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.
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