London, April to September 1822
AMONG my fellow passengers was an Englishman named Francis Tulloch. He had served in the artillery; he was a painter, a musician, a mathematician, and spoke several languages. The Abbé Nagault, a Superior of the Sulpiciens, had met this Anglican officer and made him a Catholic. He was now taking his neophyte to Baltimore.
I struck up a friendship with Tulloch. As I was then a deep philosopher, I urged him to return to his family. The sights that we had before our eyes sent him into transports of admiration. We used to get up at night, when the deck was abandoned to the officer on watch and a few sailors who smoked their pipes in silence: Tuta aequora silent.[8] The ship rolled at the mercy of the slow and soundless waves, as sparks of fire coursed in the white foam along her sides. Thousands of stars shining in the somber azure of the celestial dome and a shoreless sea: infinity in the sky and on the waters! Never has God more impressed me with his grandeur than on those nights when I had such immensity above my head and such immensity below my feet.
Westerly winds interspersed with calms slowed our progress. On May 4, we had only got as far as the Azores. On the sixth, around eight o’clock in the morning, we came in sight of the Island of Pico, that volcano which has long towered over innavigable seas, a useless beacon by night and an invisible landmark by day.
There is something magical about seeing land rising up from the bottom of the ocean. Christopher Columbus, hemmed in by his mutinous crew and ready to return to Europe without having reached his journey’s end, spied a little light shining on a beach that night had hid. The flight of birds had guided him toward America. Now the glow of a savage hearth revealed to him a new universe. Columbus must have experienced the kind of feeling that scripture ascribes to the Creator when, having drawn up the earth out of nothingness, he saw that his work was good: vidit Deus quod esset bonum.[9] Columbus also created a world. One of the first biographies of the Genoese navigator is that which Giustiniani, publishing his Hebrew psalter, placed in the form of a note beneath the psalm: Caeli enarrant gloriam dei.[10]
Vasco de Gama must have been no less amazed when, in 1498, he touched the coast of Malabar. In a moment, everything changed on the globe. Nature took on a new appearance, and the curtain, which for thousands of centuries had hidden a part of the earth, was lifted. The sailors discovered the country of the sun, the place where he rose each morning “like a bridegroom or a giant,” tanquam sponsus, ut gigas.[11] They saw, in all her nakedness, that wise and brilliant Orient whose mysterious history was blended with the travels of Pythagoras, the conquests of Alexander, the memory of the crusades, and whose perfumes came to us from across the fields of Arabia and the sea of Greece. Europe sent her a poet to pay her tribute: Camões, the swan of Tagus, made his sweet sad voice heard over the shores of the Indies. He borrowed from them their radiance, their fame, and their misfortune. He left them only their riches.