Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris Page B

searches his writings in vain for any trace of the skeptical, empirical temper of the scientist. He would be admiral of the ocean sea, the man who opened, to the west, a shorter route to the wealth of Asia than the Portuguese had managed to eke out by sailing south and east. †
    The queen decided to give him a shot at it, arid Columbus sailed in 1492, a pillar of unblinking zeal. He set his hourglass (inaccurately) by observing transits of the sun and noting the position of the Little Dipper. He navigated (accurately) by watching the compass. He corrected for variations in magnetic north by sighting the north star at both its easternmost and westernmost excursions—this a precaution that Columbus himself had developed, and one more important in 1492, when Polaris stood 3.3 degrees from the pole, than today, when the precession of the earth’s axis has brought it to within 1 degree of true north.
    Once embarked on the path of his destiny, Columbus was unshakable in his resolve to persevere. When his crewmen threatened to mutiny after a month at sea, he told them, as his son Ferdinand recorded his words, “that it was useless to complain, he had come [to go] to the Indies, and so had to continue until he found them, with the help of Our Lord.” 17 Had America not intervened, he would certainly have led them to their deaths. Instead, at 2:00 A.M . on the night of October 12, 1492, Rodrigo de Triana, lookout aboard the
Pinta
, squinting westward toward where the bright star Deneb was setting, saw in the moonlight a distant spit of land, cried out,
“Tierra! Tierra!
,” and claimed his reward as the first to sight India. The natives who beheld Columbus’s three ships by the first light of dawn ran from hut to hut, shouting, “Come see the people from the sky!”
    “They bear no arms, nor know thereof,” Columbus noted, “for I showed them swords and they grasped them by the blade and cut themselves through ignorance.” 18 He insisted that the natives be treated “lovingly,” but business was business, and soon many were on their way to the Old World in chains.
    Columbus on his subsequent voyages wandered from paradise to hell, laying eyes on some of the most beautiful islands on Earth but also suffering from thirst, starvation, and attacks by the “Indians.” As the years passed and evidence for the true dimensions of the earth mounted, he took refuge in the unique hypothesis that the earth was small toward the north, where he had rounded it, and large elsewhere: Perhaps, he wrote, the world “is not round as it is described, but is shaped like a pear, which is round everywhere except near the stalk where it projects strongly; or it is like a very round ball with something like a woman’s nipple in one place, and this projecting part is highest and the one nearest heaven”—thebreast being where other navigators measured the circumference of the globe, and the “nipple … nearest heaven” being where Columbus sailed. 19
    Toward the end Columbus roamed the coasts of the New World in a state of gathering madness. He kept a gibbet mounted on the taffrail of his ship from which to hang mutineers, and made use of it so frequently that at one point he had to be recalled to Cadiz in chains. Crewmen on his final voyage watched warily as their captain hobbled around the deck, his body twisted by arthritis, his wild eyes peering out from under an aurora of tangled hair, searching endless coastlines for the mouth of the River Ganges. He threatened to hang anyone who denied they were in India. He sent back shiploads of slaves, which alarmed his queen, and cargos of gold, which delighted them both. “O, most excellent gold!” Columbus wrote. “Who has gold has a treasure with which he gets what he wants, imposes his will in the world, and even helps souls to paradise.” 20 He died poor.
    Gold outweighed the stars in the balance sheets of the exploratory enterprise. Montezuma II, emperor of the Aztecs, sent Cortez a