In his many years at sea he must many times have met
men who had put to sea out of fear of land. He
would have sailed with many whose names, he knew,
were not those given them at birth. He must have
learned to take reasons for granted and to go on—where
he wished to go on. So we gazed at each other.
“I had written down,” he said, “that
you greatly helped the sick, and upon Bernardo Nunez’s
going to the Nina, became our physician.
But I will write no more of you, and that written
will pass in the flood of things to come.”
After a moment, he ended with deliberation, “I
know my star to be a great star, burning long and
now with a mounting flame. If yours is in any
wise its kin, then there needs must be histories.”
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
