Genoa (10 page)

                                        
(Melville: “A bloody film was before my eyes, through which, ghost-like, passed and repassed my father, mother, and sisters. An unutterable nausea oppressed me; I was conscious of gasping; there seemed no breath in my body . . . I thought to myself, Great God! this is death!”

. . . grasped an oar and, alternately swimming and resting, despite wounds, finally landed at Lagos, twenty miles from “the beginning of Europe,” and not far from Cadiz and Palos.

          
de Madariaga: “On August 13th, 1476, Christoforo Columbo, then just under twenty-five years of age, was in danger of death. He was near enough to death to be able to say that on that day he was reborn.”

          
Melville, to Hawthorne: “My development has been all within a few years past. I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed & nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life.”

I shift my position, turn to sit sideways, throwing one leg over the arm of the chair. The strange internal sensations are still with me, but are less terrifying, with greater possibility of change . . .

In Portugal, Columbus, Genoese Ishmael, married one Filipa Moniz Perestrello, of an old, established family, and thus took a step up the ladder, toward the court,

as Herman married, or was married perhaps, to Lizzie Shaw . . .

          
“Not the slightest hint has come down to us of the appearance or disposition of Columbus’s only wife; Dona Felipa is as shadowy a figure as the Discoverer’s mother.”

But there was Beatriz,

whom he loved and did not marry . . . whose last name, despite all attempts by herself and family to suppress it, was Torquemada, and whose origin, therefore, was probably Jewish . . .

Christopher and Beatriz—joined, not in matrimony, but in blasted paternity—got a son, the illegitimate Ferdinand (who later claimed noble ancestry for his father),

as, in
P
IERRE
,
Mr. Glendinning begat upon his French mistress a daughter, Isabel,

                                        
(and perhaps, in Polynesia, Herman and Fayaway . . .

But in Portugal, with the help of Dona Felipa, Columbus gained the court:

“The King, as he observed this Christovao Colom to be a big talker and boastful in setting forth his accomplishments, and full of fancy and imagination with his Isle Cypango than certain whereof he spoke, gave him small credit. However, by strength of his importunity it was ordered that he confer with D. Diego Ortiz bishop of Ceuta and Master Roderigo and Master José, to whom the King had committed these matters of cosmography and discovery, and they all considered the words of Christovao Colom as vain, simply founded on imagination, or things like that Isle Cypango of Marco Polo . . .”

And so he left the court, left Portugal, left Dona Felipa . . .

became, in fact, the ideal unwed Ishmael, wanderer in the wilderness, of which Melville, long since returned from the seas, never stopped thinking . . .

                                        
(Pasted to the inside of Melville’s desk, discovered after his death: “Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.”

Christopher, wed “to the magnanimity of the sea, which” as Melville says, “will permit no records” . . .

searching an insular paternity, left Portugal, for Spain

THREE

and Isabella,

who, like himself, was blue-eyed, fair-skinned, and red-haired . . .

He told her, perhaps, of the books he had been reading, such as the Y
MAGO
M
UNDI
:

          
“There is a spring in Paradise which waters the Garden of Delights and which splays into four rivers.”

                
“The Paradise on Earth is a pleasant place, situated in certain regions of the Orient, at a long distance by land and by sea from our inherited world. It rises so high that it touches the lunar sphere . . .”

                                        
(Melville,
B
ILLY
B
UDD
: “Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the color, but where exactly does the first one visibly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.”

          
“. . . and the water of the Deluge could not reach it . . . its altitude over the lowlands is incomparable . . . and it reaches the layers of calm air which lie on top of the zone of troubled air . . .”

                
“From this lake, as from a main spring, there flow the four rivers of Paradise: Phison or Ganges; Gihon or Nile; Tigris and Euphrates . . .”

Certain it is that Melville performed an act original and radical to himself, in M
OBY
-D
ICK
. In all his works hitherto, he had voyaged southward to Cape Horn, then westward to the Pacific, returning via that same essentially western route (the one exception being R
EDBURN
, dealing not at all with the Pacific, nor with cosmographical man).

          
“. . . the sight of many unclad, lovely island creatures, round the Horn”—that was the route to the Treasures: southward, the Horn, and then west.

But in M
OBY
-D
ICK
, Melville turned upon himself and Western Man, performing an act as violent as subsequent war and catastrophe—an act rich, perhaps, with revenge as Ahab’s pursuit of the whale: the
Pequod
turned and headed
back east
—a route Melville himself never followed to the Pacific—eastward, via Good Hope, the Indian Ocean, and

          
“By the straits of Sunda, chiefly, vessels bound to China from the west, emerge into the China seas.”

Thus, it was a return, a going back, a going back upward, perhaps . . .

like the Pacific salmon, who spend their lives in salt water, and then, anadromous, run upward to the fresh, to the very individual source waters, the headwaters, to spawn and die

                                        
(developing, often, a humpback, hooked snout, and elongated jaw—becoming altogether monstrous, while in this pursuit . . .

          
Columbus: “I always read that the world, land and water, was spherical . . . Now I observed so much divergence, that I began to hold different views about the world and I found that it was not round . . . but pear-shaped, round except where it has a nipple, for there it is taller, or as if one had a round ball and, on one side, it should be like a woman’s breast, and this nipple part is the highest and closest to heaven . . .”

Columbus, ascending the mounting waters, “running upward” to the very source point, “highest and closest to heaven . . .”

          
Genesis, the St. Jerome version: “But the Lord God in the beginning had planted a Paradise of Delight: in which he placed the
man whom he had fashioned . . . And a river came out from the Place of Delight to water Paradise: which from thence is divided into four heads . . .”

Spanish cosmographers, however, were not impressed. In fourteen hundred ninety, they “judged his promises and offers were impossible and vain and worthy of rejection . . . they ridiculed his reasoning saying that they had tried so many times and had sent ships in search of the mainland and that it was all air and there was no reason in it . . .”

          
Lizzie Melville, Herman’s wife, in a letter to her mother: “I suppose by this time you are deep in the ‘fogs’ of ‘Mardi’—if the mist ever does clear away, I should like to know what it reveals . . .”

They further advised the Sovereigns “that it was not a proper object for their royal authority to favor an affair that rested on such weak foundations, and which appeared uncertain and impossible to any educated person, however little learning he might have.”

But Columbus “had conceived in his heart the most certain confidence to find what he claimed he would, as if he had this world locked up in his trunk.”

          
Later, in the Indies:

          
“We reached the latter island near a large mountain which seemed almost to reach heaven, and in the centre of that mountain there was a peak which was much higher than all the rest of the mountain, and from which many streams flowed in different directions, especially toward the direction in which we lay. At a distance of three leagues a waterfall appeared as large through as an ox, which precipitated itself from such a high point that it seemed to fall from heaven. It was at such a distance that there were many wagers on the ships, as some said that it was white rocks and others that it was water. As soon as they arrived nearer, the truth was learned, and it was the most wonderful thing in the world to see from what a high place it was precipitated and from what a small place such a large waterfall sprang.”

And the
Pequod,
approaching the Straits of Sunda:

          
“Broad on both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and forming a great semi-circle, embracing one half of the level horizon, a continuous chain of whale-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the noonday air.”

Swinging my foot to the floor, I sit tense, crouched forward, straight in the chair. Huge-headed, I am one of millions, and there is a gateway, an opening, for which all of us have been alerted.

          
“As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains, accelerate their march, all eagerness to place that perilous passage in their rear, and once more expand in comparative security upon the plain; even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward through the straits; gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle, and swimming on, in one solid, but still crescentic centre.”

From Nantucket, east,

to Good Hope, the Indian Ocean, the Straits of Sunda, and

          
“. . . we glided between two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake. Here the storms in the roaring glens between the outermost whales, were heard but not felt. In this central expanse the sea presented the smooth satin-like surface, called a sleek, produced by the subtle moisture thrown off by the whale in his more quiet moods. Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion.”

          
“Keeping at the centre of the lake, we were occasionally visited by small tame cows and calves; the women and children of this routed host.”

          
“Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep.”

And Columbus, on the third voyage, sailing in the Gulf of Paria, observing the mangroves lining the shore, with tiny oysters clinging to their roots . . . the oyster shells open, to catch from the mangrove leaves the dewdrops that engender pearls . . .

Fourteen hundred and ninety, Isabella, rejecting the advice of her cosmographers, was hesitant. Perhaps, with insanity touching her mother and her daughter, rendering her thus bracketed

          
(as Melville, his father dying maniacal and his son a suicide, was similarly bracketed),

she was just strange enough to listen . . .

Certainly, the natural direction for Spain’s colonial expansion was Africa, in pursuit of the Moors. America was altogether irrelevant, distant, difficult, tempting, and ultimately untenable and ruinous. Thus, as Melville to Western Man, so Columbus to Spanish history, did more violence, perhaps, than all the wars that followed.

But as Albertus Magnus said of the Antipodes:

          
“Perhaps also some magnetic power in that region draws human stones even as the magnet draws iron.”

FOUR

          
And there was Michele de Cuneo, with his Carib slave: “Having taken her into my cabin, she being naked according to their custom, I conceived a desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it and treated me with her
fi
ngernails in such manner that I wished I had never begun. But seeing that (to tell you the end of it all), I took a rope and thrashed her well, for which she raised such unheard of screams that you would not have believed your ears. Finally we came to an agreement in such a manner that I can tell you that she seemed to have been brought up in a school of harlots.”

          
And the letter to the Marquis of Mantua, announcing that vessels of the King of Spain “discovered certain islands, among others a very large island toward the Orient which had very great rivers and terrible mountains and a most fertile country inhabited by handsome men and women, but they all go naked, except that some wear a leaf of cotton over their genitals . . .”