Genoa (11 page)

Melville, in T
YPEE
:

          
“. . . we found ourselves close in with the island the next morning, but as the bay we sought lay on its farther side, we were obliged to sail some distance along the shore, catching, as we proceeded, short glimpses of blooming valleys, deep glens, waterfalls, and waving groves, hidden here and there by projecting and rocky headlands, every moment opening to the view some new and startling scene of beauty.”

          
“As they drew nearer, and I watched the rising and sinking of their forms, and beheld the uplifted right arm bearing above the water the girdle of tapa, and their long dark hair trailing beside them as they swam, I almost fancied they could be nothing else than so many mermaids . . .”

                                        
(Columbus, First Voyage: “On the previous day, when the Admiral went to the Rio del Oro, he saw three mermaids, which rose well out of the sea . . .”)

          
T
YPEE
: “We were still some distance from the beach, and under slow headway, when we sailed right into the midst of these swimming nymphs, and they boarded us at every quarter; many seizing hold of the chainplates and springing into the chains; others . . . wreathing their slender forms about the ropes . . . All of them at length succeeded in getting up the ship’s side, where they clung dripping with the brine and glowing from the bath, their jet-black tresses streaming over their shoulders, and half-enveloping their otherwise naked forms. There they hung, sparkling with savage vivacity . . .”

          
“Our ship was now given up to every species of riot . . .”

But Columbus in Spain, fourteen eighty-five to ninety-two:

          
“All this delay did not go without great anguish and grief for Cristóbal Colón, for . . . he saw his life was flowing past wasted . . . and above all because he saw how distrusted his truth and person were, which for generous persons it is known to be as painful and detestable as death.”

Columbus waited.

FIVE

I am lifted from my chair, headlong. I stand, leaning over the desk, my head whirling, consonant with the gusts of blackberry winter, of the catbird storm. Decision crowds upon me, and, like one of the sperm whales crowding for the Straits of Sunda, pursued by a Nantucket madman who is in turn pursued by Malays, I push for a gateway, an entrance upon and beginning of things.

August 2nd, 1492,

ninth day of the Jewish Ab, The Father, when Jewry mourned the destruction of Jerusalem . . . the exodus from Spain began. Three hundred thousand funneled to the seaports, not far from “the beginning of Europe.”

          
“Those who went to embark in El Puerto de Santa Maria and in Cadiz, as soon as they saw the sea, shouted and yelled, men and women, grown-ups and children, asking mercy of the Lord in their prayers, and they thought they would see some marvels from God and that they would have a road opened for them across the sea . . .”

But the Jews embarked and headed back east, into the internal sea,
to the old haunts . . . and

on that day, Columbus ordered his men aboard three ships, before nightfall.

Perhaps, within himself, Christopher journeyed to the old haunts, herded himself into the tribe, to Esdras of the Apocrypha, to the earlier prophets, and to Genesis;

but it is not so much that Columbus may have been a Jew, or Melville at war with Christ, as it is that both men ran upward to the sources. Melville, an Ishmael, and Columbus, displaying an arrogance greater than Joan’s, sought the prophets—men who, like the first king of Atlantis, imagined and predicted, and from whom, therefore, action flowed . . .

                                        
(Columbus the navigator: “All people received their astronomy from the Jews.”

August 3,

before daylight of a gray, calm day—a day so quiet that one would think time had stopped—three ships slipped from their moorings—the motion a thing good and confirming—and drifted down the Rio Tinto on the tide. Guided by the sweeps, with no wind, the ships altered their course to port, and entered the Rio Saltes, floating past the piney sand dunes, and spoke another ship, outward bound on the same tide, with a cargo of emigrant Jews

                                        
(and the Pinta spoke the same ship on the return voyage of both, the one bound from the Levant, the other from the Indies . . .

Turning fifty degrees to starboard, the fleet crossed the bar, and

          
“proceeded with a strong breeze until sunset, towards the south, for 60 miles, equal to 15 leagues . . .”

There was the letter from Paul Toscanelli, Florentine physician and
philosopher (in those days, the one implied the other):

          
“To Christopher Columbus, Paul the physician, greeting: I see your great and magnificent desire to go where the spices grow, and in reply to your letter I send you the copy of another letter which I wrote a long time ago . . . and I send you another seaman’s chart . . . And although I know from my own knowledge that the world can be shown as it is in the form of a sphere, I have determined for greater facility and greater intelligence to show the said route by a chart similar to those which are made for navigation . . . straight to the west the commencement of the Indies is shown, and the islands and places where you can deviate towards the equinoctial line, and by how much space, that is to say, in how many leagues you can reach those most fertile places, filled with all kinds of spices and jewels and precious stones: and you must not wonder if I call the place where spices grow,
West,
because it is commonly said that they grow in the
East;
but whoever will navigate to the West will always find the said places in the West . . .”

But Columbus did not head “straight to the west,” but

South and by West, for the Canaries, and, further, for the Terrestrial Paradise . . .

Monday August 6,

          
“The rudder of the caravel
Pinta
became unshipped, and Martin Alonzo Pinzon, who was in command, believed or suspected that it was by contrivance of Gomes Rascon and Cristobal Quintero, to whom the caravel belonged, for they dreaded to go on that voyage. The Admiral says that, before they sailed, these men had been displaying a certain backwardness . . .”

Still standing, I step back from the desk, gaining my sea-legs. I am braced, with one hand on the chimney. The house arches and shudders—an inverted hull, with kelson aloft—against the weather.

and the human sperm enters a reservoir, low in oxygen—and thence to the
vas deferens, in the lowest, coolest scrotal area . . .

upward, then, through the spermatic cord, to globus minor and the seminal vesicle . . .

The Canaries: insular remnants, perhaps, of Atlantis—thence to Antillia, showing on Toscanelli’s chart half-way to Cathay. Antillia: of which the Indies might be scattered remnants . . .

The ships were shaken down . . . there were no desertions at the Canaries. The voyage was begun . . .

Sunday September 9:

          
“On this day they lost sight of land; and many, fearful of not being able to return for a long time to see it, sighed and shed tears. But the admiral . . . when that day the sailors reckoned the distance 18 leagues, said he had counted only 15, having decided to lessen the record so that the crew would not think they were as far from Spain as in fact they were.”

So a great head shrinks the distance . . .

shrinks the very globe itself:—for it was only the bold and persistent acceptance of cosmographical errors in the mind of Columbus—shrinking the earth by a quarter, and juggling Cypango until it fell among the Virgin Islands—that made possible the discovery . . .

                                        
(and in San Salvador, Columbus noted among the natives that “the whole forehead and head is very broad”—the result of artificially flattening the skulls of infants, by pressing them between boards.

Monday September 17:

          
Passing the true north, Columbus—making the “pilot’s blessing”—marked the North Star, and noted that the needle now began pointing to the west of north, instead of to the customary east.

          
“All the sailors feared greatly and all became very sad, and began to murmur under their breaths again, without making it known altogether to Christopher Columbus, seeing such a new thing, and one they had never seen or experienced, and there they feared they were in another world.”

          
M
OBY
-D
ICK
:
—“At first, the steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at either end; but at last it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had been intently watching for this result, stepped frankly back from the binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,—‘Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not Lord of the level loadstone! . . .’

                
“One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk away.”

Whale, boobie, sandpiper, dove, crab, and boatswain bird—all were signs of land . . . for hitherto none had sailed far enough to see such things other than close to land . . .

and there was sargasso weed, rumored to trap ships as in a web . . . detritus, perhaps, of Atlantis . . .

From the posterior, the vault of the vagina, the sperm’s journey measures, perhaps, five inches. The cilia in the oviduct have an outward stroke, against the motion of the sperm . . .

                                        
(Columbus reported the usual course of the sargasso weed to be from west to east . . .

In addition, there are the folds and ridges, like waves, of the mucous membrane, and the powerful leukocytes, white monsters that attack the sperm.

          
“Forward progress of the human spermatozoon is at the rate of about 1.5 mm a minute which, in relation to their respective lengths, compares well with average swimming ability for man.”

Driven by temperature and secretions, the sperm’s action is a fight against time; for

          
“A spermatozoon is only fertile if it is capable of performing
powerful
movements.”

          
Olson, on Melville: “He only rode his own space once—M
OBY
-D
ICK
. He had to be wild or he was nothing in particular. He had to go fast, like an American . . .”

Thus, the spermatozoon, like the salmon, swimming “a spiral course upstream.”

September 19:

          
“. . . but as the land never appeared they presently believed nothing, concluding from those signs since they failed, that they were going through another world whence they would never return.”

September 24:

          
“. . . they said that it was a great madness and homicidal on their part, to venture their lives in following out the madness of a foreigner, who . . . had risked his life . . . and was deceiving so many people: especially as his proposition or dream had been contradicted by so many great and lettered men, and considered as vain and foolish: and that it was enough to excuse themselves from whatever might be done in the matter, that they had arrived where men had never dared to navigate, and that they were not obliged to go to the end of the world . . .”

          
“Some went further, saying, that if he persisted in going onward, that the best thing of all was to throw him into the sea some night, publishing that he had fallen in taking the position of the star with his quadrant or astrolabe . . .”

          
Ahab, in
M
OBY
-D
ICK
:
“Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling one after the other, its numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered: ‘Foolish toy! babies’ plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores, and Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but
what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest to be in this wide planet, and the hand that holds thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all things that cast men’s eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth’s horizon are the glances of man’s eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!’ dashing it to the deck, ‘no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship’s compass, and the level dead-reckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and show me my place on the sea.”’

And Columbus—greatest dead-reckoning navigator of all time, whose bearings may be followed and trusted today, whose faulty observations of the stars never interfered with his level look at sea, signs, and weather—Columbus