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to see if there was an exit or if a passage was likely.” Instead, the caravel reconnoitered a “large gulf,” an “awesome river,” and “the most abundant and freshest water I ever drank.” Yet he became “most disappointed” when he realized he was trapped, unable to sail to the north, south, or west. He had no choice but to turn back, but when he tried to raise familiar landmarks onshore, “the currents had carried me away.” Everywhere, “fresh, clear water carried me eastward with great force.” And in the distance, the roaring resumed. He decided that the “volumes of water flowing in and through the strait . . . were nothing less than the violent mingling of fresh and salt water: the fresh pushed forward, fighting its way out to the ocean, and the salt resisted it.”

At sea once more, he became unusually contemplative. “Sailing from Spain to the Indies I find 100 leagues west of the Azores the greatest change in the sky and the stars and the quality of the air and in the waters of the sea,” he reflected, “and I treasure that experience.” He noticed phenomena that in his frenzy he had overlooked: the way “the sea here is filled with a certain kind of weed resembling small pine branches bearing fruit like that of the mastic; this weed is so thick that on the first voyage I thought that the sea was shoal and that I would end up running the ships aground.” Now, he marveled, “one does not encounter a single twig.” His surroundings soothed him, “the sea very calm and peaceful, and even when a strong wind blows, the surface of the sea does not swell or ruffle.” The sky itself appeared “very mild” and conducive to stargazing: “I see that the North Star describes a circle with a diameter of five degrees, and the guards are on the right hand; at that very moment, the star is at its lowest point, from which it rises until it reaches the left side.”

His eyesight improving, Columbus passed his nights observing celestial objects, but the security such observations afforded him was illusory. The consummate dead-reckoning navigator was not especially adept with the navigational tools and concepts of his day, and on this occasion he came up with an outlandish finding. “I diligently observed it with the quadrant,” Columbus said, “and I regularly saw the plumb line fall to the same point,” whereas he expected it to shift slightly as his ship slid through the slick sea. Something was awry. “I hold that this is an unknown phenomenon,” he declared, and it led him, in this deceptively calm state of reflection, to the most radical hypothesis that he would ever make—more extreme, even, than his misguided belief that he had sailed to India. He believed that he had discovered the entrance to paradise.

In the grip of this idea, Columbus interpreted the movement of the ship’s compass needles as pointing the way to heaven. The farther west they sailed, he believed, the higher their ship would rise. Practically smacking his forehead in dismay at Columbus’s folly, Las Casas commented, “From this, he arrived at the idea, against all the common knowledge of astrologers and philosophers, that the world was not round,” that is, a perfect sphere. (Most Europeans of Columbus’s day realized that the world was round, as mathematicians and geographers of antiquity had predicted.)

Columbus meant something far more elaborate than a slight bulge or distortion in the earth’s sphericity. “Each time I sailed from Spain to the Indies, I found that when I reached a point a hundred leagues west of the Azores, the heavens, the stars, the temperature of the air and the waters of the sea abruptly changed,” he recorded. “It was as if the seas sloped upward.” Sloped upward? This observation perplexed him, because he had “always read that the world of land and sea is spherical,” yet now “I have found such great irregularities that I have come to the following conclusions concerning the world: that it is not round as they describe it, but the shape of a pear, which is round everywhere except at the stalk, where it juts out a long way. . . like a woman’s nipple.” This prominent