The Great Enterprise

ADMIRAL OF THE OCEAN SEA-Samuet Eliot Morison-Atlantic-Little, Brown ($10).

This monumental, two-volume,* 874-page biography, which took ten years to complete, is the definitive job on Columbus. It warps the U.S. mind a little tighter to its neglected Spanish-American heritage, and presents the most complete picture yet published of the one historical figure about whom every American knows something. That something, says Historian Morison, is usually wrong.

Nobody, for example, really knows what Columbus looked like. There are at least 71 "alleged original portraits" in existence. Since no two look alike, Author Morison prefers an imaginary, 119th-Century portrait that "gives an impression of force, dignity and integrity."

Columbus' Journal is also missing. But a copy found its way to Columbus' contemporary biographer, Bartolome de Las Casas, who abstracted from it the text we have today. The same or another copy was used by Ferdinand Columbus (the Admiral's bastard son), who quoted long passages in writing his father's life. Professor Morison believes that these and other data are contemporary documentation enough. The real confusion about Columbus, he believes, has been caused by more recent biographies written by "armchair admirals" who know nothing about the sea.

To correct some of their mistakes, Professor Morison decided to apply the alfresco, learn-by-doing methods that Francis Parkman used for his History of France in the New World. In the summer of 1939 Morison and some friends bought the barkentine, Capitana, which was "near enough to Columbus' larger ships in rig and burthen to enable us to cross the ocean under conditions very similar to those of his day. . . ." In the Capitana they explored the European end of Columbus' routes, then headed back across the Atlantic. "Our crossing from Gomera to Trinidad was approximately on the route of [Columbus'] Third Voyage, and we made exactly the same Trinidad landfall. ..." Later they explored his routes along the Spanish Main, and Professor Morison kept retracing the Caribbean until the war made him stop.

Sailing the same kind of ships, making the same reckonings from the same stars, Author Morison came to understand the problems Columbus solved. Result is a book written with quarter-deck authority and a seaborn, salty spaciousness.

The Dead Reckoner. In rediscovering what Columbus did, Author Morison also rediscovered who Columbus was. Just before his Third Voyage, Columbus de posed that he came originally from Genoa ("from it I came and in it I was born").

This is reason enough, thinks Author Morison, to believe that Columbus was not a Spaniard or a Portuguese (both na tions claim him as a native son). Salvador de Madariaga's recent ingenious attempt to prove that Columbus was an unconverted Jew is dismissed as "a significant pattern of hypotheses and innuendoes unsupported by anything so vulgar as fact." Professor Morison also smiles wanly at stories like Columbus and the egg.* Nor, says he, did Isabella pawn her jewels to outfit Columbus' ships. She only said she would if it was necessary; it wasn't.

Furthermore, the common idea that the Nina and Pinta were open or half-decked boats is "preposterous." Nina, Columbus' favorite, was "one of the greatest little ships in the world's history." She drew only six feet of water, and sailed 25,000 miles under Columbus' command. Pinta was such a smart sailer that "Columbus became annoyed at a habit of Captain Pinzon in pressing on ahead when land was expected, in order to gain the reward." Morison guesses that she was about 75 feet long. Santa Maria was "somewhat" but "not very much" bigger than the others, drew "not more than 6 1/2 feet aft when loaded." But Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria were "well built, well rigged, well equipped and well manned. ..." Wrote Columbus: "Muy aptos para un semejante fecho-well suited for such an enterprise." Writes Author Morison: "Let us hear no more chatter about Columbus setting forth in 'tubs,' 'crates' or 'cockleshells.' "

One autumn afternoon Columbus' crews saw the last of the Canary Islands disappear. "By nightfall . . . the three ships had an uncharted ocean to themselves." How did Columbus know where he was on that sea? "The Admiral liked to pose as an expert in celestial navigation. . . . Yet the testimony of his own journals proves that the simple method of finding latitude from a meridional observation of the sun . . . was unknown to Columbus." He was unable to use the newly invented astrolabe, and probably had none aboard. The common quadrant was his only instrument of celestial navigation. Mostly he sailed by dead reckoning, "which means simply laying down your compass courses and estimated distances on a chart."

At dead reckoning, Columbus had few equals. Wrote a shipmate at the end of the Second Voyage: "But there is one thing that I wish you to know, that, in my humble opinion, since Genoa was Genoa, no other man has been born so magnanimous and so keen in practical navigation as the above-mentioned Lord Admiral: for, when navigating, by only looking at a cloud or by night at a star he knew what was going to happen and whether there would be foul weather; he himself both conned and steered at the helm; and when the storm had passed over, he made sail while others were sleeping."

Man Alone. What was the Admiral himself like? Author Morison mentions his "physical courage . . . and untiring persistence and unbreakable will." There were also "certain defects," lack of appreciation of subordinates, unwillingness to admit shortcomings, a tendency to complain and be sorry for himself. But "these were the defects of the qualities that made him a great historical figure. For he was not, like a Washington, a Cromwell or a Bolivar, an instrument chosen by multitudes to express their wills. . . . He was Man alone with God against human stupidity and depravity, against greedy conquistadors, cowardly seamen, even against nature and the sea."

He was also pious. In his journal, he usually timed events by "tierce, vespers and compline, three of the canonical hours of prayer." Whenever possible he said his prayers in his cabin at these hours. Says Morison: "A decent formality has always been observed aboard ships at sea, even to our own day . . . any departure from the settled custom is resented by mariners. In Columbus' ships these formalities were observed with a quasi-religious ritual, which lent them a certain beauty. ..."

Daybreak was greeted by a ship's boy ("on the same principle as having family grace said by the youngest child") with the singing of a hymn. Further similar hymns were sung at almost every half hour of the day. But piety did not prevent the sailors from becoming terrified as the voyage went on, from plotting mutiny and the murder of Columbus. Only the landfall at San Salvador in the Bahamas prevented some kind of outbreak. Nor did piety stop the "white gods" from swindling, kidnapping, murdering and raping Indians before they had been a month in the new world. Columbus returned to Spain triumphant in the belief that he had discovered the outer island of Japan. This was the high point of his career. The eleven years and three voyages that occupy most of Author Morison's second volume are like the thickening tragedy of blood in which there are too many acts. The perpetual, sterile hunt for gold; the extermination or enslavement of the Indians; the bitter intrigues of Columbus' rivals; his failure as a colonizer and governor; his return to Spain in irons; his loss of the confidence of Ferdinand and Isabella. . . . Everything went wrong. He discovered the Venezuelan pearl fisheries, which might have retrieved his reputation in Spain; but he did not realize what he had found, and a few months later a rival began to work them. In Panama he found gold, but could not get the metal out. With worm-riddled ships he tried to make the Spanish settlement on Haiti. He was forced to beach the boats on Jamaica, wait for months while rescuers, hoping he would die, refused to take him off.

It was the moment of Columbus' greatest failure; for at last he could no longer conceal from himself that he had discovered not the wealth of Asia but a new world.

The Author. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison (The Maritime History of Massachusetts) has been described as a Boston Brahmin with a bite. Outwardly he is a tweedy, dignified, humorous patrician who at 54 is highly enthusiastic about sailing, skiing, horseback riding, wanes, U.S. history before 1760 and Christopher Columbus. His office in Harvard's Widener Library is scattered with books, maps, charts and pictures about the discoverer. He also has a photograph of Franklin Roosevelt which is autographed: "To my friend Sam Morison-Columbus Jr."

One of Professor Morison's favorite stories concerns the yessing habits of Latin American Indians, which, he believes, account for some of the strange misinformation Columbus picked up. One day in the Gulf of Darien, Morison and friends took on a San Bias Indian as a pilot. They asked him: "Can we carry three fathoms of water through this passage?" "Yes," said the Indian. "Is there a good anchorage in there and can we get water?" "Yes," said the Indian. Then a mate who had had some experience with Indians took a hand. "Does the pink, pot-bellied ostrich live on that island?" he asked. "Yes," said the Indian. "And are you a -- damned -of a -?" asked the enraged mateo "Yes," said the Indian.

*A one-volume, popular edition ($3.50) of Admiral of the Ocean Sea has been condensed to 671 pages by cutting out esoteric nautical data, pages of notes, a chapter on the origin of syphilis, other interesting superfluities.

*It was already a chestnut, told of several other Italians by their biographers.

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