Nine against the unknown

114 NINE AGAINST THE UNKNOWN
He was a broken man. Some few of that great flock of
imaginative mendacities he had unloosed upon the world
had come home to roost. Here, to all seeming, ended both
his quests and his discoveries.
§ io
But behind that sanguine mask (that had acquired in
his brief years of success a haughty pride) there was still
indomitable if indefinite will, indomitable faith in his own
fabrications and the romantic readings of the wool-carder
chapman. If the Earthly Paradise sank a little from hope
his cosmographical notions were still medieval. No less so
were his historical notions. He was convinced that beyond
those islands that had brought him little but false hope and
disaster lay the golden lands of Ind or the pearly lands of
Cathay. And it was his duty as a Christian to seek out those
lands and win the inhabitants to the true faith—winning for
himself a due pittance in wealth as reward.
For two years he badgered the court; and at length
began to wear down the resistance of Ferdinand and Isabella,
fundamentally kindly people, a pair who could not forget
the vague glory that the Admiral’s discoveries had attached
to their names. It was true that except as a breeding-ground
for criminals and a spawning-ground for a very ineffective
kind of slave, the Indies as yet had proved of little value.
But what if the Admiral were right in his further assertions—
that as yet they had but touched the fringes of the great
Western lands that might verily be the Eastern lands of
rumour and wealth ?
Indeed, it was now more than rumour that a great
Western mainland existed. Sailing with English ships,
Sebastian Cabot had set eyes on the North American continent
and cruised along a wide section of its shore. Columbus, now
that the king and queen had acceded to his fresh demand,
determined to sail to the south, “well under the equinoctial
line, for I believe that no one has ever traversed this way, and
that this sea is nearly unknown”.
(This sentence shows his uncertainty, his landsman’s
brief unfaiths in the dominant poet-prevaricator. For, as has
been said, even before his first voyage all the western Medi¬
terranean had been filled with rumours of the Atlantic lands.