frequent
music. Each day toward evening each man was given a cup of wine. And
before sunset all were gathered for vesper service, and we sang _Salve
Regina_. At night the great familiar stars shone out above us.

Second day passed much like first,--light fickle wind, flapping sails,
smooth sea, cloudless sky. To-day beheld sea life after shore grown
habitual. We might have sailed from Marseilles or Genoa and been sailing
for a month. If this were all, then no more terror from the Sea of
Darkness than from our own so well-known sea! But Fernando said, “It is
after the Canaries! We know well enough it is not so bad this side of
them. Why do they call them Dog Islands?”

“Perhaps they found dogs there.”

“No, but that they give warning like watchdogs! ‘If you go any further
it shall be to your woe!’”

“Aye, aye! Have you heard tell of the spouting mountain?”

This night the wind came up and by morning was blowing stiffly, urging
us landward as though back to Spain. The sky became leaden, with a great
stormy aspect. The waves mounted, the lookout cried that the _Pinta_
was showing signals of distress. By now all had shortened sail, but the
Pinta was taking in everything and presently lay under bare poles. The
Santa Maria worked toward her until we were close by. They shouted
and we back to them. It was her rudder that was unshipped and injured.
Captain Martin Pinzon shouted that he would overcome it, binding it
somehow in place, and would overtake us, the _Pinta_ being faster sailer
than the Santa Maria or the Nina. But the Admiral would not agree, and
we took in all sail and lay tossed by a rough sea until afternoon
when the Pinta signaled that the rudder was hung. But by now the sky
stretched straight lead, and the water ran white-capped. We made no way
till morning, when without a drop of rain all the cloud roof was driven
landward and there sprang out a sky so blue that the heart laughed for
joy. The violent wind sank, then veered and blowing moderately carried
us again southward. All the white sails, white and new, were flung out,
and we raced over a rich, green plain. That lasted through most of the
day, but an hour before sunset the _Pinta_ again signaled trouble. The
rudder was once more worse than useless.

Again it was mended. But when the next morning it happened the third
time and a kind of wailing grumble went through the Santa Maria, there
came pronouncement from the Admiral. “The Canaries lie straight ahead.
In two days we shall sight them. Very good! we shall rest there and make
a new rudder for the _Pinta_. The Nina will do better with square sails
and we can change these. Fresh meat and water and some rambling ashore!”

Beltran the cook had been to the Canaries, driven there by a perverse
wind twenty years ago when he was boatswain upon a big carrack. He said
it was no great way and one or two agreed with him, but others declined
to believe the Admiral when he said that in two days we should behold
the volcano. Some were found to clamor that the wind had driven us out
of all reckoning! We might never find the Canaries and then what would
the _Pinta_ do? Whereas, if we all turned back to Palos--

“If--if!” answered Beltran the cook, who at first seemed strangely and
humorously there as cook until one found that he had an injured leg
and could not climb mast nor manage sail. “‘If’ is a seaman without a
ship!--He’s a famous navigator.”

“Martin Pinzon?”

“Him too. But I meant our Admiral.”

“He hasn’t had a ship for years!”

“He was of the best when he had one! I’ve heard old Captain Ruy tell--”

“Maybe he wasn’t crazy in those days, but he’s crazy now!”

That was Fernando. I think it was from him that certain of the crew
took the word “crazy.” They used it until one would think that for pure
variety’s sake they would find another!

The sixth day from Palos there lifted from sea the peak of Teneriffe.

This day, passing on some errand the open door of the great cabin, I
saw the Admiral seated at the table. Looking up, he saw me, gazed an
instant, then lifted his voice. “Come in here!”

He sat with a great chart spread upon the table before him. Beside
it the log lay open, and he had under his hand a book in which he was
writing. Door framed blue sky and sea, a pleasant wind was singing in
a pleasant warmth, the great cabin which, with the rest of the ship, he
made to be kept very clean, was awash with light and fineness of air.
“Would you like to look at the chart?” he asked, and I came and looked
over his shoulder.

“I made it,” he said. “There is nothing in the world more useful than
knowing how to make maps and charts! While I waited for Kings to make up
their minds I earned my living so.” I glanced at the log and he pushed
it to me so that I might see. “Every day from Palos out.” His strong
fingers touched the other book. “My journal that I keep for myself and
the Queen and King Ferdinand and indeed for the world.” He turned the
leaves. The bulk of them were blank, but in the front showed closely
covered pages, the writing not large but clear and strong. “This voyage,
you see, changeth our world! Once in Venice I heard a scholar learned
in the Greek tell of an old voyage of a ship called _Argo_, whence its
captain and crew were named Argonauts, and he said that it was of all
voyages most famous with the ancients. This is like that, but probably
greater.” He turned the pages. “I shall do it in the manner of Caesar
his Commentaries.”

He knew himself, I thought, for as great a man as Caesar. All said, his
book might be as prized in some unentered future. He did not move where
time is as a film, but where time is deep, a thousand years as a day. He
could not see there in detail any more than we could see tree and house
in those Canaries upon which we were bearing down.

I said, “Now that printing is general, it may go into far lands and into
multitude of hands and heads. Many a voyager to come may study it.”

He drew deep breath. “It is the very truth! Prince Henry the Navigator.
Christopherus Columbus the Navigator, and greater than the first--”

Sun shone, wind sang, blue sea danced beyond the door. Came from deck
Roderigo Sanchez and Diego de Arana. The Admiral made me a gesture of
dismissal.

The Canaries and we drew together. Great bands of cloud hid much of the
higher land, but the volcano top came clear above cloud, standing bare
and solemn against blue heaven. Leaving upon our right Grand Canary we
stood for the island of Gomera. Here we found deep, clear water close
to shore, a narrow strand, a small Spanish fort and beginnings of a
village, and inland, up ravines clad with a strange, leafless bush,
plentiful huts of the conquered Guanches. Our three ships came to
anchor, and the Admiral went ashore, the captains of the _Pinta_ and the
Nina following. Juan Lepe was among the rowers.

The Spanish commandant came down to beach with an armed escort. The
Admiral, walking alone, met him between sea and bright green trees, and
here stood the two and conversed while we watched. The Admiral showed
him letters of credence. The commandant took and read, handed them
back with a bow, and coming to water edge had presented to him the two
captains, Martin and Vicente Pinzon. He proved a cheery old veteran of
old wars, relieved that we were not Portuguese nor pirates and happy to
have late news from Spain. It seemed that he had learned from a supply
ship in June that the expedition was afoot.

The _Santa Maria_ and the Nina rode close in shore. Captain Martin
Pinzon beached the Pinta and unshipped the hurt and useless rudder. Work
upon a new one began at once. The Admiral, the two captains and those
of rank upon the ships supped with the commandant at his quite goodly
house, and the next day he and his officers dined aboard the Santa
Maria. The Admiral liked him much for he was more than respectful toward
this voyage. A year before, bathing one day in the surf, there had come
floating to his hand a great gourd. None such grew anywhere in these
islands, and the wind for days had come steadily from the west. The
gourd had a kind of pattern cut around it. He showed it to the Admiral
and afterwards gave it to him. The latter caused it to pass from hand to
hand among the seamen. I had it in my hands and truly saw no reason why
it might not have been cut by some native of the West, and, carried away
by the tide or dropped perchance from a boat, have at last, after long
time, come into hands not Indian. Asia tossing unthinkingly a ball which
Europe caught.

The _Pinta_ proved in worse plight than was at first thought. The Nina
also found this or that to do besides squaring her Levant sails. We
stayed in Gomera almost three weeks. The place was novel, the day’s task
not hard, the Admiral and his captains complaisant. We had leisure and
island company. To many it was happiness enough. While we stopped at
Gornera we were at least not drifting upon lodestone, equator fire and
chaos!

Here on Gomera might be studied the three Pinzon brothers. Vicente was
a good, courageous captain, Francisco a good pilot, and a courageous,
seldom-speaking man. But Martin Alonso, the eldest, was the prime mover
in all their affairs. He was skillful navigator like his brothers and
courageous like them, but not silent like Francisco, and ambitious far
above either. He would have said perhaps that had he not been so, been
both ambitious and shrewd, the Pinzons would never have become principal
ship-owning, trading and maritime family of Palos and three leagues
around. He, too, had family fortunes and aggrandizement at heart, though
hardly on the grand, imperial scale of the Admiral. He had much manly
beauty, daring and strength. His two brothers worshipped him, and in
most places and moments his crew would follow him with a cheer. The
Admiral was bound to him, not only in that he had volunteered and made
others to go willingly, but that he had put in his ship, the _Nina_, and
had furnished Master Christopherus with monies. That eighth of the cost
of the expedition, whence else could it come? If it tied Martin Pinzon
to the Admiral, seeing that only through success could those monies be
repaid, it likewise made him feel that he, too, had authority, was at
liberty to advise, and at need to become critical.

But the Admiral had the great man’s mark. He could acknowledge service
and be quite simply and deeply grateful for it. He was grateful to
Martin Pinzon who had aided him from his first coming to Palos, and also
I think he loved the younger man’s great blond strength and beauty. He
had all of Italy’s quickness to beauty, be it of land or sea, forest,
flower, animal or man. But now and again, even so early as this, he must
put out hand to check Pinzon’s impetuous advice. His brows drew together
above gray eyes and eagle nose. But for the most part, on Gomera, they
were very friendly, and it was a sight to see Admiral and captains and
all the privileged of the expedition sit at wine with the commandant.

Juan Lepe had no quarrel with any of them. Jayme de Marchena swept this
voyage into the Great Voyage.

The _Pinta_ was nearly ready when there arrived a small ship from Ferro
bringing news that three large Portuguese ships had sailed by that
island. Said the commandant, “Spain and Portugal are at peace. They
would not dare to try to oust us!” He came to waterside to talk to the
Admiral. “Not to fight you,” said the Admiral, “but me! King John wishes
to keep India, Cipango and Cathay still veiled. So he will get time
in which to have from the Holy Father another bull that will place the
Portuguese line west and west until he hath the whole!” He raised his
hand and let it fall. “I cannot sail to-morrow, but I will sail the day
after!”

We were put to hard labor for the rest of that day, and through much of
the moonlit night. By early morning again we labored. At mid-afternoon
all was done. The _Pinta_, right from stem to stern, rode the blue
water; the Nina had her great square sails. The Guanches stored for us
fresh provisions and rolled down and into ship our water casks. There
was a great moon, and we would stand off in the night. Nothing more had
been seen of the Portuguese ships, but we were ready to go and go we
should. All being done, and the sun two hours high, we mariners had
leave to rest ashore under trees who might not for very long again see
land or trees.

There was a grove that led to a stream and the waterfall where we had
filled the casks. I walked through this alone. The place lay utterly
still save for the murmuring of the water and the singing of a small
yellowish bird that abounds in these islands. At the end of an aisle of
trees shone the sea, blue and calm as a sapphire of heaven. I lay down
upon the earth by the water.

Finding of India and rounding the earth! We seemed poor, weak men, but
the thing was great, and I suppose the doers of a great thing are
great. East--west! Going west and yet east.--The Jew in me had come
from Palestine, and to Palestine perhaps from Arabia, and to Arabia--who
knew?--perhaps from that India! And much of the Spaniard had come from
Carthage and from Phoenicia, old Tyre and Sidon, and Tyre and Sidon
again from the east. From the east and to the east again. All our Age
that with all lacks was yet a stirring one with a sense of dawn and
sunrise and distant trumpets, now was going east, was going Home, going
east by the west road. West is home and East is home, and North and
South. Knowledge extendeth and the world above is fed.

The sun made a lane of scarlet and gold across Ocean-Sea. I wondered
what temples, what towns, what spice ships at strange wharfs might lie
under it afar. I wondered if there did dwell Prester John and if he
would step down to give us welcome. The torrent of event strikes us
day and night, all the hours, all the moments. Who can tell with
distinctness color and shape in that descending stream?



CHAPTER XI

AN hour after moonrise we were gone from Gomera. At first a light wind
filled the sails, but when the round moon went down in the west and
the sun rose, there was Teneriffe still at hand, and the sea glassy.
It rested like a mirror all that day, and the sails hung empty and the
banner at maintop but a moveless wisp of cloth. In the night arose a
contrary wind, and another red dawn showed us Teneriffe still. The wind
dropping like a shot, we hung off Ferro, fixed in blue glass. Watch was
kept for the Portuguese, but they also would be rooted to sea bottom.
The third morning up whistled the wind, blowing from Africa and filling
every sail.

Palos to the Canaries, we had sailed south. Now for long, long days
the sun rose right aft, and when it set dyed with red brow and eyes
and cheek and breast of the carved woman at our prow. She wore a great
crown, and she looked ever with wide eyes upon the west that we chased.
Straight west over Ocean-Sea, the first men, the first ships! If ever
there had been others, our world knew it not. The Canaries sank into the
east. Turn on heel around one’s self, and mark never a start of land to
break the rim of the vast sea bowl! Never a sail save those above us of
the _Santa Maria_, or starboard or larboard, the Pinta and the Nina. The
loneliness was vast and utter. We might fail here, sink here, die here,
and indeed fail and sink and die alone!

Two seamen lay sick in their beds, and the third day from Gomera the
Santa Maria’s physician, Bernardo Nunez, was seized with the same
malady. At first Fray Ignatio tried to take his place, but here the monk
lacked knowledge. One of the sailors died, a ship boy sickened, and the
physician’s fever increased upon him. Diego de Arana began to fail. The
ship’s master came at supper time and looked us over. “Is there any here
who has any leechcraft?”

Beltran the cook said, “I can set a bone and wash a wound; but it ends
there!”

Cried Fernando from his corner. “Is the plague among us!” The master
turned on him. “Here and now, I say five lashes for the man who says
that word again! Has any man here sense about a plain fever?”

None else speaking, I said that long ago I had studied for a time with
a leech, and that I was somewhat used to care of the sick. “Then you
are my man!” quoth the master, and forthwith took me to the Admiral. I
became Juan Lepe, the physician.

It was, I held, a fever received while wandering through the ravines and
woods of Gomera. Master Bernardo had in his cabin drugs and tinctures,
and we breathed now all the salt of Ocean-Sea, and the ship was clean. I
talked to Beltran the cook about diet, and I chose Sancho and a man that
I liked, one Luis Torres, for nurses. Two others sickened this night,
and one the next day, but none afterward. None died; in ten days all
were recovered. Other ailments aboard I doctored also. Don Diego de
Arana was subject to fits of melancholy with twitchings of the body.
I had watched Isaac the Physician cure such things as this, and now I
followed instruction. I put my hands upon the patient and I strengthened
his will with mine, sending into him desire for health and perception of
health. His inner man caught tune. The melancholy left him and did not
return. Master Bernardo threw off the fever, sat up and moved about. But
he was still weak, and still I tended the others for him.

The _Pinta_ had signaled four men ill. But Garcia Fernandez, the Palos
physician, was there with Martin Pinzon, and the sick recovered. The
Nina had no doctor and now she came near to the Santa Maria and sent a
boat. She had five sick men and would borrow Bernardo Nunez.

The Admiral spoke with Nunez, now nearly well. Then the physician made a
bundle of drugs and medicaments, said farewell to all and kindly enough
to me, and rowed away to the _Nina_. He was a friend of the Pinzons, and
above the vanity of the greater ship. The sick upon the Nina prospered
under him.

But Juan Lepe was taken from the forecastle, and slept where Nunez had
slept, and had his place at the table in the great cabin. He turned from
the sailor Juan Lepe to the physician Juan Lepe, becoming “Doctor” and
“Senor.” The wheel turns and a man’s past makes his present.

A few days from Gomera, an hour after sunset, the night was torn by the
hugest, flaming, falling star that any of us had ever seen. The mass
drove down the lower skirt of the sky, leaving behind it a wake of fire.
It plunged into the sea. There is no sailor but knows shooting stars.
But this was a hugely great one, and Ocean-Sea very lonely, and to most
there our errand a spectral and frightening one. It needed both the
Admiral and Fray Ignatio to quell the panic.

The next day a great bird like a crane passed over the _Santa Maria_. It
came from Africa, behind us. But it spoke of land, and the sailors gazed
wistfully.

This day I entered the great cabin when none was there but the Admiral,
and again he sat at table with his charts and his books. He asked of the
sick and I answered. Again he sat looking through open door and window
at blue water, a great figure of a man with a great head and face and
early-silvered hair. “Do you know aught,” he asked, “of astrology?”

I answered that I knew a little of the surface of it.

“I have a sense,” he said, “that our stars are akin, yours and mine. I
felt it the day Granada fell, and I felt it on Cordova road, and again
that day below La Rabida when we turned the corner and the bells rang
and you stood beside the vineyard wall. Should I not have learned in
more than fifty years to know a man? The stars are akin that will endure
for vision’s sake.”

I said, “I believe that, my Admiral.”

He sat in silence for a moment, then drew the log between us and turned
several pages so that I might see the reckoning. “We have come well,” I
said. “Yet with so fair a wind, I should have thought--”

He turned the leaves till he rested at one covered with other figures.
“Here it is as it truly is, and where we truly are! We have oversailed
all that the first show, and so many leagues besides.”

“Two records, true and untrue! Why do you do it so?”

“I have told them that after seven hundred leagues we should find land.
Add fifty more for our general imperfection. But it may be wider than
I think. We may not come even to some fringing island in eight hundred
leagues, no, nor in more than that! If it be a thousand, if it be two
thousand, on I go! But after the seven hundred is passed, it will be
hard to keep them in hand. So, though we are covering more, I let them
think we are covering only this.”

I could but laugh. Two reckonings! After all, he was not Italian for
nothing!

“The master knows,” he said, “and also Diego de Arana. But at least one
other should know. Two might drown or perish from sickness. I myself
might fall sick and die, though I will not believe it!” He paused a
moment, then said, looking directly at me, “I need one in whom I can
utterly confide. I should have had with me my brother Bartholomew. But
he is in England. A man going to seek a Crown jewel for all men should
have with him son or brother. Diego de Arana is a kinsman of one whom
I love, and he partly believes. But Roderigo Sanchez and the others
believe hardly at all. There is Fray Ignatio. He believes, and I confess
my sins to him. But he thinks only of penitents, and this matter needs
mind, not heart alone. Because of that sense of the stars, I tell you
these things.”

The next day it came to me that in that Journal which he meant to make
like Caesar’s Commentaries, he might put down the change in the _Santa
Maria’s_ physicians and set my name there too often. I watched my chance
and finding it, asked that he name me not in that book. His gray eyes
rested upon me; he demanded the reason for that. I said that in Spain I
was in danger, and that Juan Lepe was not my name. More than that I did
not wish to say, and perchance it were wiser for him not to know. But I
would not that the powerful should mark me in his Journal or elsewhere!

Usually his eyes were wide and filled with light as though it were sent
into them from the vast lands that he continuously saw. But he could be
immediate captain and commander of things and of men, and when that was
so, the light drew into a point, and he became eagle that sees through
the wave the fish. Had he been the seer alone, truly he might have been
the seer of what was to be discovered and might have set others upon the
path. But he would not have sailed on the _Santa Maria_!

In his many years at sea he must many times have met men who had put to
sea out of fear of land. He would have sailed with many whose names, he
knew, were not those given them at birth. He must have learned to take
reasons for granted and to go on--where he wished to go on. So we gazed
at each other.

“I had written down,” he said, “that you greatly helped the sick, and
upon Bernardo Nunez’s going to the _Nina_, became our physician. But I
will write no more of you, and that written will pass in the flood of
things to come.” After a moment, he ended with deliberation, “I know my
star to be a great star, burning long and now with a mounting flame. If
yours is in any wise its kin, then there needs must be histories.”



CHAPTER XII

IT was a strange thing how utterly favoring now was the wind! It blew
with a great steady push always from the east, and always we ran before
it into the west. Day after day we experienced this warm and steadfast
driving; day after day we never shifted sail. The rigging sang a
steady song, day and night. The crowned woman, our figurehead, ran,
light-footed, over a green and blue plain, and where the plain ended no
man might know! “Perhaps it does not end!” said the mariners.

Of the hidalgos aboard I like best Diego de Arana who had cast off his
melancholy. He was a man of sense, candid and brave. Roderigo Sanchez
sat and moved a dull, good man. Roderigo de Escobedo had courage, but
he was factious, would take sides against his shadow if none other were
there. Pedro Gutierrez had been a courtier, and had the vices of that
life, together with a daredevil recklessness and a kind of wild wit.
I had liking and admiration for Fray Ignatio, but careful indeed was I
when I spoke with him!

The wind blew unchanging, the stark blue shield of sea, a water-world,
must be taken in the whole, for there was no contrasting point in it to
catch the eye. Sancho, forward, in a high sweet voice like a jongleur’s
voice, was singing to the men an endless ballad. Upon the poop deck
Escobedo and Gutierrez, having diced themselves to an even wealth or
poverty, turned to further examination of the Admiral’s ways. Endlessly
they made him and his views subject of talk. Roderigo Sanchez listened
with a face like an owl, Diego de Arana with some irony about his lips.
I came and stood beside the latter.

They were upon the beggary of Christopherus Columbus. “How did the Prior
of La Rabida--?”

“I’ll tell you, for I heard it. One evening at vesper bell comes our
Admiral--no less a man!--to Priory gate with a young boy in his hand.
Not Fernando his love-child, but Diego the elder, who was born in
Lisbon. All dusty with the road, like any beggar you see, and not much
better clad, foot-sore and begging bread for himself and the boy. And
because of his white hair, and because he carried himself in that absurd
way that makes the undiscerning cry, ‘Ah, my lord king in disguise!’
the porter must have him in, and by and by comes the prior and stands to
talk with him, ‘From where?’ ‘From Cordova.’ ‘Whither?’ ‘To Portugal.’
‘For why?’ ‘To speak again with King John!’ ‘Are you in the habit of
speaking with kings?’ ‘Aye, I am!’ ‘About what, may I ask?’ ‘About
the finding of India by way of Ocean-Sea, the possession of idolatrous
countries and the great wealth thereof, and the taking of Christ to the
heathen who else are lost!’”

“Ha, ha! Ha, ha!” This was Escobedo.

“The prior thinks, ‘This is an interesting madman.’ And being a
charitable good man and lacking entertainment that evening, he brings
the beggar in to supper and sits by him.”

Roderigo Sanchez opened his mouth. “All Andalusia knows Fray Juan Perez
is a kind of visionary!”

“Aye, like to like! ‘Have you been to our Queen and the King?’ ‘Aye, I
have!’ saith the beggar, ‘but they are warring with the Moors and will
pull Granada down and do not see the greater glory!’”

All laughed at that, and indeed Gutierrez could mimic to perfection. We
got, full measure, the beggar’s loftiness.

“So the siren sings and the prior leaps to meet her, or tarantula stings
him and he dances! ‘I am growing mad too,’ thinks Fray Juan Perez, and
begins presently to tell that last week he dreamed of Prester John. The
end is that he and the beggar talk till midnight and the next morning
they talk again, and the prior sends for his friends Captain Martin
Alonzo Pinzon and the physician Garcia Fernandez. The beggar gains them
all!”

“Do you think a beggar can do that?” I said. “Only a giver can do that.”

Pedro Gutierrez turned black eyes upon Juan Lepe, whom he resented there
on the poop deck. “How could you have learned so much, Doctor, while you
were making sail and washing ship?” He was my younger in every way, and
I answered equably, “I learned in the same way that the Admiral learned
while he begged.”

“Touched!” said Diego de Arana. “So that is the way the prior came into
the business?”

“He enters with such vigor,” said Gutierrez, “that what does he do but
write an impassioned letter to the Queen, having long ago, for a time,
been her confessor? What he tells her, God knows, but it seems that it
changes the world! She answers that for herself she hath grieved for
Master Columbus’s departure from the court and the realm, and that if
he will turn and come to Santa Fe, his propositions shall at last be
thoroughly weighed. Letter finds the beggar with his boy honored guest
of La Rabida, touching heads with Martin Pinzon over maps and charts
and the ‘Book of Travels’ of Messer Marco Polo. There is great joy! The
beggar hath the prior’s own mule and his son a jennet, and here we go
to Santa Fe! That was last year. Now the boy that whimpered for bread
at convent gate is Don Diego Colon, page to Prince Juan, and the Viceroy
sails on the _Santa Maria_ for the countries he will administer!”

Gutierrez shook the dice in the box. “Oh, Queen Luck, that I have served
for so long! Why do you not make me viceroy?”

Said Escobedo, “Viceroy of the continent of water and Admiral of seaweed
and fishes!”

Diego de Arana took that up. “We are obliged to find something! No
sensible man can think like some of those forward that this goes on
forever and we shall sail till the wood rots and sails grow ragged and
wind carries away their shreds or they fall into dust!”

“Who knows anything of River-Ocean? We may not find the western shore,
if there be such a thing, for a year! By that time storm will sink us
ten times over, or plague will take us--”

“There’s not needed plague nor storm. Just say, food won’t last, and
water is already half gone!”

“That’s the undeniable truth,” quoth Roderigo Sanchez, and looked with a
perturbed face at the too-smooth sea.

Smooth blue sea continued, wind continued, pushing like a great, warm
hand, east to west. The Admiral spent hours alone in his sleeping cabin.
There were men who said that he studied there a great book of magic. He
had often a book in his hand, it is true, but Juan Lepe the physician
knew what he strove to keep from others, that the gout that at times
threatened crippling was upon him and was easier to bear lying down.

Sunset, vesper prayer and _Salve Regina_. As the strains died, there
became evident a lingering on the part of the seamen. The master spoke
to the Admiral. “They’ve found out about the needle, sir! Perhaps you’d
better hear them and answer them.”

Almost every day he heard them and answered them. To make his seamen,
however they groaned and grumbled and plotted, yet abide him and his
purpose was a day-after-day arising task! “Now,” he said equably, in the
tone almost of a father, “What is it to-day, men?”

The throng worked and put forward a spokesman, who looked from the
Admiral to the clear north. “It is the star, sir! The needle no longer
points to it! We thought you might explain to us unlearned--What we
think is that distance is going to widen and widen! What’s to keep
needle from swinging right south? Then will we never get home to Palos
and our wives and children--never and never and never!”

Said the Admiral, “It will not change further, or if it does a very
little further!” In his most decisive, most convincing voice he
explained why the needle no longer pointed precisely to the star. The
deviation marked and allowed for, it was near enough for practical
purposes, and the reasons for the wandering--

I do not know if the wisdom of our descendants will confirm his
explanation. It is so often to explain the explanation! But one as well
as another might do here. What the _Santa Maria_ wanted was reassurance,
general and large, stretching from the Canaries to India and Cathay and
back again. He knew that, and after no great time spent with compass
needle and circularly traveling polar star, he began to talk gold and
estate, and the pearls and silk and spices they would surely take for
gifts to their family and neighbors, Palos or Huelva or Fishertown!

It was truly the hope that upheld many on a voyage that they chose to
think a witches’ one. He talked now out of Marco Polo and he clad what
that traveler had said in more gorgeous attire. He meant nothing false;
his exalted imagination saw it so. He was painter of great pageants,
heightening and remodeling, deepening and purifying colors, making
humdrum and workaday over to his heart’s desire. The Venetian in his
book, and other travelers in their books, had related wonders enough.
These grew with him, it might be said--and indeed in his lifetime was
often said--into wonders without a foot upon earth. But if one took as
figures and symbols his gold roofs and platters, temples and gardens,
every man a merchant in silks and spices, strange fruit-dropping trees
and pearls in carcanets, the Grand Khan and Prester John--who could say
that in the long, patient life of Time the Admiral was over-esteeming?
The pity of it was that most here could not live in great lengths of
time. They wanted riches now, now! And they wanted only one kind of
riches; here and now, or at the most in another month, in the hands and
laps of Pedro and Fernando and Diego.



CHAPTER XIII

THERE grew at times an excited feeling that he was a prophet, and that
there were fabulously great things before us. As I doctored some small
ill one day in the forecastle, a great fellow named Francisco from
Huelva would tell me his dream of the night before. He had already
told it, it seemed, to all who would listen, and now again he had
considerable audience, crowding at the door. He said that he dreamed
he was in Cipango. At first he thought it was heaven, but when he saw
golden roofs he knew it must be Cipango, for in heaven where it
never rained and there were no nights, we shouldn’t need roofs. One
interrupted, “We’d need them to keep the flying angels from looking in!”

“It was Cipango,” persisted Francisco, “for the Emperor himself came
and gave me a rope of pearls. There were five thousand of them, and each
would buy a house or a fine horse or a suit of velvet. And the Emperor
took me by the hand, and he said, ‘Dear Brother--’ You might have
thought I was a king--and by the mass, I was a king! I felt it right
away! And then he took me into a garden, and there were three beautiful
women, and one of them would push me to the other, and that one to the
third, and that to the first again, as though they were playing ball,
and they all laughed, and I laughed. Then there came a great person with
five crowns on his head, and all the light blazed up gold and blue, and
somebody said, ‘It’s Prester John’!”

His dream kept a two-days’ serenity upon the ship. It came to the ear
of the Admiral, who said, “‘In dreams will I instruct thee.’--I have had
dreams far statelier than his.”

Pedro Gutierrez too began to dream,--fantastic things which he told with
an idle gusto. They were of wine and gold and women, though often these
were to be guessed through strange, jumbled masks and phantasies. “Those
are ill dreams,” said the Admiral. “Dream straight and high!” Fray
Ignatio, too, said wisely, “It is not always God who cometh in dreams!”

But the images of Gutierrez’s dreams seemed to him to be seated
in Cathay and India. They bred in him belief that he was coming to
happiness by that sea road that glistered before us. He and Roderigo de
Escobedo began to talk with assurance of what they should find. Having
small knowledge of travelers’ tales they made application to the Admiral
who, nothing loth, answered them out of Marco Polo, Mandeville and Pedro
de Aliaco.

But the ardor of his mind was such that he outwent his authors. Where
the Venetian said “gold” the Genoese said “Much gold.” Where the one saw
powerful peoples with their own customs, courts, armies, temples, ships
and trade, the other gave to these an unearthly tinge of splendor.
Often as he sat in cabin or on deck, or rising paced to and fro, we who
listened to his account, listened to poet and enthusiast speaking
of earths to come. Besides books like those of Marco Polo and John
Mandeville and the Bishop of Cambrai he had studied philosophers and
the ancients and Scripture and the Fathers. He spoke unwaveringly of
prophecies, explicit and many, of his voyage, and the rounding out of
earth by him, Christopherus Columbus. More than once or twice, in
the great cabin, beneath the swinging lantern, he repeated to us
such passages, his voice making great poetry of old words. “Averroes
saith--Albertus Magnus saith--Aristotle saith--Seneca saith--Saint
Augustine saith--Esdras in his fourth book saith--” Salt air sweeping
through seemed to fall into a deep, musical beat and rhythm. “After
the council at Salamanca when great churchmen cried Irreligion and even
Heresy upon me, I searched all Scripture and drew testimony together.
In fifty, yea, in a hundred places it is plain! King David saith--job
saith--Moses saith--Thus it reads in Genesis--”

Diego de Arana smote the table with his hand. “I am yours, senor, to
find for the Lord!” Fray Ignatio lifted dark eyes. “I well believe that
nothing happens but what is chosen! I will tell you that in my cell at
La Rabida I heard a cry, ‘Come over, Ignatio the Franciscan!’”

And I, listening, thought, “Not perhaps that ancient spiritual singing
of spiritual things! But in truth, yes, it is chosen. Did not the Whole
of Me that I can so dimly feel set my foot upon this ship?” And going
out on deck before I slept, I looked at the stars and thought that we
were like the infant in the womb that knows not how nor where it is
carried.

We might be four hundred leagues from Spain. Still the wind drove us,
still we hardly shifted canvas, still the sky spread clear, of a vast
blue depth, and the blue glass plain of the sea lay beneath. It was too
smooth, the wind in our rigging too changeless of tune. At last, all
would have had variety spring. There began a veritable hunger for some
change, and it was possible to feel a faint horror. _What if this is the
horror--to go on forever and ever like this_?

Then one morning when the sun rose, it lit a novel thing. Seaweed or
grass or herbage of some sort was afloat about us. Far as the eye might
reach it was like a drowned meadow, vari-colored, awash. All that day we
watched it. It came toward us from the west; we ran through it from the
east. Now it thinned away; now it thickened until it seemed that the
sea was strewn with rushes like a castle floor. With oars we caught and
brought into ship wreaths of it. All night we sailed in this strange
plain. A yellow dawn showed it still on either side the _Santa Maria_,
and thicker, with fewer blue sea straits and passes than on yesterday.
The Pinta and the Nina stood out with a strange, enchanted look, as
ships crossing a plain more vast than the plain of Andalusia. Still that
floating weed thickened. The crowned woman at our prow pushed swathes of
it to either side. Our mariners hung over rail, talking, talking. “What
is it--and where will it end? Mayhap presently we can not plough it!”

I was again and again to admire how for forty years he had stored
sea-knowledge. It was not only what those gray eyes had seen, or those
rather large, well molded ears had heard, or that powerful and nervous
hand had touched. But he knew how to take, right and left, knowledge
that others gathered, as he knew that others took and would take what
he gathered. He knew that knowledge flows. Now he stood and told that no
less a man than Aristotle had recorded such a happening as this. Certain
ships of Gades--that is our Cadiz--driven by a great wind far into
River-Ocean, met these weeds or others like them, distant parents of
these. They were like floating islands forever changing shape, and those
old ships sailed among them for a while. They thought they must have
broken from sea floor and risen to surface, and currents brought other
masses from land. Tunny fish were caught among them.

And that very moment, as the endless possibilities of things would have
it, one, leaning on the rail, cried out that there were tunnies. We all
looked and saw them in a clear canal between two floating masses. It
brought the Admiral credence. “Look you all!” he said, “how most things
have been seen before!”

“But Father Aristotle’s ship--Was he ‘Saint’ or ‘Father’?”

“He was a heathen--he believed in Mahound.”

“No, he lived before Mahound. He was a wise man--”

“But his ships turned back to Cadiz. They were afraid of this
stuff--that’s the point!”

“They turned back,” said the Admiral. “And the splendor and the gold
were kept for us.”

A thicker carpet of the stuff brushed ship side. One of the boys cried,
“Ho, there is a crab!” It sat indeed on a criss-cross of broken reeds,
and it seemed to stare at us solemnly. “Do not all see that it came from
land, and land to the west?”

“But it is caught here! What if we are caught here too? These weeds may
stem us--turn great crab pincers and hold us till we rot!”

“If--and if--and if” cried the Admiral. “For Christ, His sake, laugh at
yourselves!”

On, on, we went before that warm and potent wind, so steadfast that
there must be controlling it some natural law. Ocean-Sea spread around,
with that weed like a marsh at springtide. Then, suddenly, just as the
murmuring faction was murmuring again, we cleared all that. Open sea,
blue running ocean, endlessly endless!

The too-steady sunshine vanished. There broke a cloudy dawn followed by
light rain. It ceased and the sky cleared. But in the north held a mist
and a kind of semblance of far-off mountains. Startled, a man cried
“Land!” but the next moment showed that it was cloud. Yet all day the
mist hung in this quarter. The _Pinta_ approached and signaled, and
presently over to us put her boat, in it Martin Pinzon. The Admiral met
him as he came up over side and would have taken him into great cabin.
But, no! Martin Pinzon always spoke out, before everybody! “Senor, there
is land yonder, under the north! Should not we change course and see
what is there?”

“It is cloud,” answered the Admiral. “Though I do not deny that such a
haze may be crying, ‘Land behind!’”

“Let us sail then north, and see!”

But the Admiral shook his head. “No, Captain! West--west--arrow
straight!”

Pinzon appeared about to say, “You are very wrong, and we should see
what’s behind that arras!” But he checked himself, standing before
Admiral and Don and Viceroy, and all those listening faces around. “I
still think,” he began.

The other took him up, but kept considerate, almost deferring manner.
“Yes, if we had time or ships to spare! But now it is, do not stray from
the path. Sail straight west!”

“We are five hundred leagues from Palos.”

“Less than that, by our reckoning. The further from Palos, the nearer
India!”

“We may be passing by our salvation!”

“Our salvation lies in going as we set forth to go.” He made his gesture
of dismissal of that, and asked after the health of the _Pinta_. The
health held, but the stores were growing low. Biscuit enough, but bacon
almost out, and not so many measures of beans left. Oil, too, approached
bottom of jars. The Nina was in the same case.

“Food and water will last,” said the Admiral. “We have not come so far
without safely going farther.”

Martin Alonso Pinzon was the younger man and but captain of the Pinta_,
while the other stood Don and Admiral, appointed by Majesty, responsible
only to the Crown. But he had been Master Christopherus the dreamer, who
was shabbily dressed, owed money, almost begged. He owed large money now
to Martin Pinzon. But for the Pinzons, he could hardly have sailed. He
should listen now, take good advice, that was clearly what the captain
of the _Pinta thought! Undoubtedly Master Christopherus dreamed true to
a certain point, but after that was not so followable! As for Cristoforo
Colombo, Italian shipmaster, he had, it was true, old sea wisdom. But
Martin Pinzon thought Martin Pinzon was as good there!--Captain Martin
Alonso said good-by with some haughtiness and went stiffly back over
blue sea to the Pinta.

The sun descended, the sea grew violet, all we on the _Santa Maria_
gathered for vesper prayer and song. Fray Ignatio’s robe and back-thrown
cowl burned brown against the sea and the sail. One last broad gold
shaft lighted the tall Admiral, his thick white hair, his eagle nose,
his strong mouth. Diego de Arana was big, alert and soldierly; Roderigo
Sanchez had the look of alcalde through half a lifetime. I had seen
Roderigo de Escobedo’s like in dark streets in France and Italy and
Castile, and Pedro Gutierrez wherever was a court. Juan de la Cosa, the
master, stood a keen man, thin as a string. Out of the crowd of mariners
I pick Sancho and Beltran the cook, Ruiz the pilot, William the Irishman
and Arthur the Englishman, and two or three others. And Luis Torres.
The latter was a thinker, and a Jew in blood. He carried it in his face,
considerably more markedly than I carried my grandmother Judith. But his
family had been Christian for a hundred years. Before I left forecastle
for poop I had discovered that he was learned. Why he had turned sailor
I did not then know, but afterwards found that it was for disappointed
love. He knew Arabic and Hebrew, Aristotle and Averroes, and he had a
dry curiosity and zest for life that made for him the wonder of this
voyage far outweigh the danger.

There was a hymn that Fray Ignatio taught us and that we sang at times,
beside the Latin chant. He said that a brother of his convent had
written it and set it to music.

 Thou that art above us,
 Around us, beneath us,
 Thou who art within us,
 Save us on this sea!
 Out of danger,
 Teach us how we may
 Serve thee acceptably!
 Teach us how we may
 Crown ourselves, crowning Thee!


Beltran the cook’s voice was the best, and after him Sancho, and then a
sailor with a great bass, William the Irishman. Fray Ignatio sang like a
good monk, and Pedro Gutierrez like a troubadour of no great weight.
The Admiral sang with a powerful and what had once been a sweet voice.
Currents and eddies of sweetness marked it still. All sang and it made
together a great and pleasurable sound, rolling over the sea to the
_Pinta_ and the Nina, and so their singing, somewhat less in volume,
came to us. All grew dusk, the ships were bat wings sailing low; out
sprang the star to which the needle no longer pointed. The great star
Venus hung in the west like the lantern of some ghostly air ship, very
vast.

 Thou that art above us,
 Around us, beneath us,
 Thou that art within us,
 Save us on this sea!



CHAPTER XIV

WE were a long, long way from Spain. A flight of birds went over us.
They were flying too high for distinguishing, but we did not hold them
to be sea birds. We sounded, but the lead touched no bottom. West and
west and west, pushed by that wind! Late September, and we had left
Palos the third of August.

The wind shifted and became contrary. The sea that for so long had been
glassy smooth took on a roughness. A bird that was surely a forest
bird beaten to us perched upon a stretched rope and uttered three quick
cries. A boy climbed and softly took it from behind. It fluttered in the
Admiral’s two hands. All came to look. Its plumage was blue, its breast
reddish. We wondered, but before we could make it a cage, it strongly
strove and was gone. One flash and all the azure took it to itself.

In the night the waves flattened. Rose-dawn showed smooth sea and
every sail filled again with that westward journeying wind. Yesterday’s
roughness and the bird tossed aboard were as a dream.

A day and a day and a day. As much Ocean-Sea as ever, and Asia a lie,
and alike at this end and that of the vessel a dull despondency, and
Pedro Gutierrez’s wit grown ugly. So naked, so lonely, so indifferent
spread the Sea of Darkness!

Another day and another and another. When half the ship was at the point
of mutiny signs reappeared and thickened. Birds flew over the ships;
one perched beside the Admiral’s banner and sang. More than that, a
wood dove came upon the deck and ate corn that was strewed for it.
“Colombo--Colombo!” quoth the Admiral. “I, too, am ‘dove.’” And he
opened a window and sent forth a “dove” to find if there were land!

Almost the whole ship from Jason down took these two birds for portents.
Fray Ignatio lifted hands. “The Blessed Francis who knew that birds have
souls to save hath sent them!” We passed the drifting branch of a tree.
It had green leaves. The sea ran extremely blue and clear, and half the
ship thought they smelled frankincense, brought on the winds which now
were changeable. At evening rose a great cry of “Land!” and indeed to
one side the sinking sun seemed veritable cliffs with a single mountain
peak. The Admiral, who knew more of sea and air than any two men upon
those ships, cried “Cloud--cloud!” but for a time none believed him.
There sprang great commotion, the _Pinta_ too signaling. Then before our
eyes came a rift in the mountain and the cliffs slipped into the sea.

But now all believed in land ahead. It was as though some one had with
laughter tossed them that assurance over the horizon straight before us.
Every mariner now was emulous to be the lookout, every man kept eyes
on the west. Now sprang clear and real to them the royal promise of ten
thousand maravedies pension to him who first sighted Cipango, Cathay or
India. The Admiral added a prize of a green velvet doublet.

We had come nigh eight hundred leagues.

In the cabin, upon the table he spread Toscanelli’s map, and beside it a
great one like it, of his own making, signed in the corner _Columbus de
Terra Rubra_. The depiction was of a circle, and in the right or
eastern side showed the coasts of Ireland and England, France, Spain and
Portugal, and of Africa that portion of which anything was known. Out in
Ocean appeared the islands gained in and since Prince Henry’s day. Their
names were written,--Madeira, Canaria, Cape de Verde and Azores. West of
these and filling the middle map came Ocean-Sea, an open parchment
field save for here a picture of a great fish, and here a siren and here
Triton, and here the Island of the Seven Cities and here Saint Brandon’s
Isle, and these none knew if they be real or magical! Wide middle map
and River-Ocean! The eye quitting that great void approached the left or
western side of the circle. And now again began islands great and
small with legends written across and around them. The great island was
Cipango, and across the extent of it ran in fine lettering. “Marco Polo
was here. It is the richest of the eastern lands. The houses are roofed
with gold. The people are idolaters. There are spices and pearls,
nutmegs, pepper and precious stones. Very much gold so that the common
people use it as they wish.”

We read, the Admiral seated, we, the great cabin group, standing,
bending over the table. After the islands came mainland. “Cathay” ran
the writing. “Mangi. Here is the seat of the Great Khan. His city is
Cambalu.” South of all this ran other drawings and other legends. “Here,
opposite Africa, near the equator, are islands called Manillas. They
have lodestone, so that no ship with iron can sail to them. Here is Java
of all the spices. Here is great India that the ancients knew.”

“We are bearing toward Cipango,” said the Admiral. “I look first for
small outward islands, where perhaps the folk are uncouth and simple,
and there is little gold.”

And again days passed. When many times upon the _Santa Maria_ and as
often on the _Pinta_ and the _Nina_ some one had cried “Land!” and the
ships been put in commotion and the land melted into air before our
eyes, and another as plausible island or coast formed before us only to
vanish, despair seized us again. Witchcraft and sorcery and monstrous
ignorance, and fooled to our deaths! “West--west--west!” till the west
was hated. The Pinzons thought we should change course. If there were
lands we were leaving them in the north where hung the haze. But the
Madman or the Black Magician, our Italian Admiral, would not hear good
advice! It was Gutierrez’s word, under his breath when the Admiral was
in earshot, and aloud when he was not. “Our Italian--our Italian! Why
did not Italy keep him? And Portugal neither would have him! Castile,
the jade, takes him up!”

Then after absence began again the signs. Flocks of birds went by us. I
saw him watching, and truly these flights did seem to come from south of
west. On the seventh of October he altered course. We sailed southwest.
This day there floated by a branch with purple berries, and we saw
flying fish. Dolphins played about the ship. The very sea felt warm to
the hand, and yet was no oppression, but light and easily breathed air,
fragrant and lifting the spirits.

And now we saw floating something like a narrow board or a wide staff.
The master ordered the boat lowered; we brought it in and it was given
dripping into the Admiral’s hand. “It is carved by man,” he said.
“Look!” Truly it was so, rudely done with bone or flint, but carved by
man with something meant for a picture of a beast and a tree.

We sailed west by south this day and the next. No more man-wrought
driftage came our way, but other signs multiplied. We saw many birds,
the water was strangely warm and clear, when the wind blew toward us it
had a scent, a tone, that cried land breeze! Then came by a branch with
yellow flowers, and upon one a butterfly. After this none doubted, not
Fernando nor any. “Gold flowers--gold flowers--gold, gold!”

This night we lay by so that we should not slip past land in the
darkness. When day came there showed haze south and west. A gentle wind
sang in our rigging. On board the _Santa Maria_, the Pinta and the
Nina all watched for land. Excitement and restlessness took us all.
The Admiral’s eyes burned like deep gray seas. I could read in them the
images behind. _Prester John and the Release of the Sepulchre. The Grand
Khan a tributary Prince. Argosies of gold, silk and spices, sailing
steady, sailing fast over a waterway unblocked by Mahound and his
soldans. All Europe burning bright, rising a rich Queen. Holy Church
with_ _another cubit to her stature. Christopherus Columbus, the
Discoverer, the Enricher, the Deliverer! Queen Isabella, and on her
cheeks a flush of gratitude; all the Spanish court bowing low. All
the friends, the kindred, all so blessed! Sons, brothers; Genoa, and
Domenico Colombo clad in velvet, dining with the Doge_.

Dolphins were all about us; once there rose a cry from the mariners that
they heard singing over the waves. We held breath and listened, but if
they were sirens they ceased their song. But at eve, the sky pale gold,
the water a sapphire field, we ourselves sang mightily our “_Salve
Regina_.”

The Admiral would speak to us. Now all loved him, with golden India
rising to-morrow from the sea, with his wisdom proving itself! He had
this eve a thrilling voice. God had been good to us; who could say
other? This very eve, at Palos, they thought of us. At Santa Maria de
la Rabida, chanting vesper hymn, they prayed for us also. In Cordova the
Queen prayed. In Rome, the Holy Father had us in mind. Would we lessen
ourselves, disappointing so many, and very God, grieving very Christ?
“No! But out of this ship we shall step on this land to come, good men,
true men, servants and sons of Christ in His kingdom. This night, in
India before us, men sigh, ‘We weary of our idols! Why tarrieth true
God?’ There the learned think, bending over their maps, ‘Why doth not
some one put forth, bringing all the lands into one garland?’ They look
to their east whence we come, and they may see in dream tonight these
three ships!” His voice rang. “I tell you these Three Ships shall be
known forever! Your grandchildren’s grandchildren shall say, ‘The _Santa
Maria_, the Pinta and the Nina--and one that was our ancestor sailed in
this one or in that one, to the glory and gain of the world, wherefore
we still make festival of his birthday!’”

At this they stirred, whether from Palos or Huelva or Fishertown. They
looked at him now as though indeed he were great mage, or even apostle.

That evening I heard Roderigo de Escobedo at an enumeration. He seemed
to have committed to memory some Venice list. “Mastic, aloes, pepper,
cloves, mace and cinnamon and nutmeg. Ivory and silk and most fine
cloth, diamonds, balasses, rubies, pearls, sapphires, jacinth and
emeralds. Silver in bulk and gold common as iron with us. Gold--gold!”

Pedro Gutierrez was speaking. “Gold to carry to Spain and pay my debts,
with enough left to go again to court--”

Said Escobedo, “The Admiral saith, ‘No fraud nor violence, quarreling
nor oppression’!”

Gutierrez answered: “The Admiral also thinks to pay his debts! He may
think he will be strict as the Saints, but he will not!”

The Admiral was walking the deck. He stopped beside Juan Lepe who leaned
upon the rail and watched a strange, glistering sea. It was that shining
stuff we see at times at night in certain weather. But to-night Luis
Torres, passing, had said, “Strewn ducats!”

The Admiral and Juan Lepe watched. “Never a sail!” said I. “How strange
a thing is that! Great populous countries that trade among themselves,
and never a sail on this sea rim!”

He drummed upon the rail. “Do not think I have not thought of that! I
looked to meet first a ship or ships. But now I think that truly there
may be many outlying islands without ships. Or there may be a war
between princes, and all ships drawn in a fleet to north or south.
One beats one’s brains--and time brings the solution, and we say, ‘How
simple!’”

Turning his great figure, he mounted to our castle built up from deck,
whence he could see great distances. The wind had freshened; we were
standing to the west; it was behind us again and it pushed us like a
shuttle in a giant’s hand. The night was violet dark and warm; then at
ten the moon rose. Men would not sleep while the ship sailed. A great
event was marching, marching toward us. We thought we caught the music
of it; any moment heralds, banners, might flame at end of road. We were
watching for the Marriage Procession; we were watching for Kings, for
the Pope, for I know not what! But there was certain to be largesse.

I went among the mariners. Sancho met me, a young man whom then and
afterwards I greatly liked. “Well, we’ve had luck, senor! Saint Noah
himself, say I, wasn’t any luckier!”

“Yes, we’ve done well!”

Beltran the cook’s great easy voice rolled in. “Fear’s your only
barnacle, say I!”

Luis Torres said, “When I studied Arabic and the Hebrew, I thought it
was for the pleasure of it. They said around me, ‘How you waste your
time!’ But now some about the Grand Khan should know Arabic. I will be
of use.”

Pedro said, “Well, it has turned out better than any reasonable man
could have expected!” and Fernando, “Yes, it has! Of course there may be
witches. I’ve heard it said there are great necromancers in India!”

“Necromancers! That’s them that show you a thing and then blow it
away--”

I said, “Do you not know that all of us are the only necromancers?”

“Did you see,” asked Sancho, “the glistering in the water? Are we going
to lie to after midnight? Saint George! I would like to plunge in and
swim!”

On poop deck, Diego de Arana called me to him. “Well, Doctor, how goes
it?” He and I rested good friends. I said, “Why, it goes well.”

“I was thinking, watching the moon, how little I ever dreamed, being no
sea-going man, of such a thing as this. Who knows his fate? A man’s a
strange matter!”

“He is a ballad,” I answered. “One stave leads to another and the story
mounts.”

“I cannot think what to-morrow may show us!”

“Nor can I! But it will be important. We enter by a narrow strait great
widths of the future.”

“There will be great changes, doubtless. Our world is growing little.
Everybody feels that we must push out! It isn’t only Spain, but all
kingdoms.”

Pedro Gutierrez joined us. “You are a learned man, Doctor! What like are
the women of Cipango?”

The moon, past the full yet strong enough to silver this vast shield,
rose higher. The sails of the _Pinta_ and the Nina were curves of
pearl, our sails above us pale mountains. The light dimmed our lanterns.
Crowned woman at our prow would be bathed in it as she ran across
Ocean-Sea. It washed our decks, pricked out our moving men. They cast
shadows. The master had served out an extra draught of wine. It was
hardly needed. We were all lifted, with visions drumming in our heads.
Fray Ignatio stood against the mast, and I knew that he felt a pulpit
and was making his sermon. After a time, Diego de Arana and Pedro
Gutierrez moving away, I was alone. Mind and heart tranquilized, and
into them stepped Isabel, and she and I, hand in hand, walked fields of
the west.

The moon shone. The Admiral’s voice came from above us where he watched
from the castle. “Come up here, one or two of you!” Gutierrez was
nearest the ladder. He mounted and I after him, and we stood one on
either hand the Admiral. He pointed south of west. “A light!” His voice
was an ocean. “It is as it should be. I, Christopherus Columbus, have
first seen the Shore of Asia!”

We followed his extended hand. Clear under sail we saw it, dimmed by
the moon, but evident, a light as it were of a fire on a beach. Diego
de Arana came up also and saw it. It was, we thought, more than a league
away, a light that must be on land and made by man. It dwindled, out it
went into night and there ran only plain silver. We waited while a man
might have swam from us to the _Pinta_, then forth it started again, red
star that was no star. Some one below us cried, “Ho, look!” The Admiral
raised his voice, it rang over ship. “Aye! I saw it a time ago, have
seen it thrice! I, the Admiral, saw first.” Men were crowding to
the side to look, then it went out as though a wave had crept up and
drenched it. We gazed and gazed, but it did not come again.

It might have been not land, but a small boat afire. But that is not
probable, and we upon the _Santa Maria_ held that to see burning wood
on shore, though naught showed of that shore itself, was truly first to
view, first of all of us, that land we sought. He did not care for the
ten thousand maravedies, but he cared that it should be said that God
showed it first to him.

The wind pushed us on with the flat of a great hand. Midnight and after
midnight. At the sight of that flame we should have fired our cannon,
but for some reason this was not done. Now the silver silence beyond the
ship was torn across by the _Pinta’s_ gun. She fired, then came near
us. “Land! Land!” Now we saw it under the moon, just lifting above the
sea,--lonely, peaceful, dark.

It was middle night. The Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Nina went
another league, then took in sail and came to anchor.



CHAPTER XV

THE Admiral set a watch and commanded all beside to sleep. To-morrow
might be work and wakefulness enough! The ship grew silent. With the
_Pinta_ and the Nina it lay under the moon, and all around was silver
water.

He did not sleep this night, I am sure. At all times he was a provident
and wakeful sea king who knew his ship through and through. His habit
was light sleep and not many hours of that. He studied his books at
night while others slept. Lying in his bed, with eyes open or eyes shut,
he watched form in the darkness lands across sea.

This night so far from Europe passed. The sense of day at hand wrapped
us. In the east arose a cool, a stern and indifferent pallor. It
changed, it flushed. We carried in the _Santa Maria_ a cock and hens.
Cock crew.

Christopherus Columbus had Italian love for fit, harmonious noting of
vast events. This morning the trumpeter also of the Santa Maria waked
those who slept. The clear and joyful notes were heard by the Pinta and
the Pinta, too, answered with music. The Nina took it from her. Beltran
the cook and his helpers gave us a stately breakfast. The Admiral came
forth from his cabin in a dress that a prince might have worn, crimson
and tawny, and around his throat a golden chain. Far and near rushed
into light, for in these lands and seas the dawn makes no tarrying. It
is almost night, then with a great clap of light it is day.

We had voyaged, all thought, to Asia over an untrodden way. Every eye
turned to land. Not haze, not dissolving cloud, not a magic nothing in
the thought, but land, land, solid, palpable, like Palos strand! Had we
seen a great port city, had we seen ships crowding harbor, had we seen
a citadel on some height, armed and frowning, had we marked temples and
palaces and banners afloat in this divine cool wind of morning, many
aboard us would have had now no surprise, would have cried, “Of course,
I really knew it, though for the fun of it I pretended otherwise!”

But others among us could not expect such as this after the quiet night;
no light before us save that one so soon quenched, no stir of boat
at all or large or small; an unearthly quiet, a low land still as a
sleeping marsh under moon.

The light brightened. The water about us turned a blue that none there
had ever seen, so turquoise, so cerulean, so penetrable by the eye!
Before us gentle surf broke on a beach bone-white. The beach with little
rise met woodland; thick it seemed and of a vivid greenness and fairly
covering the island. It was island, masthead told us, who saw blue
ribbon going around. Moreover, there were two others, no greater, upon
the horizon. Nor, though the woodland seemed thick as pile of velvet,
was it desolate isle. We made out in three places light plumes of smoke.
Now some one uttered a cry, “Men!”

They were running out of the wood, down upon the white beach. There
might be a hundred.

“Naked men! They are dark--They are negroes!”--“Or magicians!”

The Admiral lifted his great voice. “Mariners all! India and Cathay are
fringed with islands, as are many parts of Europe. A dozen of you have
sailed among the Greek islands. There may be as many here as those. This
is a small island and its folk simple. They are not Negroes, but the
skin of the Indian is darker than ours, and that of Cipango and Cathay
is yellow. As for clothing, in all warm lands the simpler folk wear
little. But as for magicians, there may be magicians among them as
there are among all peoples, but it is falseness and absurdity to speak
of all as magicians! Nonsense and cowardice! The man who cried that goes
not ashore to-day!”

Not Great India before us nor Golden Cipango! But it was land--land--it
was solid, there were folk! How long had flowed the sea around us, for
this was the twelfth of October, five weeks since Gomera and above two
months since Palos had sunk away and we had heard the last faint bell of
La Rabida! And there had been strong doubt if ever we should see again a
white beach, or a tree, or a kindly fire ashore, or any men but those of
our three ships, or ever another woman or a child. But land--land!
Here was land and green woods and crowds of strange folk. The mariners
laughed, and the tears stood in their eyes and friends embraced. And
they grew mightily respectful to the Admiral.

So many were to go ashore in the first boat, and so many in the second.
The _Pinta_ and the Nina were lowering their boats. Our hidalgos aboard,
Diego de Arana, Roderigo Sanchez and the rest, had also fine apparel
with them--seeing that the Grand Khan would have a court and our
Sovereigns must be rightly represented--and this morning they suited
themselves only less splendidly than did the Admiral. The great banner
of Castile and Leon was ready for carrying. Trumpet, drum and fife
should land. Fray Ignatio was ready--oh, ready! His liquid dark eyes had
an unearthly look. Gifts were being sorted out. There were aboard rich
things, valued in any land of ours, for gifts to the Grand Khan and his
ministers, or the Emperor of Cipango and his. For Queens and Empresses
and Ladies also. And there was a wondrous missal for Prester John did
we find him! But this was evidently a little island afar, and these were
naked, savage men. The expedition was provident. It had for all. The
Portuguese, our great navigators, had taught what the naked African
liked. A basket stood at hand filled with pieces of colored cloth,
beads, caps, hawk bells, fishhooks, toys of sorts. For that we might
have trouble, four harquebus men and four crossbows were going. The
_Santa Maria_ carried two cannon. Now at the Admiral’s signal, one of
these was discharged. It was a voice not heard before in this world.
If he wished to produce awe that should accompany him like the ancient
pillars of cloud and fire, he had success. When the smoke cleared we saw
the wild men prostrate upon the ivory beach as though a scythe had cut
them down. They lay like fallen grain, then rose and made haste for the
wood. We could thinly hear their shouting.

Christopherus Columbus descended into the boat of the _Santa Maria_,
Fray Ignatio after him. Diego de Arana, Roderigo Sanchez, Escobedo,
Gutierrez and Juan Lepe the physician followed. Juan de la Cosa stayed
with the ship, it not being wise to take away all authority. Our armed
men came after and the rowers. We drew off and the small boat filled.
Boats of the Pinta and the Nina joined us. The great banner over us, the
Admiral’s hand upon its standard, we rowed for Asia.

Nearer and nearer. The water hung about us, plain marvel, not dark blue,
but turquoise and clear as air. We could see the strange, bright-hued
fish and the white bottom. The air breathed Maytime, and now we thought
we could tell the spices. And so ivory-white it was, the long curved
beach, and so gayly bright the emerald of the wood! There were many
palms with other trees we knew not. It was low, the island, and it shone
before us silver and green, and the trees moved gently in a wind more
sweet, we thought, than any Andalusian zephyr. Pedro Gutierrez stared.
“Paradise--Paradise!”

It was not what we had looked for, but it was good enough. It seemed
divine, that morning!

Nearer we drew, nearer. The beach was now bare. We made out the dark,
naked folk at edge of the wood, in tree shadows, watching us. Were they
strange to us, be sure we were stranger to them!

The azure water, so marvelous, met that sand white like crushed bone,
strewn with delicate shells. Never was wind so sweet as that which blew
this morning! Green plumes, the palms brushed the sky; there seemed to
us fruit trees also, with satin stems and wide-laden boughs. When we
looked over shoulder the _Santa Maria_, the Pinta and the Nina each rode
double, mast and hull in sky, mast and hull in mirror sea. Something
strange and divine was about us, over us. We wished to laugh, we wished
to weep.

Boat head touched clean sand. The oars rested. Christopherus Columbus
the Admiral stepped from boat first and alone, all waiting as was right.
He took with him the banner of Spain. He walked a few yards, then struck
the standard into the sand. There was air enough to open the folds,
to make them float and fly. Kneeling, he bowed himself and kissed the
earth. We heard his strong voice praying. “_Domine Deus, aeterne et
omnipotens, sacro tuo verbo coelum, et terra, et mare, creasti_--”

We also bowed our heads. He rose and cried to Fray Ignatio. The
Franciscan was the next to enter this new world. After him sprang out
Diego de Arana and the others. The Pinzons, too, were now leaving their
boats. All were at last gathered about the Admiral, between blue water
and green wood. Fifty Spaniards, we gathered there, and we heard our
fellows left upon the ships cheering us. We kneeled and Fray Ignatio
thanked God for us.

We rose, drew long breath and looked about us, then turned to the
Admiral with loud praise and gratulation. He was girded with a sword,
cross-hilted. Drawing it, he set its point in the sand. Then with one
hand upon the cross, and one lifted and wrapped in the banner folds, he,
with a great voice, proclaimed Spain’s ownership. To the King and Queen
of the Spains all lands unchristian and idolatrous that we might find
and use and hold, all that were clearly away from the line of the King
of Portugal, drawn for him by the Holy Father! In the name of God, in
the name of Holy Church, in the name of Isabella, Queen of Castile,
and Ferdinand, King of Aragon and their united Power, amen and amen! He
motioned to the trumpeter who put trumpet to his lips and blew a blast
to the north and the south and the east and the west. At the sound there
seemed to come a cry from the fringing wood, a cry of terror.

The island was ours,--if all this could make it ours.

A piece of scarlet cloth spread upon the sand had heaped upon it
necklaces of glass and three or four hawk bells with other toys. We
placed it there, then stood back. At the Admiral’s command the harquebus
and crossbow men laid their weapons down, though watchful eye was kept.
But no arrow flights had come from the wood, and as far as could be seen
some kind of lance, not formidable looking, was their only weapon. Next
the Admiral made our fifer to play a merry and peaceful air.

We had noted a clump of trees advanced into the sand and we thought that
the bolder men were occupying this. Now a man started out alone, a young
man by the looks of him, drawn as he was against the white sand, and
a paladin, for he marched to meet alone he knew not what or whom.
“Blackamoor!” exclaimed De Arana beside me, but as he came nearer we saw
that the dead blackness was paint, laid in a fantastic pattern upon his
face and body. Native hue of skin, as we came presently to find in the
unpainted, was a pleasing red-brown. He advanced walking daintily and
proudly, knowing that his people were watching him. Single Castilian,
single Moor, had advanced so, many a time, between camps, or between
camp and fortress.

Halting beside the red cloth he stooped and turned over the trinkets.
When he straightened himself he had in hand a string of great beads,
rose and blue and green. He fingered these, seemed about to put the
necklet on, then refrained as too daring. Laying it gently back upon the
scarlet he next took up a hawk bell. These bells, as is known, ring very
clear and sweet. I was afterwards told that the Portuguese had noted
their welcome among the African people. There was no nail’s breadth of
information that this man Columbus could not use! He had used this, and
in a list for just possibly found savage Indians had put down, “good
number of hawk bells.”

The red man painted black, took up the hawk bell. It chimed as he moved
it. He dropped it on the sand and gave back a step, then picked it up
and set it tinkling. His face, the way in which he moved, said “Music
from heaven!”

The Admiral motioned to Fray Ignatio to move toward him. That good man
went gently forward. The youth gave back, but then braced himself, under
the eyes of his nation. He stood. The Franciscan put out a gowned arm
and a long, lean kindly hand. The youth, naked as the bronze of a
god, hesitated, raised his own arm, let it drop upon the other’s. Fray
Ignatio, speaking mild words, brought him across and to the Admiral.
The latter, tallest of us all and greatly framed, lofty of port, dressed
with magnificence, silver-haired, standing forth from his officers and
men, the banner over him, would be taken by any for Great Captain, chief
god of these gods, and certes, at the first they thought that we were
gods! The Indian put his hands to his face, shrank like a girl and came
slowly to his knees and lower yet until his forehead rested upon the
earth. The Admiral lifted him, calling him “son.”

Those of his kind watching from the wood now sent forth a considerable
deputation. There came to us a dozen naked men, fairly tall,
well-shaped, skin of red copper, smeared often with paint in bars and
disks and crescents. Their hair was not like the Negro’s, the only other
naked man our time knew, but was straight, black, somewhat coarse, not
bushy but abundant, cut short with the men below the ear. They are
a beardless people. Our beards are an amazement to them, as are our
clothes. A fiercely quarrelsome folk, a peace-keeping, gentle folk will
sound their note very soon. These belonged to the latter kind. Their
lances were not our huge knightly ones, nor the light, hard ones of the
Moors. They were hardly more than stout canes, the head not iron--they
had no iron--but flint or bone shaped by a flint knife. Where the paint
was not splashed or patterned over them, their faces could be liked very
well. Lips were not over full, the nose slightly beaked, the forehead
fairly high, the eyes good. They did not jabber nor move idly but kept
measure and a pleasant dignity. They seemed gentle and happy. So were
they when we found them.

Their speech sounded of no tongue that we knew. Luis Torres and I alike
had knowledge of Arabic. We had no Persian that might be nearer yet, but
Arabia being immemorially caravan-knit with India, it was thought that
it might be understood. But these bare folk had no notion of it, nor
of the Hebrew which Luis tried next. The Latin did not do, the Greek
of which I had a little did not do. But there is an old, old language
called Gesture. If, wherever there is a common language there is one
people, then in end and beginning surely we are one folk around the
earth!

We were to be friends with these islanders. “Friends first and last!”
 believed the Admiral. Indeed, all felt it so, this bright day. If they
were not all we had imaged, sailing to them, yet were they men, and
unthreatening, novel, very interesting to us with their island and their
marvelous blue water. All was heightened by sheer joy of landing, and
of finding--finding something! And what we found was not horrible nor
deathful, but bright, promising, scented like first fruits.

To them we found we were gods! They moved about us with a kind of
ceremony of propitiation. Two youths came with a piece of bark carried
like a salver, piled with fruits and with thin cakes of some scraped
root. Another brought a parrot, a great green and rose bird that at
once talked, though we could not understand his words. Two older men had
balls, as large as melons, of some wound stuff that we presently found
to be cotton loosely twisted into yarn. The Admiral’s eyes glowed. “Now
if any bring spices or pepper--” But they did not, nor did they bring
gold.

All these things they put down before us, in silence or with words that
we thought were petitions, moving not confusedly but with a manner of
ritual. The Admiral took a necklace and placed it round the throat of
the young man who first had dared, and in his hand put a hawk bell. That
was enough for himself to do, who was Viceroy. Three of us finished the
distribution. They who had brought presents were given presents. All
would have us go with them to their village, just behind the trees. A
handful of men we left with the boats and the rest of us crossed sand.
Harquebuses and crossbows went with us, but we had no need of them. The
island apparently followed peace, and its folk greatly feared to give
offense to gods from the sky. Above the ships held a range of pearly
clouds, out of which indeed one might make strange lands and forms.
The Indians--Christopherus Columbus called them “Indians”--pointed from
ships to cloud. They spoke with movements of reverence. “You have come
down--you have come down!” We understood them, though their words were
not ours.

Now the greenwood rose close at hand. The trees differed, the woven
thickness of it, the color and blossom, from any wood at home. A space
opened before us, and here was the village of these folk,--round huts
thatched with palm leaves, set on no streets, but at choice under trees.
Earth around was trodden hard, but the green woods pressed close. Here
and there showed garden patches with plants whose names and uses we knew
not. Now we came upon women and children. Like the men the women were
naked. Well-shaped and comely, with long, black, braided hair, they
seemed to us gentle, pleasing and fearless. The children were a crew
that any might love.

Time lacks to say all that we did and heard and guessed this day upon
this island! It was first love after long weeks at sea, and our cramped
ships and all our great uncertainty! If it was not what we had expected,
still here it was, tangible land that never had been known, wonderful
to us, giving us already rich narrative for Palos and Huelva and
Fishertown, for Cordova and the Queen and King. We were sure now that
other land was to be met, so soon as we sailed a reasonable distance to
meet it. Under the horizon would be land surely, and surely of an import
that this small island lacked, like Paradise though it seemed to us
this day! Any who looked at the Admiral saw that he would make no long
tarrying here. He named this island San Salvador, but we would not wait
in San Salvador.

This day in shifts, all our men were brought ashore, each division
having three hours of blessed land. So good was earth under foot, so
good were trees, so delectable the fruit, so lovely to move and run and
watch every moving, running, walking thing! And these good, red-brown
folk, naked it was true, but mannerly after their own fashion, who
thought every seaman a god, and the ship boys sons of gods! And we also
were good and mannerly, the _Santa Maria_, the Pinta and the Nina. I
look back and I see a strange, a boyish and a happy day.

The sun was westering. We felt the exhaustion of a long holiday with
novelties so many that at last the senses did not answer. Perhaps the
Indians felt it too. Often and often have I seen great wisdom guide the
Admiral. An hour before approaching night might have said “Go!” he took
us one and all back to the ships. “_Salve Regina_” was a sound that
evening to hear, and afterwards it was to sleep, sleep,--tired as from
the Fair at Seville!



CHAPTER XVI

AT first, the day before, we had not made out that the Indians had
boats. Later, straying here and there, we had seen them drawn upon the
shore and covered with boughs of trees. They called them “canoes”, made
them, large and small, out of trunks of trees, hollowed by fire, and
with their stone knives. We had seen one copper knife. Asked about that,
they pointed to the south and seemed to say that yonder dwelled men who
had all they wished of most things.

From dark the east grew pale, from pallor put on roses. This day no
mariner grumbled at the call to awake. Here still lay our Fortunate
Isle, our San Salvador; here our ivory beach, our green wood. Up went
the little curls of smoke.

We had breakfast. So great was now the deference to him who three days
ago had been “madman” and “black magician”, “dreaming fool” and “spinner
without thread!” Now it was “Admiral”, “Excellency”, and “What shall we
do next?” and “What is your opinion, sir?”

The immediate thing to do proved to be to come forth from cabin and mark
the beach thronging with thrice the number of yesterday, and the canoes
putting off to us. We counted eight. Only one was a long craft, holding
twenty men; the others came in cockle boats, with one or two or three.
Not only canoes, but they came swimming, men and boys, all a dark grace
in the cerulean, lucid sea. They were so fearless--for we came from
heaven and would not harm them. We were going to make them rich; we were
going to “save” them.

A score perhaps were helped aboard the _Santa Maria_. The Pinta, the
Nina, had others. They were like children, touching, staring, excitedly
talking and gesturing among themselves, or gazing in a kind of fixed
awe, asking of the least sailor with all reverence, bowing themselves
before the Admiral, the over-god. The Admiral moved richly dressed, rapt
and benignant, yet sparing a part of himself to keep all order, measure,
rightness on the ship, and another part to find out with keen pains,
“What of other lands? What of folk who must be your superiors?”

They had brought offerings. Half a dozen parrots perched around, very
gorgeously colored, loquacious in a speech we did not know. We had
stacks of the large round thin cakes baked on stones which afterwards
we called cassava, and great gourds, “calabashes” filled with fruit, and
balls of cotton in a rude thread. We gave beads, bits of cloth, little
purses, and the small bells that caused extravagant delight. But ever
the Admiral looked for signs of gold, for he must find for princes and
nobles and merchants gold or silver, or precious stones or spice, or all
together. If he found them not, half his fortunes fell; a half-wind only
would henceforth fill his sails.

And at last came in a canoe with three a young Indian who wore in his
ear a knob of gold. Roderigo Sanchez saw this first and brought him to
the Admiral. The latter, taking up an armlet of green glass and a hawk
bell, touched the gold in the ear. “Do you trade?” Glad enough was the
Indian to trade. It lay in the Admiral’s palm, a piece of gold as great
as a filbert.

Juan Lepe watched him make inquisition, Diego de Arana, Sanchez and
Escobedo at his elbow. He did it to admiration, with look, gesture and
tone ably translating his words. “Gold--gold?” The Indian said, or we
put down in this wise what he said, “Harac.”

Was there more harac on the island? We would give heavenly things for
harac. The Indian was doubtful; he thought proudly that he had the only
harac. “Where did he get it?” He indicated the south.

“Little island like this one?”

“No. Great land. Harac there in many ears. Much harac.”

So we understood him. “Cipango!” breathed the Admiral. “Or neighbor to
Cipango, increasingly rich and civilized as we go.”

He took a case of small boxes, each box filled with merchandise of spice
which he desired. Cinnamon, nutmeg, pepper, saffron, cloves and others.
He made the islander smell and taste. “Had they aught like these?”

The Indian seemed to say they had not, but would like to have. He looked
about for something with which to trade, a parrot, or heap of cakes, or
ball of cotton. I thought that it was the box of boxes that he extremely
wished, but the Admiral thought it was the spicery, and that he must
have known them wherever he got the gold. “Were they found yonder?”

The Admiral stretched arm out over blue sea and the Indian followed his
gesture. He shot out his own arm, “South--southwest--west,” nodded the
Admiral. “Many islands, or the mainland. Gates open before us!”

“Had the Indian been to these lands?” No, it seemed, but one had come in
a boat, wearing this knob of gold, and he had told them. Was he living?
No, he was not living. What kind of a person was he? Such as us?
Emphatically no. Not such as us! Much, we gathered, as was the Indian
himself. “Pearls have come from Queen’s neck to Queen’s neck,” quoth the
Admiral, “by a thousand rude hands and twisting ways!”

There was one woman among the visitors to the _Santa Maria_, a young
woman, naked, freely moving and smiling. Eyes dwelled on her, eyes
followed her. She was with an Indian who might be brother or husband.
The Admiral gave her a worked, Moorish scarf. She tied it about her
head, and the bright ends fell down beside her long, black, braided
hair. None touched her, but they were woman-starved, and they looked at
her hungrily. She had beauty in her way, and a kind of innocence both
frank and shy. She was like a doe in the green forest, come silently
upon at dawn.

Fed full of marvel at last, these Indians left us. But no sooner
had they reached land and told of great kindness on the part of the
inhabitants of heaven than other canoes and other swimmers put forth.
This might go on all day, so we checked it by ourselves going ashore.

This day we filled our water casks and took aboard much fruit and all
the cakes that they brought us. Moreover we explored the island, finding
two villages of a piece with the first, and in the middle land a fair
pool of water. This day like yesterday was blissful wine.

All blessed Christopherus Columbus. No man now but, for a while, did his
bidding with an open heart.

In the morning we sailed away, not without plentiful promises of return.
When we put up our white sails they cried out and pointed to the cloud
sierra. No! We would not go back to heaven--or if we did so we would
come again, loving so our gentle friends upon earth! We sailed, and in
all our after wanderings we neve

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