titleThe pilots story, in so far as it has been preserved, and taking the
/titlecategory1/categorymean of four contemporary accounts of it, was as follows
The pilots story, in so far as it has been preserved, and taking the
mean of four contemporary accounts of it, was as follows. This man,
whose name is doubtful, but is given as Alonso Sanchez, was sailing on a
voyage from one of the Spanish ports to England or Flanders. He had a
crew of seventeen men. When they had got well out to sea a severe
easterly gale sprung up, which drove the vessel before it to the
westward. Day after day and week after week, for twenty-eight days, this
gale continued. The islands were all left far behind, and the ship was
carried into a region far beyond the limits of the ocean marked on the
charts. At last they sighted some islands, upon one of which they landed
and took in wood and water. The pilot took the bearings of the island,
in so far as he was able, and made some observations, the only one of
which that has remained being that the natives went naked; and, the wind
having changed, set forth on his homeward voyage. This voyage was long
and painful. The wind did not hold steady from the west; the pilot and
his crew had a very hazy notion of where they were; their dead reckoning
was confused; their provisions fell short; and one by one the crew
sickened and died until they were reduced to five or six–the ones who,
worn out by sickness and famine, and the labours of working the ship
short-handed and in their enfeebled condition, at last made the island of
Madeira, and cast anchor in the beautiful bay of Funchal, only to die
there. All these things we may imagine the dying man relating in
snatches to his absorbed listener; who felt himself to be receiving a
pearl of knowledge to be guarded and used, now that its finder must
depart upon the last and longest voyage of human discovery. Such
observations as he had made–probably a few figures giving the bearings
of stars, an account of dead reckoning, and a quite useless and
inaccurate chart or map–the pilot gave to his host; then, having
delivered his soul of its secret, he died. This is the story; not an
impossible or improbable one in its main outlines. Whether the pilot
really landed on one of the Antilles is extremely doubtful, although it
is possible. Superstitious and storm-tossed sailors in those days were
only too ready to believe that they saw some of the fabled islands of the
Atlantic; and it is quite possible that the pilot simply announced that
he had seen land, and that the details as to his having actually set foot
upon it were added later. That does not seem to me important in so far
as it concerns Columbus. Whether it were true or not, the man obviously
believed it; and to the mind of Columbus, possessed with an idea and a
blind faith in something which could not be seen, the whole incident
would appear in the light of a supernatural sign. The bit of paper or
parchment with the rude drawing on it, even although it were the drawing
of a thing imagined and not of a thing seen, would still have for him a
kind of authority that he would find it hard to ignore. It seems
unnecessary to disbelieve this story. It is obviously absurd to regard
it as the sole origin of Columbuss great idea; it probably belongs to
that order of accidents, small and unimportant in themselves, which are
so often associated with the beginnings of mighty events. Walking on the
shore at Madeira or Porto Santo, his mind brooding on the great and
growing idea, Columbus would remember one or two other instances which,
in the light of his growing conviction and know ledge, began to take on a
significant hue. He remembered that his wifes relative, Pedro Correa,
who had come back from Porto Santo while Columbus was living in Lisbon,
had told him about some strange flotsam that came in upon the shores of
the island. He had seen a piece of wood of a very dark colour curiously
carved, but not with any tool of metal; and some great canes had also
come ashore, so big that, every joint would hold a gallon of wine. These
canes, which were utterly unlike any thing known in Europe or the islands
of the Atlantic, had been looked upon as such curiosities that they had
been sent to the King at Lisbon, where they remained, and where Columbus
himself afterwards saw them. Two other stories, which he heard also at
this time, went to strengthen his convictions. One was the tale of
Martin Vincenti, a pilot in the Portuguese Navy, who had found in the
sea, four hundred and twenty leagues to the west of Cape St. Vincent,
another piece of wood, curiously carved, that had evidently not been
laboured with an iron instrument. Columbus also remembered that the
inhabitants of the Azores had more than once found upon their coasts the
trunks of huge pine-trees, and strangely shaped canoes carved out of
single logs; and, most significant of all, the people of Flares had taken
from the water the bodies of two dead men, whose faces were of a strange
broad shape, and whose features differed from those of any known race of
mankind. All these objects, it was supposed, were brought by westerly
winds to the shores of Europe; it was not till long afterwards, when the
currents of the Atlantic came to be studied, that the presence of such
flotsam came to be attributed to the ocean currents, deflected by the
Cape of Good Hope and gathered in the Gulf of Mexico, which are sprayed
out across the Atlantic.
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