Deeply embedded in the history of America there is a strange quality of expectancy. We have somehow inherited a sense of wonder, a feeling that our strange progress toward the future is a fantastic and incomprehensible adventure that moves constantly past the bounds of imagination. We are permanently oriented, so to speak, in the direction of the improbable, and the fact that we do not always know what to do when the improbable turns out to be real makes very little difference. From the moment of our beginning we have been looking for something on the far side of the horizon—from which it follows that we are never convinced that any horizon is ever final.
This is in large part our heritage from the open sea. America could not exist until somebody went questing for it. It had to be discovered, and the discovery required an undying curiosity and a prodigious act of faith. Someone, in other words, had to get in a ship and go out beyond the limits of knowledge. When he had gone as far as he could go, other men had to do likewise; and for the better part of five centuries the American story has been bright with the names of great voyages.
The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus, by his son Ferdinand, translated and annotated by Benjamin Keen. The Rutgers University Press. 316 pp. $7.50.
Greatest of all, of course, was the first one, the earthchanging voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492. The story is almost too familiar to us. It is one of the first stories drummed into us in school. The great Admiral and his three little ships, Santa Maria, Pinta, and Nina, move out from Palos like shapes in a pageant, romantic but vaguely unreal. We learn how Queen Isabella pawned certain jewels to make the voyage possible, how the sailors feared the unknown and came close to mutiny, how the Admiral saw a light on the dark sky line just when hope seemed lost, and how at last this man who had found an authentic new world believed that he had simply reached the East Indiesconceiving, as do most of us, that the world holds fewer surprises than is really the case. We get, in short, the familiar legend, and we let it go at that; which is a pity, for here is one of the most significant stories in all American history, the story that sets the key for everything that has happened since.
It is a good story to return to, and an excellent approach is to be found in the biography which Columbus’ son Ferdinand wrote in the 1530’s, some years after the Admiral’s death. Translated and annotated by Benjamin Keen, The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus is now available to the general reader.
Why did Columbus go on that immense voyage in the first place? Ferdinand explains succinctly: “Turning to the reasons which persuaded the Admiral to undertake the discovery of the Indies, I say there were three, namely, natural reasons, the authority of writers, and the testimony of sailors.” The natural reasons were simple enough; Columbus knew that the earth was a globe and believed that a good sailor could circumnavigate it. The “authority of writers” was a shakier foundation; he relied on things set down by Aristotle, Seneca, Strabo, Marco Polo, and others, and not all of these knew what they were talking about. One suspects that it was the testimony of sailors that really got him. Atlantic seaports were full of fables and tall tales about men who had ventured to the west, a hodgepodge of yarns about lost islands, floating bits of carved wood, inexplicable landfalls made by stormtossed mariners, including a fine yarn told by a oneeyed sailor who believed that on a voyage to Ireland he had touched the coast of Tatary. There were hints, in plenty, that something besides the great gulf lay west of the Atlantic sky line, and Columbus wanted to find out.
Well, Columbus got his way, and at last he and his three ships went cruising; and when they made their landfall the sense of wonder re-entered the world, so that human life took on a permanent new dimension.…
At daybreak they saw an island about fifteen leagues in length, very level, full of green trees and abounding in springs, with a large lake in the middle, and inhabited by a multitude of people who hastened to the shore, astounded and marveling at the sight of the ships … and the Admiral, perceiving they were a gentle, peaceful and very simple people, gave them little red caps and glass beads which they hung about their necks, together with other trifles that diey cherished as if they were precious stones of great price.
The natives, Ferdinand explains, knew perfectly well that these trinkets had no great intrinsic value. They prized them simply because these strange newcomers had given them to them, “for they were convinced our men had come from Heaven, and therefore they wished to have some relic of them.”
They would be disillusioned a little later, for the Spaniards—like all other Europeans who came after them—ruled their new possessions with a heavy hand, giving the native residents nothing much better than a choice between slavery, dispossession, or outright extermination. Columbus seems to have lacked a social conscience; as a man of his time, he believed that the Indians must be made to serve their conquerors for their own good. Not until Las Casas would a strong voice be raised in defense of the rights of America’s original inhabitants.
But if the natives were to be disillusioned, so too was Columbus himself. As voyage succeeded voyage, it began to be clear to the Spanish authorities that they had given the Admiral altogether too much, and he was whittled down. Between the first great stroke of discovery and the long, wearisome fight to maintain his own authority and prerogatives against mutinous subordinates and schemers at court, Columbus fell on difficult times. Yet the faith that was the obverse side of the coin, with him—the faith that went hand in hand with his God-given curiosity and eagerness—never deserted him. Seven years after the discovery, deserted by fortune, Columbus wrote thus in his journal:
The day after Christmas Day, 1499, all having left me, I was attacked by the Indians and the bad Christians, and was placed in such extremity that fleeing death I took to sea in a small caravel. Then Our Lord aided me, saying, “Man of little faith, do not fear, I am with thee.” And he dispersed my enemies, and showed me how I might fulfill my vows. Unhappy sinner that I am, to have placed all my hopes in the things of this world!
Actually, Columbus had placed his hopes not so much in the things of this world as in the belief that this world contained ever so much more than any of his contemporaries suspected. These hopes were abundantly sustained. The belief that went with them has colored the American consciousness ever since.
Mariner’s Quest
By BRUCE CATTON
Between Columbus sailing west to see what might lie beyond an unknown sea, and a late-nineteenthcentury sea captain who, lacking gainful employment, went cruising aimlessly and alone all around a world whose last shores had been mapped and claimed, there is an immense gap. Yet it is by no means absurd to mention Joshua Slocum on the same page with Columbus, because all true voyages of discovery are basically alike. The voyager is concerned first of all with something in himself, if it is nothing more than the conviction that if he searches long enough he can make the world give him something he has not yet had.
Joshua Slocum was a Bluenose, which is to say that he was a native of Nova Scotia, a cold, hard man from the Bay of Fundy, who went to sea young, became a skipper of Yankee merchant ships, and in the i8go’s discovered that the world had moved out from under him. He knew precisely how to move a wind-driven ship through all the chances of tide and water. His only trouble was that the era in which men could be paid for doing that sort of thing had ended, the era of the deep-water sailing man was over, and here was a master of his craft surviving into a day when the craft itself was one with Nineveh and Tyre.
He was, in other words, a master mariner in sail at a time when nobody had any work for master mariners in sail. So he found a tubby little 37-foot sailboat which was rotting on the beach, spent the better part of a year rebuilding it, and then got aboard, took on such provisions as he could get, and then took off on a trip around the world, singlehanded, sailing off for the last horizon at a time when nobody in particular cared whether master mariners still survived. He went from New England over to Gibraltar, cut down across the South Atlantic to the Strait of Magellan, swung out across the Pacific to the fabulous islands under the sun, went on to Australia and thence to South Africa, and came plugging back four years later, a singlehanded circumnavigator of the globe who had done something fabulous but useless. And he wrote a book to tell what had happened to him.
The full story of his adventures is set forth in The Voyages of Joshua Slocum, by Walter Magnes Teller; a book which not only gives Slocum’s own background but reprints everything that he wrote about his experiences, and which somehow takes on stature simply because what the man did and what was in his mind when he did it tie in with the basic American adventure.
The Voyages of Joshua Slocum, collected and introduced by Walter Magnes Teller. Rutgers University Press. 401 pp. #6.00.
For Slocum resembled both Columbus and, in an odd way, Henry David Thoreau, who roamed to the farthest ends of the universe without actually leaving his own Massachusetts. He was devoted to solitude, which has been an American trait from the earliest days—consider Daniel Boone, and Richard Henry Dana, or if you choose, Abraham Lincoln—and he found in solitude what he had been looking for: a trace of the ultimate answer, a testing of himself, a mocking answer to the riddle posed by Aladdin’s lamp: “My fisherman’s lantern, which I got at Gloucester, has shown me better things than your smoky old burner ever revealed.” He sailed all around the world in an unseaworthy little tub which, a few years later, was the death of him, and he had fun at it.
It appears that he was a man who could make friends. Singlehanded, in a frowsty tub of a sloop, he puts in at Gibraltar—and, suddenly, a British admiral, no man to be impressed by a beachcombing sailor, makes him his guest, orders the resources of the Royal Navy put at his disposal, and sees to it that his fragile sloop is prepared for its enormous adventure. It is the same in Buenos Aires, in Punta Arenas, in the islands under the sun, in Australia and in Cape Town; he comes in out of the ocean and suddenly he knows everyone and everyone is glad to help him, and he goes around the globe alone, all but penniless, and lacking resources, but somehow everybody helps him and he comes home famous, a world figure, a master mariner to whom everyone will give a helping hand.
Why? Partly, as was said, because he had the knack of making people like him; but more, it would seem, because the quest he was on was something that touched everyone, something that still has its appeal, because he was not just performing a stunt—he was looking for something which the world thought it had lost, and because he looked for it so bravely and with such simplicity of mind the world discovered that it was still there, and he got it. His awkward sloop, the Spray, became one with the Golden Hind; and at the end, after four years of lonely wandering, he got back to New England, dropped anchor in his home port of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and wrote a paragraph about what it might have meant:
If the Spray discovered no continents on her voyage, it may be that there were no more continents to be discovered; she did not seek new worlds, or sail to powwow about the dangers of the seas. The sea has been much maligned. To find one’s way to lands already discovered is a good thing, and the Spray made the discovery that even the worst sea is not so terrible to a well-appointed ship. No king, no country, no treasury at all, was taxed for the voyage of the Spray, and she accomplished all that she undertook to do.
Which was, specifically, what? To fulfill, probably, what her captain wanted; which is to say that the true voyage of discovery depends not so much on the new landfall that may be made, or on the perils met and surpassed along the way, as on what the captain himself has in his heart when the voyage begins. Slocum had what Columbus had left for him: nothing much in the way of physical discovery, but a complete, untouched universe that could be found only in the examination of loneliness and solitude, a gateway opening into the infinite, which is finally the meaning of America.
Slocum was restless after he got home. He exhibited his vessel, posed for a time as a celebrity, picked up a few odd dollars here and there, and at last took off once more on a voyage across the trackless ocean. He never came back. In the fall of 1909, at 65, he sailed for South America, with some vague plan for wandering up the Orinoco and down the Amazon, and he never made port. The Spray’s ancient seams apparently opened up in some heavy sea and that was the end. Or, possibly, it was the beginning.
Voyage To Nowhere
By BRUCE CATTON
To complete the story, one more famous ship, and a famous voyage: the U.S.S. Indianapolis, an eight-inch-gun cruiser of the vintage of the early 1930’s, which sailed from San Francisco in the summer of 1945, carrying a cargo which made her one of the ships that change history, and then went on to a resting place two miles under the surface of the Pacific, a tragic ship whose end was mystery and a dark portent.
The Indianapolis was a ship which crossed the border between yesterday and tomorrow. She died because of a thousand-to-one chance that went wrong, and her end was dark tragedy for hundreds of American families, and a plaguy problem for the United States Navy. The tragedy went unalleviated, and the problem, Heaven knows, went completely unsolved; but the ship itself went on to become one of the great, portentous vessels in the American story. In Abandon Ship! Richard F. Newcomb, an excellent war correspondent for the Associated Press, tells her story in first-rate style.
Until the summer of 1945, the Indianapolis was just one of many cruisers built and maintained by the U.S. Navy. Then she got a job to do: amid all of the trappings of top secrecy, she was pulled up to a pier in San Francisco and given a top-secret cargo to carry out to Guam—namely, the bits and pieces which would presently be put together to make the world’s first atomic bomb, which was dropped on Hiroshima to end one era in human history and to open, cloudily but effectively, another. This, quite unintentionally, the Indianapolis did; then, her mission accomplished—and what warship ever had a more far-reaching mission?—the Indianapolis went on, with a routine assignment to go to the Philippines, indulge in a little special training, and then become one of the fleet that was going to make the final assault on the shores of Japan.
Abandon Shipl Death of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, by Richard F. Newcomb. Henry Holt and Co. 305 pp. $3.95.
The final assault never took place, because the bits and pieces that this cruiser ferried out to Guam changed the face of the world forever, and made it unnecessary for any sea-borne fleet to blast a way in through the perimeter defenses of Japan; but it would not have mattered much in any case, because the Indianapolis never even reached the Philippines. A few minutes after midnight on July 30, 1945, the cruiser was steaming along in mid-Pacific; a roving Japanese submarine just happened to surface a mile away, a fitful moon just happened to break through the clouds at that precise moment, the submarine’s skipper loosed two torpedoes, and the Indianapolis went down inside of twelve minutes, with a loss of some 800 American lives.
The loss became a cause célèbre, which is a hightoned way of saying that it raised an unearthly stinkpartly because, as a meaningless tragedy, it was announced to the world on the very day the war ended, and partly because it quickly became painfully clear that this warship had somehow fallen through a hitherto undetected gap in the American Navy’s system for handling its combat vessels in time of war. The Navy, to be blunt about it, simply lost track of this ship, for the 48 hours that really counted; because it had lost track of it, a good many members of the crew who might otherwise have been saved lost their lives; and the United States Navy, which could admit anything on earth except a flaw in its basic system for handling combat ships, made itself look infernally bad hunting for a few scapegoats who could be compelled to take the blame for the disaster.
Seldom has the Navy looked worse than it looked when it tried to explain this disaster away. It courtmartialed the cruiser’s captain, broke him, and then, half-apologetically, took it all back—the poor man’s career was wrecked, but if it helped he had the consolation of knowing that the Navy didn’t really mean it. Then it pounced on four underlings, blasted them, and finally had to back-track on that action. What it could not do—what no military organization can ever do—was admit that it had simply muffed one, not because of any individual failure but because the system which it had set up for moving ships from here to there in time of war had one unsuspected hole in it.
With all of this Mr. Newcomb deals at length, thoroughly and, I think, conclusively. Yet what sticks with one, when the tragic story is finished, is the realization that here, in the long history of American seafaring, was one of history’s fated ships: a ship which served as a hinge on which human history turned, and which, its mission accomplished, went to the bottom of the sea, with all its freight of human grief and suffering.
For the Indianapolis, like the Santa Maria, was sailing toward the wholly improbable. Before this cruiser left San Francisco, life was lived on one set of terms; after it went to the bottom, the terms on which people live had been transvalued, and nothing will ever be the same again. Nobody in this ship’s crew knew it, and if any had known it most of them would not have had much time to meditate about it, but the voyage of the Indianapolis was a cutoff point. Before that, one kind of life: after that, another kind.
We live today in a time when this new kind of life is giving us nightmares. Yet if any people on earth should be prepared to enter into change of this kind, it is the Americans. Once more, a horizon has been fractured; once more, the attainable bounds of human experience have been pushed back infinitely far. We were born that way. If now we face a time of danger and challenge, it may also be a time of enormous opportunity. Here we are, after five centuries, face to face with a world of wonder.
