up by himself in his journals: the world consists of Europe, Africa and Asia (therefore about half its real size) It is composed of six parts of dry land and one part water exactly.
The disagreement between his view and that current at the time lay therefore in this: both naturally ignored
the existence of the Americas, but whereas Columbus believed that Asia was quite a short westward journey from Portugal, the rest were certain that it was terribly far. Between the two continents in this direction all were agreed there must lie certain islands—peopled with saints and immortals according to Christopher’s books—like Madeira, or the Azores in the more current opinion. In a far more serious degree the Columbian legend misrepresents, under-estimates, the contemporary
seaman. So far from standing the egg of exploration on its end, except as to success, Columbus was but one of a whole population of explorers. The coast towns of
Portugal, Liguria, and Spain were full of hardy seamen lit up with the ambition to explore. Every port was full of stories of what was almost daily being done to enlarge the map, and of plans for new raids on the unknown. It is difficult to estimate, for a curious reason, the true amount of what was known, but it was certainly enough to place Christopher’s favourite reading in the class of children’s books to a large &ite. The Portuguese in particular had been trading far down the Guinea coast; they had
discovered Madeira, the Canaries, and organised a profitable trade with them. Four years before the
expedition of Columbus, Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope and turned back in sight of the
passage to India. But besides all the notable discoveries that had been published there were undoubtedly others, the secret of which was the strictly guarded property of the great trading houses and banks,
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which then as now were not in the habit of blabbing all they knew, that they had gained in the course of
the exercise of their business and which was of use to them. It is from scraps of information dropped by the returned captains and agents of such concerns, eagerly shared by the savants of the day, that those wonderful maps were drawn, which amidst a banal and bookish distortion often show details amazing and mysterious in their apparent anachronism. Thus while Columbus was still hawking his father’s cloth over the Genoese foothills, Pietro Toscanelli, the learned Florentine, had already inserted the island of Cuba, under the name of Antilia, on his best maps.
The impulsion behind this exploration-fever, which Columbus contracted, was partly the rising power of the Mahommedan Turks, which barred off the eastward land route which the Italian trading Republics had used for generations; and the European shortage of gold.
Economic historians have setded in their own mysterious way that there was no more than four million pounds’
worth of gold in the whole of Europe at this time, coinage and ornament, and this was rapidly diminishing, by
natural usage and by the drain of such eastern trade as remained. The only sources of supply were washings in Saxony and Spain, so miserable that they were abandoned forever after the discovery of America. An irresistible trinity of reasons pushed states and financiers to try the minutest possibilities of finding new supplies of the metal: to pay for a decisive war against the Turk and the
Mahommedans, to pay for the Eastern luxury trade
(portable goods of European manufacture with a market in the highly civilised East in any case lacking) and for the currencies. The prize of discovery was in short the salvation as well as the mastery of Europe; and in less comprehended form it infected seamen, captains, and, like Columbus,
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those whose connection with ships was more or less indirect.
Those who—under the influence of Christopher’s own lies and bluff, to be sure—have made him out the
solitary captain of his age, the great navigator standing in lonely advance of the science, imagination, and daring of his times have missed his real glory. It is that of all
his last voyage it is very doubtful if he could even use a quadrant. He knew no more of navigation than any able- bodied seaman. He was incapable by himself of fixing the latitude and longitude of his discoveries. At the time of his first expedition he had no experience of commanding men, and he never learnt it. By his own policy he had cut
himself off from any national advantage; if ever a man played a solo hand against the social universe it was Columbus.
So his was the triumph of the Unqualified, the stigma of the adventurer that ordered Society hates the worst, the man who pushed his way in and did what others with the right were soberly, competendy, conscientiously planning to do; the patron example of the crank and the amateur. In her dealings with him Fate snubbed all the worths and competencies.
We have seen his social policy. Its firstfruits were to win him a rich or at any rate a society bride. On the strength of his “ family connections ” he was introduced in Lisbon to Filepa Moniz Perestrello, whose father was governor of Porto Santo, the companion island of Madeira. Perestrello owed this position to the fact that his two sisters were the mistresses of Cardinal de Noronha, Archbishop of Lisbon, all-powerful at court; the nobility Christopher deceived was therefore highly genuine. His father-in-law had a good library of travel books. Christopher used it; on the
margin of Pius IPs Historia rerum
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ubique gestarum, the compendium from which the declaration on the roundness of the world is taken, is written in his hand: “ India produces many things, aromatic spices, quantities of precious stones, and
mountains of gold.” The corner boys of Florence knew as much ; in their “ Song of the merchants who return home rich ” the chorus went:
From the far region of Calcutta With toil and strict attention to business We have brought here many sorts of spices.
Dagli estremi confin di Gallicutta Con diligenza e cura
Abbiam piu spezierie di qua condutte.
In his copy of the Imago Muttdt is the deeper and less true remark written by his own hand: “ Between Spain and the beginning of India there is a small sea, navigable in a few days.” From this doctrine he never departed.
the soft goods business. Naturally he visited Porto Santo, and probably made long stays there and at Madeira. There is no evidence for his story that he went as far as
the Guinea coast; his ideas of its position on the map were erroneous; his statements on the matter were not convincing. But in the Islands, he was in the clearing- house of sea-stories. The favourites were about Antilia and Brazil. Antilia was an archipelago due west where seven bishops emigrated in the Moorish invasion of Spain and founded seven cities. Brazil was the land where the rare woods grew that from time to time washed up on the beach of Ireland and Madeira. Charles V of France had his library in the Louvre wainscoted with this jetsam.
Many attempts had already been made to reach Antilia by the Portuguese before their efforts were concentrated on the doubling of Africa. There is a story that one actually
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