And you can see them now. Against a strong
seabreeze they make their way forward, new rigging is tightened and
retightened, the hills sink behind them. They stop at the Canaries
and set out again, this time for the horizon only. But say, just say
that the sceptics had been right all along, and that before them
there was no real, no elemental sea, but only, after two, maybe
three day’s sail due west, the threshold of their understanding.
Beyond it, despite the familiar passage of the days and nights, and
the flight of the stars, say they venture into the Sea of Allegory.
Before them the moon at its quarter swings down the western sky, and
its chaste goddess of the hunt, Roman Diana, with her bow and quiver
of plagues, walks at the ship’s side, its bridle in her hand.
Neptune with his trident and trinity of horses rides a Botticelli
shell off to port, and scouts ahead. It is, after all, new territory
for him as well. In the distance, are those islands, or clouds
drifting up over the horizon into a false perspective? Sea sightings
are often tricks of light, so close to the huge distorting lens of
the bellied ocean. Except, yes, there they are again, just visible
in the coat of arms that billows from the masthead. Sinister:
anchors and a lion rampant; Dexter: a castle and the islands in the
sea. That the ship is armed and cannon ready is no surprise, the sea
pregnant with those shapes sea-monstrous, and there on deck is the
coiled rope for binding and for bringing back. Close in to port, two
lusty sea-centaurs blow a fanfare on their conch shells, while a
pair of sirens off to starboard are promising a song. Columbus
himself stands in the ship’s centre, fully armed, out-sized, one
hand at his sword, in the other a staff and Christian banner. He
looks westward. Is it those islands that hold his gaze, or the
sirens singing, or the standard of the Cross obscuring all? He seems
aloof. Does he, coursing into history, so disdain the graceful
progeny of his mythic heritage to leave them in his wake? We’ve
seen him in this state before, the fixed assertive look, the surety.
And what is that—out in front? Unsteady on the bowsprit the eager
dove, wings outstretched, articulates the wooden letter of the Cross
and prepares to fly.
What you cannot see in this picture are the
huge circling currents, the respiration of the whale, or the whale’s
way turning and turning on itself, the great ease of oceans around
continents. The feathered coral feels it, the sand banks sketch it,
the seethe and drag of the tides knows it, but you cannot see it
here. Nor can you see the round earth made strange by the helmsman’s
good work, by the charged hull, the lodestone, the Genoese needles
balanced on their axes, by the fine straight line (the course is
true) growing westward, dividing, never turning back on itself,
always moving westward.
Nor will you find here any of the icons of
exploration, no instruments of observation or of record. The ship is
ill-equipped, the islands are misty and remote. He is naked in that armour,
the Discoverer. Where does he think he is going?
The way west is the way east. The way out is
the way in. At five, maybe six miles per hour the knotted thread is
unwound to the centre of the labyrinth of desire. The heart is
eager, it is violent, it is empty. The winds have turned and carry
him effortlessly forward.
Already at first light, Columbus is at his
table in the gallery under the aft deck. The burnished vellum is
spread out before him, pinned flat, and all around him arrayed in
trays and cases are his pens and inks, raw pigments, sable brushes,
bottles of fine absorbent sand, his mortar and pestle, dividers in a
leather sheath, his rules and compasses. Yesterday he prepared a
ground of gum arabic to coat the hide and let it dry in the east
wind that swelled all afternoon behind them. Now, as they make their
way in, the ship steadying when it finds the line of the island’s
shelter and the ground swell suddenly subsides, he leans against the
table and inscribes a figure for the journey itself, a kind of
invocation, the compass rose.
It is clear that he has laboured over the
stencil. Here, at the centre, are the petals of a flower in
perpetual bloom, this circled by a band of gold leaf on which are
set eight indigo diamonds, one for each of the world’s eight
winds. Around these runs a horizon of plain black bordered by
threads of cochineal. And from the rose’s centre he has drawn out
thirty-two fine straight lines, black portolan lines, that emanate
across the whole plain of the vellum like the rays of a darkened
sun, a cloud drawn across its face. This process he repeats around
the chart’s perimeter, each rose oriented to the others, their
rays criss-crossing to form a loose net, weighted at the edges, for
his observations. And here, leaning in from the margins, the faces
of four wind gods animate the empty space between them, their cheeks
straining, their hair caught back in invisible gusts.
Why are charts so wonderfully engaging? He
works in a sort of rapture, does Columbus, despite the busy ship
around him, now pauses to trim his pen, and now stoops again to the
table, narrowing his gaze. And I must confess, I too have felt their
beauty, their allure, and spent my share of hours bent over a
broken-backed atlas tracing with my finger the road or river
furthest north or south or east or west, or indeed, a mazy course
among islands that open secretly onto other seas, into other worlds
which I entered, following it. The language of charts is the visible
in outline, the beach or cape or spit of land, the cliff face
conspicuous from a coasting ship, the reef just breaking, the bright
littoral that encloses every island translated to a black line by
the flowing pen, the white foaming rock to a blackened star. This is
their language, but it is not their subject: charts chart the
numinous and are the textbooks for a certain kind of yearning.
But let us turn back to the Santa Maria’s low
gallery where Columbus sits in the shadow of the deck and awaits our
full attention, a soft tipped brush poised above the island of
arrival. Behind the black apostrophe that marks the crescent of the
beach, the bay the ships are sailing into, he lays down a
preliminary wash of island green, vivid and translucent. And now, to
show this first anchorage and its depth, uncoils with his pen a
length of the lead and line. It is the small inshore lead, armed
with tallow, so scrupulous in detail you can see the strips of
leather at the two and three fathom marks, the white rag at five,
the red at seven.
It is not disappointment, but surprise to find
so little of what he had been thinking of, ghosting in on the making
tide to a broad and shining bay. The bosun sounds the still water.
At every fall the lead marks its own centre; ripples widening
outward link with those before and after, the ship’s course marked
by this light chain. His singing chant comes back to them from the
woods behind the beach, strong and clear and startling after a month
on the echoless ocean. And with the echo come all the other sounds,
a flood of the particular; instead of the dull percussion of the
waves, they hear their own breath as it escapes them, and as it is
drawn in, with it comes the dizzy scent of pine, overwhelming,
lucid; the rustling of the palms that line the beach and just now
begin to shift and sway in the first trace of the morning breeze
breaks in upon them as though upon their sleep, sibilant and
distinct; a brook that clatters across the beach on the far shore
rings like a bell; across the hollow bay, the green of the forest
keens, birdsong; the sea-worn sails furl like sheering silk; each
thing astonishing in its clarity and separateness glistens under the
light of the senses returning, it seems, one by one, the knot of the
voyage that bound them up suddenly loosened. The morning is still,
the bay to all appearances deserted: no town, no village, not even a
clearing or a path presents itself. True, mixed in with the scent of
the forest warming in the morning sun, there might be the sour trace
of an extinguished fire, and there is at least the possibility of
fishing nets draped like shadows to dry among the shadows higher up
the beach.
This is nothing that he had expected.
But consider, reader, in this brief hiatus (for
the bay is not deserted, nor is it still for long: if you look here,
off the island’s southern point, you will see where Columbus has
already painted, in a dense wash of blue bice, the shadow of the
morning breeze that picks up the islands one by one all along this
archipelago, bright shells gathered in a palm of wind), consider how
this prospect—the running brook of sweet water, the solace of the
scented air, the flowers and the earth, the white strand and safe
harbour—how this prospect might allay any disappointment over
unmet expectations, and instil instead a sense of wonder in one so
long at sea and so far from home. The place might seem magical.
And indeed, when the first trace of morning
breeze turns the mirror of the bay to the wall and the ships swing
to and set their anchors, several young men and a girl emerge from
the porous wall of trees and slough off the leaves’ green shade,
stepping naked into the sunlight. Their movements are easy and
unhurried and clothed in light. They slide a boat out from a shaded
lee and into the water to the depth of their thighs where they slip
into the narrow hull to take up their flashing oars. The winged hull
moves just a breath above the surface of the bay where it leaves no
wake, despite its swiftness, and the paddles feather nothing but the
bright air. The paddlers are decorated with cochineal, yelloe,
black, their skin, myrrh slightly darkened. Behind them, the island
itself is extravagant, a green gem set in gold, banded by a line of
white and then by turquoise (fine ground azurite),and set in a deep
blue wash of ocean. When they come up to the ships and speak, their
voices are like the senseless soft chattering of birds.
But despite the chart’s excesses (gold
dissolved in ox-bile brightens some sections of the beach, and lapis
lazuli deepens the inland lakes), the ships do not stay for long at
this first island. When Columbus rows ashore and, unsteady after a
month on the pitching sea, climbs carefully backwards over the bluff
bow of the ship’s boat onto the sand, he looks down to see the toe
of his narrow shoe pointing seaward (and still westward); this we
may, as he does, interpret as a sign, his footprint clear in its
declaration of departure not arrival. Today and tomorrow they do
take time to enjoy the beach and eat a local meal of conch fritters
and iguana tail, cassava bread, and carry out a little trade in
beads (for braiding in the hair), and in the colour red. And
Columbus makes a formal proclamation which, in a word, lays claim to
this one island. But the ceremony of arrival is muted, a small
speech in a large hall, and all parties seem unsure of the
dimensions of their gestures, whether of conquest or of greeting:
the one invents a ritual for surprise, the other for arrival at a
place they cannot recognize.
Columbus is working by dead reckoning, and dead
reckoning finds its meaning in motion only; a careful balance
between expectation and observation, it defines where the ship is,
always and only in terms of where it has been and is going. Consider
the instruments he has at his disposal: the compass in its binnacle,
that precipitous enclosure; the ampoletta, or sand glass, that lays
down its golden path through time; the knotted log-line that
measures out the ship’s speed through the water; and the lead and
line that leads them through the brailled shallows. He is not
equipped for standing still. And so it should be no surprise that we
find him even now, on this evening of the first day, mixing burnt
umber with egg-white (beaten and settled) for the hulls, myrrh
lightened with yelloe for the sails lit by the morning sun, and white
lead for the water cresting at the bows. Look. He has already set
the three ships into another day and westward under full sail, their
shadows billowing before them. Vermilion pennants unfurl at the
mastheads.
It is just dawn and the bows bear down on the
still midnight west. Behind them the first island has flattened to a
silhouette against the eastern sky when the sun lifts free and
burnishes the empty sea before them. The guides he has taken lean
against the gunwale and sweep the horizon from the south to the
northwest, calling out between them a litany of one hundred islands
that lie just beyond their sight; the ships sail out among them.
Contributors
©Robert Finley, 2000. From THE
ACCIDENTAL INDIES, published by McGill-Queen’s
University Press ,
Montreal & Kingston, London, Ithaca; with permission.
