CONTENTS:

LETTER TO THE RIGHT HON. SIR HORACE PLUNKETT

PREFACE

BOOK 1 - THE INNER LIGHT
   CHAPTER I. THE STREAM OF THE WORLD
   CHAPTER II. THE HOME IN GENOA
   CHAPTER III. YOUNG CHRISTOPHER
   CHAPTER IV. DOMENICO
   CHAPTER V. SEA THOUGHTS
   CHAPTER VI. IN PORTUGAL
   CHAPTER VII. ADVENTURES BODILY AND SPIRITUAL
   CHAPTER VIII. THE FIRE KINDLES
BOOK 2
   CHAPTER IX. WANDERINGS WITH AN IDEA
   CHAPTER X. OUR LADY OF LA RABIDA
   CHAPTER XI. THE CONSENT OF SPAIN
   CHAPTER XII. THE PREPARATIONS AT PALOS
   CHAPTER XIII. EVENTS OF THE FIRST VOYAGE
   CHAPTER XIV. LANDFALL

BOOK 3 - THE NEW WORLD
   CHAPTER I. THE ENCHANTED ISLANDS
   CHAPTER II. THE EARTHLY PARADISE
   CHAPTER III. THE VOYAGE HOME
BOOK 4
   CHAPTER IV. THE HOUR OF TRIUMPH
   CHAPTER V. GREAT EXPECTATIONS
   CHAPTER VI. THE SECOND VOYAGE
   CHAPTER VII. THE EARTHLY PARADISE REVISITED

BOOK 5 - DESPERATE REMEDIES
   CHAPTER I. THE VOYAGE TO CUBA
   CHAPTER II. THE CONQUEST OF ESPANOLA
   CHAPTER III. UPS AND DOWNS
   CHAPTER IV. IN SPAIN AGAIN
BOOK 6
   CHAPTER V. THE THIRD VOYAGE
   CHAPTER VI. AN INTERLUDE
   CHAPTER VII. THE THIRD VOYAGE (continued)

BOOK 7 - TOWARDS THE SUNSET
   CHAPTER I. DEGRADATION
   CHAPTER II. CRISIS IN THE ADMIRAL'S LIFE
   CHAPTER III. THE LAST VOYAGE
   CHAPTER IV. HEROIC ADVENTURES BY LAND AND SEA
   CHAPTER V. THE ECLIPSE OF THE MOON
BOOK 8
   CHAPTER VI. RELIEF OF THE ADMIRAL
   CHAPTER VII. THE HERITAGE OF HATRED
   CHAPTER VIII. THE ADMIRAL COMES HOME
   CHAPTER IX. THE LAST DAYS
   CHAPTER X. THE MAN COLUMBUS



                                  TO
                  THE RIGHT HON. SIR HORACE PLUNKETT,
                        K.C.V.O., D.C.L., F.R.S.

MY DEAR HORACE,

Often while I have been studying the records of colonisation in the New 
World I have thought of you and your difficult work in Ireland; and I have 
said to myself, "What a time he would have had if be had been Viceroy of 
the Indies in 1493!" There, if ever, was the chance for a Department such 
as yours; and there, if anywhere, was the place for the Economic Man. 
Alas! there war only one of him; William Ires or Eyre, by name, from the 
county Galway; and though he fertilised the soil he did it with his blood 
and bones. A wonderful chance; and yet you see what came of it all. It 
would perhaps be stretching truth too far to say that you are trying to 
undo some of Columbus's work, and to stop up the hole he made in Ireland 
when be found a channel into which so much of what was best in the Old 
Country war destined to flow; for you and be have each your places in the 
great circle of Time and Compensation, and though you may seem to oppose 
one another across the centuries you are really answering the same call 
and working in the same vineyard. For we all set out to discover new 
worlds; and they are wise who realise early that human nature has roots 
that spread beneath the ocean bed, that neither latitude nor longitude nor 
time itself can change it to anything richer or stranger than what it is, 
and that furrows ploughed in it are furrows ploughed in the sea sand. 
Columbus tried to pour the wine of civilisation into very old bottles; 
you, more wisely, are trying to pour the old wine of our country into new 
bottles. Yet there is no great unlikeness between the two tasks: it is all 
a matter of bottling; the vintage is the same, infinite, inexhaustible, 
and as punctual as the sun and the seasons. It was Columbus's weakness as 
an administrator that he thought the bottle was everything; it is your 
strength that you care for the vintage, and labour to preserve its flavour 
and soft fire. 

Yours, 
FILSON YOUNG. 
RUAN MINOR, September 1906. 



PREFACE 

The writing of historical biography is properly a work of partnership, to 
which public credit is awarded too often in an inverse proportion to the 
labours expended. One group of historians, labouring in the obscurest 
depths, dig and prepare the ground, searching and sifting the documentary 
soil with infinite labour and over an area immensely wide. They are 
followed by those scholars and specialists in history who give their 
lives to the study of a single period, and who sow literature in the 
furrows of research prepared by those who have preceded them. Last of all 
comes the essayist, or writer pure and simple, who reaps the harvest so 
laboriously prepared. The material lies all before him; the documents have 
been arranged, the immense contemporary fields of record and knowledge 
examined and searched for stray seeds of significance that may have blown 
over into them; the perspective is cleared for him, the relation of his 
facts to time and space and the march of human civilisation duly 
established; he has nothing to do but reap the field of harvest where it 
suits him, grind it in the wheels of whatever machinery his art is 
equipped with, and come before the public with the finished product. And 
invariably in this unequal partnership he reaps most richly who reaps 
latest. 

I am far from putting this narrative forward as the fine and ultimate 
product of all the immense labour and research of the historians of 
Columbus; but I am anxious to excuse myself for my apparent presumption in 
venturing into a field which might more properly be occupied by the expert 
historian. It would appear that the double work of acquiring the facts of 
a piece of human history and of presenting them through the medium of 
literature can hardly ever be performed by one and the same man. A 
lifetime must be devoted to the one, a year or two may suffice for the 
other; and an entirely different set of qualities must be employed in the 
two tasks. I cannot make it too clear that I make no claim to have added 
one iota of information or one fragment of original research to the expert 
knowledge regarding the life of Christopher Columbus; and when I add that 
the chief collection of facts and documents relating to the subject, the 
'Raccolta Columbiana,'--[Raccolta di Documenti e Studi Publicati dalla R. 
Commissione Colombiana, &c. Auspice il Ministero della Publica Istruzione. 
Rome, 1892-4.]--is a work consisting of more than thirty folio volumes, 
the general reader will be the more indulgent to me. But when a purely 
human interest led me some time ago to look into the literature of 
Columbus, I was amazed to find what seemed to me a striking disproportion 
between the extent of the modern historians' work on that subject and the 
knowledge or interest in it displayed by what we call the general reading 
public. I am surprised to find how many well-informed people there are 
whose knowledge of Columbus is comprised within two beliefs, one of them 
erroneous and the other doubtful: that he discovered America, and 
performed a trick with an egg. Americans, I think, are a little better 
informed on the subject than the English; perhaps because the greater part 
of modern critical research on the subject of Columbus has been the work 
of Americans. It is to bridge the immense gap existing between the labours 
of the historians and the indifference of the modern reader, between the 
Raccolta Columbiana, in fact, and the story of the egg, that I have 
written my narrative. 

It is customary and proper to preface a work which is based entirely on 
the labours of other people with an acknowledgment of the sources whence 
it is drawn; and yet in the case of Columbus I do not know where to begin. 
In one way I am indebted to every serious writer who has even remotely 
concerned himself with the subject, from Columbus himself and Las Casas 
down to the editors of the Raccolta. The chain of historians has been so 
unbroken, the apostolic succession, so to speak, has passed with its 
heritage so intact from generation to generation, that the latest 
historian enshrines in his work the labours of all the rest. Yet there are 
necessarily some men whose work stands out as being more immediately 
seizable than that of others; in the period of whose care the lamp of 
inspiration has seemed to burn more brightly. In a matter of this kind I 
cannot pretend to be a judge, but only to state my own experience and 
indebtedness; and in my work I have been chiefly helped by Las Casas, 
indirectly of course by Ferdinand Columbus, Herrera, Oviedo, Bernaldez, 
Navarrete, Asensio, Mr. Payne, Mr. Harrisse, Mr. Vignaud, Mr. Winsor, Mr. 
Thacher, Sir Clements Markham, Professor de Lollis, and S. Salvagnini. It 
is thus not among the dusty archives of Seville, Genoa, or San Domingo 
that I have searched, but in the archive formed by the writings of modern 
workers. To have myself gone back to original sources, even if I had been 
competent to do so, would have been in the case of Columbian research but 
a waste of time and a doing over again what has been done already with 
patience, diligence, and knowledge. The historians have been committed to 
the austere task of finding out and examining every fact and document in 
connection with their subject; and many of these facts and documents are 
entirely without human interest except in so far as they help to establish 
a date, a name, or a sum of money. It has been my agreeable and lighter 
task to test and assay the masses of bed-rock fact thus excavated by the 
historians for traces of the particular ore which I have been seeking. In 
fact I have tried to discover, from a reverent examination of all these 
monographs, essays, histories, memoirs, and controversies concerning what 
Christopher Columbus did, what Christopher Columbus was; believing as I do 
that any labour by which he can be made to live again, and from the dust 
of more than four hundred years be brought visibly to the mind's eye, will 
not be entirely without use and interest. Whether I have succeeded in 
doing so or not I cannot be the judge; I can only say that the labour of 
resuscitating a man so long buried beneath mountains of untruth and 
controversy has some times been so formidable as to have seemed hopeless. 
And yet one is always tempted back by the knowledge that Christopher 
Columbus is not only a name, but that the human being whom we so describe 
did actually once live and walk in the world; did actually sail and look 
upon seas where we may also sail and look; did stir with his feet the 
indestructible dust of this old Earth, and centre in himself, as we all 
do, the whole interest and meaning of the Universe. Truly the most 
commonplace fact, yet none the less amazing; and often when in the dust of 
documents he has seemed most dead and unreal to me I have found courage 
from the entertainment of some deep or absurd reflection; such as that he 
did once undoubtedly, like other mortals, blink and cough and blow his 
nose. And if my readers could realise that fact throughout every page of 
this book, I should say that I had succeeded in my task. 

To be more particular in my acknowledgments. In common with every modern 
writer on Columbus--and modern research on the history of Columbus is only 
thirty years old--I owe to the labours of Mr. Henry Harrisse, the chief of 
modern Columbian historians, the indebtedness of the gold-miner to the 
gold-mine. In the matters of the Toscanelli correspondence and the early 
years of Columbus I have followed more closely Mr. Henry Vignaud, whose 
work may be regarded as a continuation and reexamination--in some cases 
destructive--of that of Mr. Harrisse. Mr. Vignaud's work is happily not 
yet completed; we all look forward eagerly to the completion of that part 
of his 'Etudes Critiques' dealing with the second half of the Admiral's 
life; and Mr. Vignaud seems to me to stand higher than all modern workers 
in this field in the patient and fearless discovery of the truth regarding 
certain very controversial matters, and also in ability to give a sound 
and reasonable interpretation to those obscurer facts or deductions in 
Columbus's life that seem doomed never to be settled by the aid of 
documents alone. It may be unseemly in me not to acknowledge indebtedness 
to Washington Irving, but I cannot conscientiously do so. If I had been 
writing ten or fifteen years ago I might have taken his work seriously; 
but it is impossible that anything so one-sided, so inaccurate, so untrue 
to life, and so profoundly dull could continue to exist save in the 
absence of any critical knowledge or light on the subject. All that can be 
said for him is that he kept the lamp of interest in Columbus alive for 
English readers during the period that preceded the advent of modern 
critical research. Mr. Major's edition' of Columbus's letters has been 
freely consulted by me, as it must be by any one interested in the 
subject. Professor Justin Winsor's work has provided an invaluable store 
of ripe scholarship in matters of cosmography and geographical detail; Sir 
Clements Markham's book, by far the most trustworthy of modern English 
works on the subject, and a valuable record of the established facts in 
Columbus's life, has proved a sound guide in nautical matters; while the 
monograph of Mr. Elton, which apparently did not promise much at first, 
since the author has followed some untrustworthy leaders as regards his 
facts, proved to be full of a fragrant charm produced by the writer's 
knowledge of and interest in sub-tropical vegetation; and it is 
delightfully filled with the names of gums and spices. To Mr. Vignaud I 
owe special thanks, not only for the benefits of his research and of his 
admirable works on Columbus, but also for personal help and encouragement. 
Equally cordial thanks are due to Mr. John Boyd Thacher, whose work, 
giving as it does so large a selection of the Columbus documents both in 
facsimile, transliteration, and translation, is of the greatest service to 
every English writer on the subject of Columbus. It is the more to be 
regretted, since the documentary part of Mr. Thacher's work is so 
excellent, that in his critical studies he should have seemed to ignore 
some of the more important results of modern research. I am further 
particularly indebted to Mr. Thacher and to his publishers, Messrs. 
Putnam's Sons, for permission to reproduce certain illustrations in his 
work, and to avail myself also of his copies and translations of original 
Spanish and Italian documents. I have to thank Commendatore Guido Biagi, 
the keeper of the Laurentian Library in Florence, for his very kind help 
and letters of introduction to Italian librarians; Mr. Raymond Beazley, of 
Merton College, Oxford, for his most helpful correspondence; and Lord 
Dunraven for so kindly bringing, in the interests of my readers, his 
practical knowledge of navigation and seamanship to bear on the first 
voyage of Columbus. Finally my work has been helped and made possible by 
many intimate and personal kindnesses which, although they are not 
specified, are not the less deeply acknowledged. 

September 1906.