XI 
FAYAL AND THE PORTUGUESE 
(1855-56) 
Every man when he first crosses the ocean 
is a Columbus to himself, no matter how many 
voyages by other navigators he may have heard 
described. Geographies convince only the 
brain, not the senses, that the globe is round; 
and when personal experience proves the fact, 
it is as wonderful as if never before suggested. 
You have dwelt for weeks within one unbroken 
loneliness of sea and sky, finding nothing that 
seemed solid in the universe but the bit of 
painted wood on which you have floated. Sud- 
denly one morning something looms high and 
cloudlike far away, and you are told that it is 
land. Then you feel, with all ignorant races, 
as if the ship were a god, thus to find its way 
over that trackless waste; or as if this must 
be some great and unprecedented success, and 
by no means the expected or usual result of 
such enterprises. An intelligent sea-captain of 
twenty-five years’ experience once told me that 
