Genoa

by Paul Metcalf

  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 . . .”

  Spanish cosmographers, however, were not impressed. In fourteen hundred ninety, they “judged his promises and offers were impossible and vain and worthy of rejection . . . they ridiculed his reasoning saying that they had tried so many times and had sent ships in search of the mainland and that it was all air and there was no reason in it . . .”

  Lizzie Melville, Herman’s wife, in a letter to her mother: “I suppose by this time you are deep in the ‘fogs’ of ‘Mardi’—if the mist ever does clear away, I should like to know what it reveals . . .”

  They further advised the Sovereigns “that it was not a proper object for their royal authority to favor an affair that rested on such weak foundations, and which appeared uncertain and impossible to any educated person, however little learning he might have.”

  But Columbus “had conceived in his heart the most certain confidence to find what he claimed he would, as if he had this world locked up in his trunk.”

  Later, in the Indies:

  “We reached the latter island near a large mountain which seemed almost to reach heaven, and in the centre of that mountain there was a peak which was much higher than all the rest of the mountain, and from which many streams flowed in different directions, especially toward the direction in which we lay. At a distance of three leagues a waterfall appeared as large through as an ox, which precipitated itself from such a high point that it seemed to fall from heaven. It was at such a distance that there were many wagers on the ships, as some said that it was white rocks and others that it was water. As soon as they arrived nearer, the truth was learned, and it was the most wonderful thing in the world to see from what a high place it was precipitated and from what a small place such a large waterfall sprang.”

  And the Pequod, approaching the Straits of Sunda:

  “Broad on both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and forming a great semi-circle, embracing one half of the level horizon, a continuous chain of whale-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the noonday air.”

  Swinging my foot to the floor, I sit tense, crouched forward, straight in the chair. Huge-headed, I am one of millions, and there is a gateway, an opening, for which all of us have been alerted.

  “As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains, accelerate their march, all eagerness to place that perilous passage in their rear, and once more expand in comparative security upon the plain; even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward through the straits; gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle, and swimming on, in one solid, but still crescentic centre.”

  From Nantucket, east,

  to Good Hope, the Indian Ocean, the Straits of Sunda, and

  “. . . we glided between two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake. Here the storms in the roaring glens between the outermost whales, were heard but not felt. In this central expanse the sea presented the smooth satin-like surface, called a sleek, produced by the subtle moisture thrown off by the whale in his more quiet moods. Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion.”

  “Keeping at the centre of the lake, we were occasionally visited by small tame cows and calves; the women and children of this routed host.”

  “Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep.”

  And Columbus, on the third voyage, sailing in the Gulf of Paria, observing the mangroves lining the shore, with tiny oysters clinging to their roots . . . the oyster shells open, to catch from the mangrove leaves the dewdrops that engender pearls . . .

  Fourteen hundred and ninety, Isabella, rejecting the advice of her cosmographers, was hesitant. Perhaps, with insanity touching her mother and her daughter, rendering her thus bracketed

  (as Melville, his father dying maniacal and his son a suicide, was similarly bracketed),

  she was just strange enough to listen . . .

  Certainly, the natural direction for Spain’s colonial expansion was Africa, in pursuit of the Moors. America was altogether irrelevant, distant, difficult, tempting, and ultimately untenable and ruinous. Thus, as Melville to Western Man, so Columbus to Spanish history, did more violence, perhaps, than all the wars that followed.

  But as Albertus Magnus said of the Antipodes:

  “Perhaps also some magnetic power in that region draws human stones even as the magnet draws iron.”

  FOUR

  And there was Michele de Cuneo, with his Carib sla
ve: “Having taken her into my cabin, she being naked according to their custom, I conceived a desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it and treated me with her fingernails in such manner that I wished I had never begun. But seeing that (to tell you the end of it all), I took a rope and thrashed her well, for which she raised such unheard of screams that you would not have believed your ears. Finally we came to an agreement in such a manner that I can tell you that she seemed to have been brought up in a school of harlots.”

  And the letter to the Marquis of Mantua, announcing that vessels of the King of Spain “discovered certain islands, among others a very large island toward the Orient which had very great rivers and terrible mountains and a most fertile country inhabited by handsome men and women, but they all go naked, except that some wear a leaf of cotton over their genitals . . .”

  Melville, in TYPEE:

  “. . . we found ourselves close in with the island the next morning, but as the bay we sought lay on its farther side, we were obliged to sail some distance along the shore, catching, as we proceeded, short glimpses of blooming valleys, deep glens, waterfalls, and waving groves, hidden here and there by projecting and rocky headlands, every moment opening to the view some new and startling scene of beauty.”

  “As they drew nearer, and I watched the rising and sinking of their forms, and beheld the uplifted right arm bearing above the water the girdle of tapa, and their long dark hair trailing beside them as they swam, I almost fancied they could be nothing else than so many mermaids . . .”

  (Columbus, First Voyage: “On the previous day, when the Admiral went to the Rio del Oro, he saw three mermaids, which rose well out of the sea . . .”)

  TYPEE: “We were still some distance from the beach, and under slow headway, when we sailed right into the midst of these swimming nymphs, and they boarded us at every quarter; many seizing hold of the chainplates and springing into the chains; others . . . wreathing their slender forms about the ropes . . . All of them at length succeeded in getting up the ship’s side, where they clung dripping with the brine and glowing from the bath, their jet-black tresses streaming over their shoulders, and half-enveloping their otherwise naked forms. There they hung, sparkling with savage vivacity . . .”

  “Our ship was now given up to every species of riot . . .”

  But Columbus in Spain, fourteen eighty-five to ninety-two:

  “All this delay did not go without great anguish and grief for Cristóbal Colón, for . . . he saw his life was flowing past wasted . . . and above all because he saw how distrusted his truth and person were, which for generous persons it is known to be as painful and detestable as death.”

  Columbus waited.

  FIVE

  I am lifted from my chair, headlong. I stand, leaning over the desk, my head whirling, consonant with the gusts of blackberry winter, of the catbird storm. Decision crowds upon me, and, like one of the sperm whales crowding for the Straits of Sunda, pursued by a Nantucket madman who is in turn pursued by Malays, I push for a gateway, an entrance upon and beginning of things.

  August 2nd, 1492,

  ninth day of the Jewish Ab, The Father, when Jewry mourned the destruction of Jerusalem . . . the exodus from Spain began. Three hundred thousand funneled to the seaports, not far from “the beginning of Europe.”

  “Those who went to embark in El Puerto de Santa Maria and in Cadiz, as soon as they saw the sea, shouted and yelled, men and women, grown-ups and children, asking mercy of the Lord in their prayers, and they thought they would see some marvels from God and that they would have a road opened for them across the sea . . .”

  But the Jews embarked and headed back east, into the internal sea, to the old haunts . . . and

  on that day, Columbus ordered his men aboard three ships, before nightfall.

  Perhaps, within himself, Christopher journeyed to the old haunts, herded himself into the tribe, to Esdras of the Apocrypha, to the earlier prophets, and to Genesis;

  but it is not so much that Columbus may have been a Jew, or Melville at war with Christ, as it is that both men ran upward to the sources. Melville, an Ishmael, and Columbus, displaying an arrogance greater than Joan’s, sought the prophets—men who, like the first king of Atlantis, imagined and predicted, and from whom, therefore, action flowed . . .

  (Columbus the navigator: “All people received their astronomy from the Jews.”

  August 3,

  before daylight of a gray, calm day—a day so quiet that one would think time had stopped—three ships slipped from their moorings—the motion a thing good and confirming—and drifted down the Rio Tinto on the tide. Guided by the sweeps, with no wind, the ships altered their course to port, and entered the Rio Saltes, floating past the piney sand dunes, and spoke another ship, outward bound on the same tide, with a cargo of emigrant Jews

  (and the Pinta spoke the same ship on the return voyage of both, the one bound from the Levant, the other from the Indies . . .

  Turning fifty degrees to starboard, the fleet crossed the bar, and

  “proceeded with a strong breeze until sunset, towards the south, for 60 miles, equal to 15 leagues . . .”

  There was the letter from Paul Toscanelli, Florentine physician and philosopher (in those days, the one implied the other):

  “To Christopher Columbus, Paul the physician, greeting: I see your great and magnificent desire to go where the spices grow, and in reply to your letter I send you the copy of another letter which I wrote a long time ago . . . and I send you another seaman’s chart . . . And although I know from my own knowledge that the world can be shown as it is in the form of a sphere, I have determined for greater facility and greater intelligence to show the said route by a chart similar to those which are made for navigation . . . straight to the west the commencement of the Indies is shown, and the islands and places where you can deviate towards the equinoctial line, and by how much space, that is to say, in how many leagues you can reach those most fertile places, filled with all kinds of spices and jewels and precious stones: and you must not wonder if I call the place where spices grow, West, because it is commonly said that they grow in the East; but whoever will navigate to the West will always find the said places in the West . . .”

  But Columbus did not head “straight to the west,” but

  South and by West, for the Canaries, and, further, for the Terrestrial Paradise . . .

  Monday August 6,

  “The rudder of the caravel Pinta became unshipped, and Martin Alonzo Pinzon, who was in command, believed or suspected that it was by contrivance of Gomes Rascon and Cristobal Quintero, to whom the caravel belonged, for they dreaded to go on that voyage. The Admiral says that, before they sailed, these men had been displaying a certain backwardness . . .”

  Still standing, I step back from the desk, gaining my sea-legs. I am braced, with one hand on the chimney. The house arches and shudders—an inverted hull, with kelson aloft—against the weather.

  and the human sperm enters a reservoir, low in oxygen—and thence to the vas deferens, in the lowest, coolest scrotal area . . .

  upward, then, through the spermatic cord, to globus minor and the seminal vesicle . . .

  The Canaries: insular remnants, perhaps, of Atlantis—thence to Antillia, showing on Toscanelli’s chart half-way to Cathay. Antillia: of which the Indies might be scattered remnants . . .

  The ships were shaken down . . . there were no desertions at the Canaries. The voyage was begun . . .

  Sunday September 9:

  “On this day they lost sight of land; and many, fearful of not being able to return for a long time to see it, sighed and shed tears. But the admiral . . . when that day the sailors reckoned the distance 18 leagues, said he had counted only 15, having decided to lessen the record so that the crew would not think they were as far from Spain as in fact they were.”

  So a great head shrinks the distance . . .

  shrinks the very globe itself:—for it was o
nly the bold and persistent acceptance of cosmographical errors in the mind of Columbus—shrinking the earth by a quarter, and juggling Cypango until it fell among the Virgin Islands—that made possible the discovery . . .

  (and in San Salvador, Columbus noted among the natives that “the whole forehead and head is very broad”—the result of artificially flattening the skulls of infants, by pressing them between boards.

  Monday September 17:

  Passing the true north, Columbus—making the “pilot’s blessing”—marked the North Star, and noted that the needle now began pointing to the west of north, instead of to the customary east.

  “All the sailors feared greatly and all became very sad, and began to murmur under their breaths again, without making it known altogether to Christopher Columbus, seeing such a new thing, and one they had never seen or experienced, and there they feared they were in another world.”

  MOBY-DICK:—“At first, the steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at either end; but at last it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had been intently watching for this result, stepped frankly back from the binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,—‘Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not Lord of the level loadstone! . . .’

  “One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk away.”

  Whale, boobie, sandpiper, dove, crab, and boatswain bird—all were signs of land . . . for hitherto none had sailed far enough to see such things other than close to land . . .

  and there was sargasso weed, rumored to trap ships as in a web . . . detritus, perhaps, of Atlantis . . .

  From the posterior, the vault of the vagina, the sperm’s journey measures, perhaps, five inches. The cilia in the oviduct have an outward stroke, against the motion of the sperm . . .

  (Columbus reported the usual course of the sargasso weed to be from west to east . . .