Page:The life of Christopher Columbus.djvu/90

66 Nevertheless, the rank his father-in-law had occupied, and the relations arising from that honorable alliance, gave him access to the highest quarters. One circumstance, until this day unrecorded by biographers, attests it beyond doubt. King Alphonsus V., who, without undertaking maritime expeditions, still, from tradition and instinct, interested himself about naval affairs, cheerfully admitted into his presence this foreign pilot, whose conversation captivated him. Columbus spoke to him about the natural sciences and maritime adventures. One day, at the end of a conversation on cosmographie affairs, and perhaps to confirm the Genoese in his ideas, the King showed him some reeds of an enormous size, foreign to any climate of Europe, which a storm had driven on the shore of the Azores. This fact, apparently insignificant, was still very explicative.

Although the idea of his plan was not developed in a complete manner until the fourth year of his sojourn in Portugal, we can assert that he had already conceived the project of examining the whole of this earth; for this man never was inconsistent with himself. In examining into the secret of his life, we find him always the same. That which he was in his advanced age, he was in his youth. The time of his birth is known only by that of his death; the movements of his youth are known only by the revelations of his adult age; and we do not fully know the ideas of his mature age but by the thoughts of his last years. He has written that he who follows the business of navigating the sea, feels the desire of penetrating into the secrets of the world. This declaration of his old age tells us of the preoccupations of his adult age as well as those of his youth. Here we have an involuntary disclosure of those long years he passed on sen, without material profit to his fortune.

How wonderful are the ways in which Providence acts! It draws from a disaster a benefit for him who appears to have been its victim. Columbus finds himself carried, against his will, to the centre of those ideas that were to expand his views, among a people who are given to making