Christopher Columbus

“ Of the New World, about the possibility of which Columbus is beginning to dream as he sails the Mediterranean, there was no knowledge and hardly any thought. Though new in the thoughts of Columbus, it was very old in itself; generations of men had lived and walked and spoken and toiled there, ever since men came upon the earth; sun and shower, the thrill of the seasons, birth and life and death, had been visiting it for centuries and centuries. And it is quite possible that, long before even the civilisation that produced Columbus was in its dawn, men from the Old World had journeyed there. ”

“ Cloud shadows following a shimmer of sunlit ripples; lines and runes traced on the surface of a blank calm; salt laughter of purple furrows with the foam whipping off them; tides and eddies, whirls, overfalls, ripples, breakers, seas mountains high-they are but movements and changing expressions on an eternal countenance that once held his gaze and wonder, as it will always hold the gaze and wonder of those who follow the sea.
So much of the man Christopher Columbus, who once was and no longer is ”

“ Columbus may have been the greatest genius in the world; very possibly they admitted it; but in the meanwhile Spain was resounding with the cries of the impoverished colonists who had returned from his ocean Paradise. No doubt the Sovereigns ignored them as much as they possibly could; but when it came to ragged emaciated beggars coming in batches of fifty at a time and sitting in the very courts of the Alhambra, exhibiting bunches of grapes and saying that that was all they could afford to live upon since they had come back from the New World, some notice had to be taken of it. ”

“ It has been my agreeable and lighter task to test and assay the masses of bed-rock fact thus excavated by the historians for traces of the particular ore which I have been seeking. In fact I have tried to discover, from a reverent examination of all these monographs, essays, histories, memoirs, and controversies concerning what Christopher Columbus did, what Christopher Columbus was; believing as I do that any labour by which he can be made to live again, and from the dust of more than four hundred years be brought visibly to the mind’s eye, will not be entirely without use and interest. ”

“ In a word, what matters most is a man’s behaviour, not as an admiral, or a discoverer, or a viceroy, or a courtier, but as a man. In this respect Columbus’s character rings true. If he was little on little occasions, he was also great on great occasions. The inner history of his fourth voyage, if we could but know it and could take all the circumstances into account, would probably reveal a degree of heroic endurance that has never been surpassed in the history of mankind. ”

“ Age was rapidly making its advances upon Columbus when he undertook his fourth and last voyage of discovery. He had already numbered sixty-six years, and they were years filled with care and trouble, in which age outstrips the march of time. His constitution, originally vigorous in the extreme, had been impaired by hardships and exposures in every clime, and silently preyed upon by the sufferings of the mind. His frame, once powerful and commanding, and retaining a semblance of strength and majesty even in its decay, was yet crazed by infirmities and subject to paroxysms of excruciating pain. ”

“ It is our solemn duty, as Americans, to take a warm interest in Christopher Columbus, for the reason that he had the good taste and judgment to discover our beloved country. Efforts have frequently been made to deprive him of that honor. It has been urged that he was not the first man who crossed the Atlantic, that he never saw the continent of North America, and that he was not the original discoverer of South America. Most of this is undoubtedly true. It is now generally conceded the Norwegians landed on the coast of New England about six hundred years before Columbus was born ”

“ The life and achievements of Christopher Columbus demonstrate how powerful and lasting an influence one individual can have on the course of human history. Although great explorers reached the shores of this continent both before and after Columbus, few have captured the American imagination as he has. Perhaps because we have always been an adventurous people, eager for challenge and change, we feel a special affinity for this extraordinary man who left the safety of known waters to pursue his vision across the ocean to the threshold of a new world. ”

“ But Christopher Columbus had grown to be a very wise and thoughtful man, and from all he could learn from the maps of his father-in-law and the books which he read, and from the long talks which he had with some other learned men, he grew more and more certain that the world was round like an orange, and that by sailing westward from the coast of Portugal one could gradually go round the world and find at last the wonderful land of Cathay, the strange country which lay far beyond the sea, the accounts of which had so thrilled him as a boy. ”

“ So much of the man Christopher Columbus, who once was and no longer is; perished, to the last bone and fibre of him, off the face of the earth, and living now only by virtue of such truth as there was in him; who once manfully, according to the light that he had, bore Christ on his shoulders across stormy seas, and found him often, in that dim light, a heavy and troublesome burden ”

“ CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AND THE NEW WORLD OF HIS DISCOVERY A NARRATIVE BY FILSON YOUNG Volume 4 CHAPTER IV THE HOUR OF TRIUMPH From the moment when Columbus set foot on Spanish soil in the spring of 1493 he was surrounded by a fame and glory which, although they were transient, were of a splendour such as few other men can have ever experienced. He had not merely discovered a country, he had discovered a world. He had not merely made a profitable expedition; he had brought the promise of untold wealth to the kingdom of Spain. ”

“ Almost two years passed in this way and still Columbus staid in Spain. At last the king and queen said he might go if he would not go near Hayti and would be sure to find other and better gold lands.
Columbus did not relish being told where to go and where not to go like this; but he promised. And on the ninth of May, 1502, with four small caravels and one hundred and fifty men, Christopher Columbus sailed from Cadiz on his fourth and last voyage to the western world.
He was now fifty-six years old. That is not an age at which we would call any one an old man. ”

“ Columbus was no longer, in public estimation, the tedious foreigner who ought to be sent out of the country at any cost; he was one of the most remarkable men in Spain, who deserved all sorts of honors. There were any number of men who now recollected that they had always said he was a great man and would certainly discover a first-class continent, and there were very few persons in all Palos who were not confident that the encouragement which they had given to Columbus had been one of the chief causes of his success. ”

“ So that there is a profound symbolism in those raying beams that now, night after night, month by month, and year after year, shine out across the sea from Watling’s Island in the direction of the Old World.
In the preparations for this voyage, and in the conduct and accomplishment of it, the personality of the man Columbus stands clearly revealed. He was seen at his best, as all men are who have a chance of doing the thing for which they are best fitted. The singleness of aim that can accomplish so much is made manifest in his dogged search for means with which to make his voyage ”

“ This fact of the advanced age of Columbus throws quite a new coloring over his character and history. How much more extraordinary is the ardent enthusiasm which sustained him through his long career of solicitation, and the noble pride with which he refused to descend from his dignified demands, and to bargain about his proposition, though life was rapidly wasting in delays. How much more extraordinary is the hardihood with which he undertook repeated voyages into unknown seas, amidst all kinds of perils and hardships ”

“ Columbus never forgot his old home at Genoa, and the most precious treasures of the proud city are the documents which her illustrious son confided to her charge, and the letters in which he expressed his affection for his native town. Columbus was a man to reverence, but he was still more a man to love.
The great discoverer's genius was a gift which is only produced once in an age, and it is that which has given rise to the enthusiastic celebration of the fourth centenary of his achievement. To geographers and sailors the careful study of his life will always be useful and instructive. ”

“ Then it cannot be forgotten that, in spite of the direct and repeated commands of Queen Isabella, Columbus sent cargo after cargo of slaves to Spain. He may have been very sorry to see the natives oppressed by Spaniards whom he disliked, but he certainly oppressed them quite as vigorously as did any of his successors. The contrast between his pious and humane protestations and his acts as an oppressor and a slave-trader is not easily explicable if we adopt the usual theory that he was one of the most sincere and noble of men. ”

“ He does not deceive us! We fools are compromising the safety of all by quenching this light. He alone can get us through this business—that was the human instinct which responded to the look and bearing of Columbus at the moment when he was wholly lost, and when his life's work, his great voyage almost accomplished, was also to all appearance lost. ”

“ It is almost all the fancy of a wise man who has studied it out for himself, and says he believes there was such a city. But he does not really know it as we know of the city of Isabella, and so we must still say that Christopher Columbus really discovered America and built the first fort and the first city on its shores—although he thought he was doing all this in Asia, on the shores of China or Japan. ”

“ Among the various attempts to injure Columbus by those who were envious of his fame, was one intended to destroy all his merit as an original discoverer. It was said that he had received information of the existence of land in the western parts of the ocean from a tempest-tossed pilot, who had been driven there by violent easterly winds, and who on his return to Europe, had died in the house of Columbus, leaving in his possession the chart and journal of his voyage, by which he was guided to his discovery. ”

“ Columbus was struggling manfully with difficulties that were already beginning to be too much for him. The Man from Genoa, with his guiding star of faith in some shore beyond the mist and radiance of the West—see into what strange places and to what strange occupations this star has led him! The blue visionary eyes, given to seeing things immediately beyond the present horizon, must fix themselves on accounts and requisitions, on the needs of idle, aristocratic, grumbling Spaniards ”

“ When the Indians saw that planet restored to its brightness, and rolling in all its beauty through the firmament, they overwhelmed the admiral with thanks for his intercession, and repaired to their homes, joyful at having escaped such great disasters. Regarding Columbus with awe and reverence, as a man in the peculiar favor and confidence of the Deity, since he knew upon earth what was passing in the heavens, they hastened to propitiate him with gifts; supplies again arrived daily at the harbor, and from that time forward, there was no want of provisions. ”

“ But there can be little doubt that this raising the curtain of the unknown, this glimpse of new countries, gave a keen stimulus to the researches of geographers, and, in fact, set the fashion of discovery. Men's minds were drawn into this special channel; and it remained for Christopher Columbus first to form a sound theory out of the conflicting views of the cosmographers, and finally to carry out that theory with the boldness and resolution which have made his name one of those beacon-fires which carry on from period to period the tidings of the world's great history through successive ages. ”

“ His benefactor had returned to Spain apparently under a cloud of disgrace; a long interval had elapsed without tidings from him; he considered him a fallen man, and began to devise how he might profit by his downfall. He was intrusted with an office inferior only to that of the Adelantado; the brothers of Columbus were highly unpopular; he imagined it possible to ruin them, both with the colonists and with the government at home, and by dextrous cunning and bustling activity to work his way into the command of the colony. ”

“ There is very much to be said in favor of the theory that Columbus is a personification of the Sun, but that theory cannot be accepted either by a biographer or by any patriotic American. The one would have to put his biography of the Great Admiral in the fire, and the other would lose all certainty as to whether America had ever been discovered. We must resolve to believe in the reality of Columbus, no matter what learned sceptics may tell us; and we shall find no difficulty in so doing if we found our belief on a good strong prejudice instead of reasonable arguments. ”

“ Well would it have been for Spain had those who followed in the track of Columbus possessed his sound policy and liberal views. The New World, in such cases, would have been settled by pacific colonists, and civilized by enlightened legislators; instead of being overrun by desperate adventurers, and desolated by avaricious conquerors.
Columbus was a man of quick sensibility, liable to great excitement, to sudden and strong impressions, and powerful impulses. He was naturally irritable and impetuous, and keenly sensible to injury and injustice ”