Genoa (9 page)

The sailors talked of islands:

of Antilia, and the splendid mirages beyond Gomera; of the French and Portuguese Green Island, and the Irish O’Brasil;

of the great pines, of a kind unknown, cast ashore on the Azores by west and north-west winds—and the lemons, green branches, and other fruits washing upon the Canaries;

of Saint Brandon’s, to be seen now and again from the Canaries, but always eluding discovery,

except by the Saint himself, who set out in search of islands possessing the delights of paradise, and finally landed,

found a dead giant in a sepulchre, revived him, conversed with him, found him docile, converted him, and permitted him to die again. The sailors talked of

          
“the desert islands inhabited by wild men with tails . . .”

or of Atlantis, where the gods were born, and whose first king, Uranus, was given to prophecy . . .

discovered, perhaps, by Phoenicians blown west, and reported by Silenus (whose words are beyond question, as he was drunk at the time) to be “a mass of dry land, which in greatness was infinite and immeasurable, and it nourishes and maintains by virtue of its green meadow and pastures many great and mighty beasts. The men who inhabit this clime are more than twice the height of human stature . . .”

The shore was lofty and precipitous, with a vast, fertile plain lying inland, and great mountains to the north. The land abounded in all precious minerals, and cattle and elephants were plentiful.

                                        
(modern excavations in southwest Spain have unearthed elephant tusks . . .

There was a canal, and a proud, barbaric city, with copper-clad walls, and a great temple to Poseidon, clad with silver, and a gigantic statue in gold.

And there was Scheria, home of Nausicaa and the Phaeacians, UIysses’ longest resting place before his return home—like Atlantis, it boasted a great city, and was located beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

And Tarshish, the port for which Jonah set sail from Joppa.

                                        
(Melville in Joppa: “No sleep last night—only resource to cut tobacco, and watch the six windows of my room, which is like a lighthouse—& hear the surf & wind . . . I have such a feeling in this lonely old Joppa, with the prospect of a long detention here, owing to the surf—that it is only by stern self-control & grim defiance that I continue to keep cool and patient.”

Joppa, the point of departure, the Palos, from which Jonah sought to escape, to Tarshish . . .

But perhaps Tarshish, Atlantis, and Scheria were all one: islands locked in the minds of those who dwelt in the internal sea . . .

perhaps they were all Cadiz: the barbaric western city beyond the Pillars, on the southwest shore of Spain (not far from Palos), where the Guadalquivir pours into “the real ocean,” as the Egyptian priest called it; or, in the words of the Arabians, “the green sea of gloom” . . .

The Western Ocean.

          
In Lisbon, the sailors say: “He who sails beyond the Cape of No may return or not.

          
“For many said: how is it possible to sail beyond a Cape which the navigators of Spain had set as the terminus and end of all navigation in those parts, as men who knew that the sea beyond was not navigable, not only because of the strong currents, but because it was very broken with so much boiling over of its waters that it sucked up all the ships.”

TWO

there was Marco Polo, talking of Cipango, from a jail cell in Genoa:

reporting it to be fifteen hundred miles east of Asia, to be reached by huge Chinese ships made of the fir tree, ships that sailed freely upon the ocean that washed the eastern shores of that continent . . .

                                        
(and if Asia extended to the ocean, and Cipango were fifteen hundred miles east of Asia—to where did the ocean extend?

          
And Melville in Genoa: “Ramparts overhanging the open sea, arches thrown over ravines. Fine views of sections of town. Up & up. Galley-slave prison. Gratings commanding view of sea—infinite liberty.”

And Genoa itself:

          
“Janus, the first king of Italy, and descended from the Giants, founded Genoa on this spot in the time of Abraham; and Janus, Prince of Troy, skilled in astronomy, while sailing in search of a place wherein to dwell in healthfulness and security, came to the same Genoa founded by Janus, King of Italy and great-grandson of Noah; and seeing that the sea and the encompassing hills seemed in all things convenient, he increased it in fame and greatness.”

Janus, Roman god,

doorkeeper of the firmament, presider over gates, the entrance upon and beginning of things . . .

Ianus geminus,
faced front and back,

East and West . . .

I close my eyes, and there is again a sense of split, a jagged crease running the length of my forehead—only for a moment, and it is gone.

Genoa,

at the northernmost pitch of the Ligurian Sea, turning

southeast, to trade with the East, and

southwest, perhaps, through the Pillars of Hercules, to

the Terrestrial Paradise . . . (for many philosophers believe this will be found south of the equator, the torrid zone serving as a flaming sword to ward off invasion. They divide the globe into northern and southern hemispheres, the southern being the head, or better part, and the northern the feet, or lesser part (this being confirmed by the stars of the southern hemisphere, which shine with a larger and brighter aspect). The east, according to the philosophers, is to the right, and to the left, the west.)

In Genoa. in the year 1451, Susanna Columbus, wife to Domenico, gave birth to a son, Christopher . . .

          
“His parents were notable persons, one time rich . . .; at other times they must have been poor . . .”

          
Allan Melvill, Herman’s father, in a letter: “I have now to request in the most
urgent manner,
as equally involving my personal honor & the welfare of my Family, that you would favor me by
return of mail
with your Note to my Order at six months from 31st March, for Five Thousand Dollars . . .”

At the age of fourteen, Columbus went to sea . . .

          
Melville: “Sad disappointments in several plans which I had sketched for my future life; the necessity of doing something for myself, united to a naturally roving disposition, had now conspired within me, to send me to sea as a sailor.”

and

          
“. . . thought me an erring and a wilful boy, and perhaps I was; but if I was, it had been a hard-hearted world and hard times that had made me so. I had learned to think much and bitterly before my time . . .”

Domenico, Christopher’s father, was a well-liked man, easily obtaining property on credit . . .

          
Allan Melvill: “I rec
^d
this morning with unutterable satisfaction your most opportune & highly esteemed favour . . . with the annexed two notes drawn by yourself . . . one for $2500—the other for $2750—payable at the Bank of America . . .”

But—a weaver by trade—he neglected his loom, took on sidelines: cheese, wine, a tavern . . . so that Christopher, returning from a sea voyage, age nineteen, found himself responsible for his father’s debts, and, with his mariner’s wages, secured the father’s freedom from a Genoese j
^ail.

          
Allan Melvill: “. . . my situation has become almost intolerable for the want of $500 to discharge some urgent debts, and provide necessaries for my Family . . . I may soon be prosecuted for my last quarters Rent, & other demands which were unavoidably left unpaid . . .”

Christopher remained, throughout his life, mysterious regarding his origins, speaking of himself never as Genoese, but only as foreigner . . .

          
Ahab, gazing at the corpusants: “Oh, thou magnanimous! Now I do glory in my genealogy! . . . thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire.”

Columbus and Melville—the paternity blasted . . .

                                        
(perhaps Domenico and Allan should have practiced a custom of the Iberians and Caribs,

                                        
(The Couvade,

                                        
(the father taking to his bed for several days or weeks at the birth of a child, so as not to endanger the delicate affinity with the newborn . . .

Columbus:

          
“Most exalted Sovereigns: At a very early age I entered upon the sea navigating, and I have continued doing so until today. The calling in itself inclines whoever follows it to desire to know the secrets of this world. Forty years are already passing which I have employed in this manner: I have traversed every region which up to the present time is navigated.”

          
“During this time I have seen, and in seeing, have studied all writings, cosmography, histories, chronicles, and philosophy and those relating to other arts, by means of which our Lord made me understand with a palpable hand, that it was practicable to navigate from here to the Indies and inspired me with a will for the execution of this navigation. And with this fire, I came to your Highnesses.”

          
Melville, as Pierre: “A varied scope of reading, little suspected by his friends, and randomly acquired by a random but lynx-eyed mind . . .; this poured one considerable contributory stream into that bottomless spring of original thought which the occasion and time had caused to burst out in himself.”

Columbus:

          
“It might be that your Highnesses and all the others who knew me, . . . either in secret or public would reprove me in divers manners, saying that I am not learned in letters and calling me a crazy sailor, a worldly man, etc.”

          
“I say that the holy spirit works in Christians, Jews, Moors, and in all others of all sects, and not only in the wise but the ignorant: for in my time I have seen a villager who gave a better account of the heaven and the stars and their courses than others who expended money in learning of them.”

And Melville—always a man of the fo’castle:

          
“. . . a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”

Christopher, who called himself “an ignorant man,” was captain of his own ship and a corsair, at twenty-one. And

          
“. . . I saw all the East and West . . .”

Once,

          
“It happened to me that King Reynal . . . sent me to Tunis to seize the galleas Fernandina, and when I was already on the island of St. Peter in Sardinia, a settee informed me that the galleas was accompanied by two other ships and a carack, whereupon there was agitation among the men and they refused to sail on unless we returned first to Marseilles to pick up another ship and more men. Seeing that I could not force their hand without some artifice, I agreed to what they asked me, but, changing the bait of the magnetic needle, I spread sails at sunset, and the next morning, at dawn, we were within the cape of Carthagine while all had been certain that we were going to Marseilles.”

          
M
OBY
-D
ICK
:
“Thrusting his head halfway into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost seemed to stagger. Standing behind him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two compasses pointed East, and the ‘Pequod’ was as infallibly going West.”

Fourteen hundred seventy-eight and -nine: Columbus in all probability sailed to the East, in the service of the House of Centurione. The course was through the Straits of Messina,

                                        
(Melville: “Coasts of Calabria & Sicily ahead at day break. Neared them at 10 o’clock . . . At 1
P
.
M
.
anchored in harbor of Messina . . . Rainy day.”)

. . thence across the Ionian Sea to Taenarum, through the Cervi Channel north of Cythera, past the white columns of the Temple of Poseidon on Cape Sunium, through the difficult currents of the D’Oro channel to Cape Mastika and the island of Chios, due south of Lesbos.

          
Melville: “Sea less cross. At 12.M. pleasant, & made the coast of Greece, the Morea. Passed through the straits, & Cape Matapan.”

Matapan being the Taenarum of Christopher . . .

Thus Columbus before the Indies, and Melville, after Polynesia . . . rubbing among the old islands . . .

And August the thirteenth, 1476, Columbus, on board a Genoese trading vessel, engaged in sea-battle with a Franco-Portuguese outfit: another ship locked with his, both caught fire, and both eventually went down. Columbus, in the open sea,