He sailed under the Spanish flag. Ferdinand and Isabella, who paid for his journey, and were to use the profits of his discovery to drive the last of the Jews and Moors from a newly unified Spain, knew him as Colón. In his own language he was known as Colombo, but English speakers, who were also to benefit greatly from his voyages, remember him as Columbus. Cristóbal, Cristoforo, or Christopher: he is the man credited with discovering the new world, even though he arrived five hundred years after Erik the Red settled his family at Brattahlid, Greenland, and fifteen or thirty thousand years after the first Eurasians walked across the frozen waters of the Bering Strait, and didn’t stop walking until they had settled every square foot of the new continents, from the Aleuts to Tierra del Fuego, from Ellesmere to Piura, from the Golden Gate to Hispaniola. History remembers also that the great captain wasn’t looking for new lands, but rather a new route to India. But in this too the history books do not quite have the story correct.
“Land!”
The cry from the crow’s nest of the Santa Maria doesn’t wake the dozing captain in his berth belowdecks. He has been at sea for forty days. Water and food rationing have been in effect for the past two weeks, and days earlier, the Pinta deserted in the middle of the night. The nimble Niña ranges far afield from its lumbering command ship, as if it too is eager to abandon this fool’s quest. By now it has become clear there is no route to India, only water and water and more endless, empty water. Some have even heard whisperings that India was never the goal. That the captain is looking for something…new.
The only thing that keeps them from mutiny is the fact that they do not have enough food to return to a known port.
Now a dozen weary sailors make their way to the bow. They do not trust the cabin boy high on the mast. In the first place, he is not Spanish or Italian, but hails from some barbaric northern land. And, as well, he spends an inordinate amount of time with the captain, despite the fact that he is the lowest-ranking member of the crew. For the past four days, however, he has been up in the crow’s nest, insisting they will reach their destination soon, and most of them believe the hot sun and lack of adequate food and water have addled his wits, until his eyes have made up the thing they want to see. But because there is nothing else to do, they too shade their eyes with their hands, and squint across water that has been empty for so long most doubt they will ever see land again.
It’s true the water looks different. Bluer than the dark green depths that have surrounded them for more than a month. And Cook insisted he saw a bird two days ago. Half the crew disbelieved him, the other half thought it had been an albatross, an omen not of land but of death.
Suddenly someone points. There, in the distance!
Could it be? The thinnest green line separates sky and sea, which are nearly the same color. Someone calls for the glass. More sailors run to the stern. Could it really be…land?
The captain hears the sailors’ tread creaking on the planks above his stateroom. He pulls a pillow over his head. He knows he should restore order, but he too has come to doubt the reality of the dream he is chasing. How could he have let a strange boy convince him that a new world lay on the western edge of the Atlantic, let alone convince him that he could find it, that his name would become the most famous in sailing history, save perhaps that of Odysseus?
The captain met his informant six years ago on a trip to the Norwegian colony of Iceland, when the young Italian had been little more than a cabin boy himself. The boy, still a teenager, had come up to him as if he already knew of the desire for discovery that lay in the Italian mariner’s heart. Without preamble, the Icelander launched into stories of limitless lands to the west. Of cities to rival Rome and Cordoba, rivers that could drink the Nile and Danube, of plants and animals that were sweeter, stronger, stranger than anything previously known. In fact, many of the men in the Reykjavik taverns talked of western lands, although their descriptions sounded far less hospitable than the boy made them out to be. But the boy had one thing they did not: a tiny golden locket of a craftsmanship more delicate than anything else in all of Iceland. It was possible that the boy had stolen it from one of the European ships that occasionally docked in Reykjavik, but the boy insisted it came from the new world. As proof of its distinctiveness, he allowed the young Italian to look inside the locket. There were the most remarkable miniatures he had ever seen. A boy and a girl, the former wearing spectacles with strange, thick rims, the latter short-haired and staring at him with the most assertive eyes he’d ever seen on a female. Hills lay in the background, empty sky stretched overhead. The young Italian had never heard of a painting so small, so realistic, let alone seen one. He had asked if the new world the boy spoke of was filled with objects as remarkable as this one.
The boy’s smile was mysterious and full of promise.
“It will be.”
Now there is a knock on the captain’s stateroom. The door creaks open, and the captain pulls the pillow off his head to see his cabin boy leaning into the room. His hair—pale brown, unlike the dark-haired Italians and Spaniards who make up the rest of the crew—is pulled back into a ponytail, and his skin is bronzed from the sun, which has grown relentless in recent days.
“Eh? What is it, boy?” Still half asleep, the captain blanks on the cabin boy’s name. It is an odd word—the captain is quite sure the boy made it up when he left Iceland. “Quoin,” he says now, not sitting up. “What is it?”