that when God saw the gathering together of the waters
which he called the Seas, he saw that it was good;
and he perhaps had the right to say so. But the
man who uses the sea and whose life’s pathway
is laid on its unstable surface can hardly sum up
his impressions of it so simply as to say that it is
good. It is indeed to him neither good nor bad;
it is utterly beyond and outside all he knows or invents
of good and bad, and can never have any concern with
his good or his bad. It remains the pathway and
territory of powers and mysteries, thoughts and energies
on a gigantic and elemental scale; and that is why
the mind of man can never grapple with the unconsciousness
of the sea or his eye meet its eye. Yet it is
the mariner’s chief associate, whether as adversary
or as ally; his attitude to things outside himself
is beyond all doubt influenced by his attitude towards
it; and a true comprehension of the man Columbus must
include a recognition of this constant influence on
him, and of whatever effect lifelong association with
so profound and mysterious an element may have had
on his conduct in the world of men. Better than
many documents as an aid to our understanding of him
would be intimate association with the sea, and prolonged
contemplation of that face with which he was so familiar.
We can never know the heart of it, but we can at least
look upon the face, turned from us though it is, upon
which he looked. Cloud shadows following a shimmer
of sunlit ripples; lines and runes traced on the surface
of a blank calm; salt laughter of purple furrows with
the foam whipping off them; tides and eddies, whirls,
overfalls, ripples, breakers, seas mountains high-they
are but movements and changing expressions on an eternal
countenance that once held his gaze and wonder, as
it will always hold the gaze and wonder of those who
follow the sea.
So much of the man Christopher Columbus, who once was and no longer is; perished, to the last bone and fibre of him, off the face of the earth, and living now only by virtue of such truth as there was in him; who once manfully, according to the light that he had, bore Christ on his shoulders across stormy seas, and found him often, in that dim light, a heavy and troublesome burden; who dropped light and burden together on the shores of his discovery, and set going in that place of peace such a conflagration as mankind is not likely to see again for many a generation, if indeed ever again, in this much-tortured world, such ancient peace find place.