Christopher Columbus and the New World of His Discovery

Columbus, Complete, by Filson
Young

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Title: Christopher Columbus, Complete
Author: Filson Young
Release Date: October 7, 2006 [EBook #4116]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, COMPLETE ***

Produced by David Widger

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
AND THE NEW WORLD OF HIS DISCOVERY
A NARRATIVE BY FILSON YOUNG

TO THE RIGHT HON. SIR HORACE PLUNKETT, K.C.V.O., D.C.L.,
F.R.S.
MY DEAR HORACE,
Often while I have been studying the records of colonisation in the
New World I have thought of you and your difficult work in Ireland;
and I have said to myself, "What a time he would have had if he had
been Viceroy of the Indies in 1493!" There, if ever, was the chance for
a Department such as yours; and there, if anywhere, was the place for
the Economic Man. Alas! there war only one of him; William Ires or
Eyre, by name, from the county Galway; and though he fertilised the
soil he did it with his blood and bones. A wonderful chance; and yet
you see what came of it all. It would perhaps be stretching truth too far
to say that you are trying to undo some of Columbus's work, and to
stop up the hole he made in Ireland when he found a channel into
which so much of what was best in the Old Country war destined to
flow; for you and he have each your places in the great circle of Time
and Compensation, and though you may seem to oppose one another
across the centuries you are really answering the same call and working
in the same vineyard. For we all set out to discover new worlds; and
they are wise who realise early that human nature has roots that spread
beneath the ocean bed, that neither latitude nor longitude nor time itself
can change it to anything richer or stranger than what it is, and that
furrows ploughed in it are furrows ploughed in the sea sand. Columbus
tried to pour the wine of civilisation into very old bottles; you, more
wisely, are trying to pour the old wine of our country into new bottles.
Yet there is no great unlikeness between the two tasks: it is all a matter
of bottling; the vintage is the same, infinite, inexhaustible, and as
punctual as the sun and the seasons. It was Columbus's weakness as an
administrator that he thought the bottle was everything; it is your
strength that you care for the vintage, and labour to preserve its flavour
and soft fire.
Yours, FILSON YOUNG. RUAN MINOR, September 1906.

PREFACE
The writing of historical biography is properly a work of partnership, to
which public credit is awarded too often in an inverse proportion to the
labours expended. One group of historians, labouring in the obscurest
depths, dig and prepare the ground, searching and sifting the
documentary soil with infinite labour and over an area immensely wide.
They are followed by those scholars and specialists in history who give
their lives to the study of a single period, and who sow literature in the
furrows of research prepared by those who have preceded them. Last of
all comes the essayist, or writer pure and simple, who reaps the harvest
so laboriously prepared. The material lies all before him; the
documents have been arranged, the immense contemporary fields of
record and knowledge examined and searched for stray seeds of
significance that may have blown over into them; the perspective is
cleared for him, the relation of his facts to time and space and the
march of human civilisation duly established; he has nothing to do but
reap the field of harvest where it suits him, grind it in the wheels of
whatever machinery his art is equipped with, and come before the
public with the finished product. And invariably in this unequal
partnership he reaps most richly who reaps latest.
I am far from putting this narrative forward as the fine and ultimate
product of all the immense labour and research of the historians of
Columbus; but I am anxious to excuse myself for my apparent
presumption in venturing into a field which might more properly be
occupied by the expert historian. It would appear that the double work
of acquiring the facts of a piece of human history and of presenting
them through the medium of literature can hardly ever be performed by
one and the same man. A lifetime must be devoted