AUGUST 2ND, 1492
The ropes sing and the sails crack, and the Santa Maria makes her way out of the harbour of Palos de la Frontera. Girolamo tastes salt spray on his lips as the ship comes about.
They say Columbus is mad, that Asia is twice as far away as he believes, but Girolamo knows he will find new lands, lands where he will know no one and no one will know him, where even the name of God is strange. When he was pope they asked him to bless the conquests made in the new lands, and to send priests to convert the heathens that they found, and after he read the book of his fellow Dominican Las Casas, he tried to regulate their interactions. He can’t bear to repeat his life anymore, to start again with his friends, to speak to Isabella and have her reply as a stranger, to go through the explanations, to fail and fail and fail again. Anywhere in Europe he will meet people he knows, not every day but from time to time. Here there will be no one he knows.
The men on the ships are mostly Spaniards, though he is not the only Italian. They are all strangers. It was not easy to persuade Columbus to take him. He says he has no need for a chaplain, and he can keep records himself. It is Girolamo’s total belief that sways him, reinforcing his own belief that if he sails West into the open ocean he will find something.
Girolamo does not know what will happen to him in the New World. He does not know very much about the people or cultures he will encounter, whether they will be friendly or unfriendly. He prays as he stands at the rail to God and the Holy Virgin and all the saints, and does not know whether they hear him or not. He stands there for hours, though the spray soaks his face as they sail out into the open ocean. He prays to Lorenzo to intercede for him in Heaven, and he cannot tell whether the salt water on his face is the sea or his tears.