Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [141]
If the gold and slaves and spices he had sent back from his earlier voyages would not silence his critics, perhaps this sighting would. “I do not believe that the earthly paradise is a steep mountain,” he explained, “except at its summit, the part I described as the stem of the pear.” He believed that “no one could reach the summit,” where the water’s source lay. He divined this because of the torrents of fresh water he had experienced off the coast of Venezuela, “for I never read nor knew of so much fresh water penetrating so far inland and so near salt water. . . . And if it does not come from there, from paradise, the wonder is even greater, because I do not believe that a river as big and deep is known anywhere else in the world.”
In this upwelling from his unconscious ruminations, his search for paradise served as a metaphor for the more elemental surveillance of womankind, of Mother Earth. He took solace in his reveries of inhabiting a world where magic was still possible even as he experienced a troubling sense of confronting the unknown. It was, for him, reassuring to know that the promise of paradise existed, even if he would never reach it himself.
Columbus’s visionary propensities remained intact, stronger and more singular than ever. Other explorers felt buoyed by the belief that they were fulfilling the Lord’s will, but Columbus’s striking conception of the entrance to paradise was unique. It was easy for students of Columbus, beginning with Bartolomé de Las Casas, to separate fact from folly, and science from delusion, but to the Admiral’s way of thinking, these seeming opposites remained inextricably intertwined. Even at this late date, eight years after setting out on his first voyage, he still believed that he was on the doorstep of the Indies, as well as the threshold of paradise. Experience fostered his illusions rather than dispelling them. As the voyage proceeded, he gave himself over to reveries. When he considered the globe, he no longer saw the ocean, evidence of currents and tides, sandbanks, reefs, bays, or other geologic features, but a series of shimmering images that might be better described as visions containing coded information about the nature of the cosmos. For him, reconnaissance was the process of deciphering this God-given code as best he could.
“The world is small,” he later declared, on the basis of this experience and other mystical flights. “Six parts are dry and only the seventh is covered with water. Experience has already verified that”—even though his voyages demonstrated that, on the contrary, the world was mostly covered by oceans. In his defense, he argued that “I hold that the world is not so large as thought by common men.” Columbus based his expert opinion on a conception of the world that included paradise, but excluded the Pacific Ocean and the Americas. His small world had a circumference of about 14,000 miles, when in reality earth’s circumference at the equator is about 24,900 miles.
Clinging to his insupportable beliefs, he maintained that as a result of the “navigation and exploration and discovery” promoted by the Sovereigns, he could tell which zones of the earth he had visited by the complexions of the people he encountered. In Cape Verde, he insisted, “the people there are much darker” than elsewhere, “and the farther south one goes the more extreme their color,” reaching the blackest at a point “where the North Star at nightfall was five degrees above the horizon.”
He explained that after he had passed through the dreadful Doldrums, and reached luxuriant Trinidad, “I found the mildest temperature and lands and trees as green and beautiful as the orchards of Valencia in April, and the people there have beautiful bodies and are whiter than the others I was able to see in the Indies.” Not only that, “they have greater ingenuity, show more intelligence, and are not cowardly,” qualities that