The Lost Mariner | The New Yorker
In August, 1498, three months into his Third Voyage, Christopher Columbus found himself sailing toward the nipple of the world. He had just spent several weeks navigating off what he believed to be an island in the Far East but was actually Venezuela, and during that time he had noticed several curious phenomena. Great quantities of fresh water were flowing into the ocean; the climate seemed unusually temperate for a region so close to the equator; and the North Star was wandering from its course. Putting all this together, Columbus reasoned that the world was shaped like a ball with a breastlike protuberance. He felt himself not just crossing the ocean but going up it, his whole ship being lifted gently toward the sky. Had he reached the very tip of the protuberance, he concluded, he would have sailed straight into the Terrestrial Paradise. He found this theory so compelling that two months later he sent news of it in a long letter to his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. What they made of it was not recorded.
Columbus was one of history’s great optimists. When he read in Marco Polo that the palace of the Japanese king had floors of gold “two fingers thick,” he accepted it as fact. Cuba, he was convinced, was part of the Malay Peninsula; things of value were more plentiful in the south; and the riches of the Orient—or, barring that, the rewards of Paradise—were always just around the corner. On all of these points, of course, he was wrong, and should have been fatally so, except that he was also fantastically lucky.
