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,
(Melville: “A bloody film was before my eyes, through which, ghost-like, passed and repassed my father, mother, and sisters. An unutterable nausea oppressed me; I was conscious of gasping; there seemed no breath in my body. . I thought to myself, Great God! this is death!”
. . grasped an oar and, alternately swimming and resting, despite wounds, finally landed at Lagos, twenty miles from “the beginning of Europe,” and not far from Cadiz and Palos.
de Madariaga: “On August 13th, 1476, Christoforo Columbo, then just under twenty-five years of age, was in danger of death. He was near enough to death to be able to say that on that day he was reborn.”
Melville, to Hawthorne: “My development has been all within a few years past. I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed & nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life.”
I shift my position, turn to sit sideways, throwing one leg over the arm of the chair. The strange internal sensations are still with me, but are less terrifying, with greater possibility of change. .
In Portugal, Columbus, Genoese Ishmael, married one Filipa Moniz Perestrello, of an old, established family, and thus took a step up the ladder, toward the court,
as Herman married, or was married perhaps, to Lizzie Shaw. .
“Not the slightest hint has come down to us of the appearance or disposition of Columbus’s only wife; Dona Felipa is as shadowy a figure as the Discoverer’s mother.”
But there was Beatriz,
whom he loved and did not marry. . whose last name, despite all attempts by herself and family to suppress it, was Torquemada, and whose origin, therefore, was probably Jewish. .
Christopher and Beatriz — joined, not in matrimony, but in blasted paternity — got a son, the illegitimate Ferdinand (who later claimed noble ancestry for his father),
as, in PIERRE, Mr. Glendinning begat upon his French mistress a daughter, Isabel,
(and perhaps, in Polynesia, Herman and Fayaway. .
But in Portugal, with the help of Dona Felipa, Columbus gained the court:
“The King, as he observed this Christovao Colom to be a big talker and boastful in setting forth his accomplishments, and full of fancy and imagination with his Isle Cypango than certain whereof he spoke, gave him small credit. However, by strength of his importunity it was ordered that he confer with D. Diego Ortiz bishop of Ceuta and Master Roderigo and Master José, to whom the King had committed these matters of cosmography and discovery, and they all considered the words of Christovao Colom as vain, simply founded on imagination, or things like that Isle Cypango of Marco Polo. .”
And so he left the court, left Portugal, left Dona Felipa. .
became, in fact, the ideal unwed Ishmael, wanderer in the wilderness, of which Melville, long since returned from the seas, never stopped thinking. .
(Pasted to the inside of Melville’s desk, discovered after his death: “Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.”
Christopher, wed “to the magnanimity of the sea, which” as Melville says, “will permit no records”. .
searching an insular paternity, left Portugal, for Spain
THREE
and Isabella,
who, like himself, was blue-eyed, fair-skinned, and red-haired. .
He told her, perhaps, of the books he had been reading, such as the YMAGO MUNDI:
“There is a spring in Paradise which waters the Garden of Delights and which splays into four rivers.”
“The Paradise on Earth is a pleasant place, situated in certain regions of the Orient, at a long distance by land and by sea from our inherited world. It rises so high that it touches the lunar sphere. .”
(Melville, BILLY BUDD: “Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the color, but where exactly does the first one visibly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.”
“. . and the water of the Deluge could not reach it. . its altitude over the lowlands is incomparable. . and it reaches the layers of calm air which lie on top of the zone of troubled air. .”
“From this lake, as from a main spring, there flow the four rivers of Paradise: Phison or Ganges; Gihon or Nile; Tigris and Euphrates. .”
Certain it is that Melville performed an act original and radical to himself, in MOBY-DICK. In all his works hitherto, he had voyaged southward to Cape Horn, then westward to the Pacific, returning via that same essentially western route (the one exception being REDBURN, dealing not at all with the Pacific, nor with cosmographical man).
“. . the sight of many unclad, lovely island creatures, round the Horn”—that was the route to the Treasures: southward, the Horn, and then west.
But in MOBY-DICK, Melville turned upon himself and Western Man, performing an act as violent as subsequent war and catastrophe — an act rich, perhaps, with revenge as Ahab’s pursuit of the whale: the Pequod turned and headed back east—a route Melville himself never followed to the Pacific — eastward, via Good Hope, the Indian Ocean, and
“By the straits of Sunda, chiefly, vessels bound to China from the west, emerge into the China seas.”
Thus, it was a return, a going back, a going back upward, perhaps. .
like the Pacific salmon, who spend their lives in salt water, and then, anadromous, run upward to the fresh, to the very individual source waters, the headwaters, to spawn and die
(developing, often, a humpback, hooked snout, and elongated jaw — becoming altogether monstrous, while in this pursuit. .
Columbus: “I always read that the world, land and water, was spherical. . Now I observed so much divergence, that I began to hold different views about the world and I found that it was not round. . but pear-shaped, round except where it has a nipple, for there it is taller, or as if one had a round ball and, on one side, it should be like a woman’s breast, and this nipple part is the highest and closest to heaven. .”
Columbus, ascending the mounting waters, “running upward” to the very source point, “highest and closest to heaven. .”
Genesis, the St. Jerome version: “But the Lord God in the beginning had planted a Paradise of Delight: in which he placed the man whom he had fashioned. . And a river came out from the Place of Delight to water Paradise: which from thence is divided into four heads. .”