206 THE OCEAN RIVER 



coasts of the Caribbean he died still apparently convinced 

 that he had discovered the Orient and that Cuba was a penin- 

 sula of the Asiatic mainland. The impress of Marco Polo on 

 the early fancy of Columbus might be said to be the dominant 

 color of his mind. Everything he saw had to fit his concept. 



For men live by legend. The classic world lived on the 

 concept of the Mediterranean basin as the center of their 

 universe. The world beyond the Black Sea or the Gates of 

 Hercules at Gibraltar faded out into dread dark and a sur- 

 rounding River of Ocean whence no man returned. We have 

 seen how the Phoenicians no doubt fostered this legend 

 while they dominated the earliest trade routes outside along 

 the Atlantic coasts. But men had dreamed of the Fortu- 

 nate Isles and of Atlantis. The dream became a fact for them 

 because it was necessary to them. Man's mind cannot be con- 

 tained by fear or the unknown. So the Fortunate Isles were 

 discovered in the Canaries. And Atlantis, once sought in the 

 air and the sun, is still sought beneath the waves by dreamers 

 and a few scattered scientists. Columbus, early in life moved 

 by the reports of Marco Polo, was possessed by his own vision 

 of the land beyond the west. He was also a man of persistent 

 purpose and action, well prepared to chase down what others 

 might have left to day-dreams. 



There is something both grand and pathetic in his carrying 

 with him a converted Jew, Luis de Torres, taken along to 

 speak Arabic to the Grand Khan of Cathay when they made 

 landfall. His course from the Canaries had a similar logic — 

 that luckily panned out. They were the same latitude on Mar- 

 tin Behaim's globe as Cypangu, and it was known that easterly 

 trade winds blew pretty constantly in that area. What Colum- 

 bus happily discovered was the persistence of these trades 

 clear across the ocean. What he failed to note was that here 

 also was the beginning of a similar drift of the seas from east 

 to west, forming the great equatorial current, the very root of 



