ADMIRAL OF THE OCEAN SEA

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28268, 4 May 1957, Page 3

ADMIRAL OF THE OCEAN SEA

Christopher Columbus, Mariner. Bv Samuel Eliot Morison. Faber and Faber. Ltd. 236 PP.

Most persons, if asked who Christopher Columbus was. would reply, correctly enough, that he was the man who discovered America. And at that point their knowledge of him would stop, though some might be able to add that he was born in Genoa, that he lived in the fifteenth century, and that he made his voyages under the aegis of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. What sort of a man was he? How did he rank as a sailor, navigator, and explorer? How many voyages did he make? What difficulties did he have to overcome in securing Royal patronage for his enterprises? These and a hundred, other relevant and interesting questions are answered in this biography by a distinguished American historian. Mr Morison has been sailor and yachtsman as well as an historian and in a yacht of similar size to Columbus’s Caravels he crossed the Atlantic along the great sailor’s routes. The sea. he points out, does not change, so he was able to experience at first hand the conditions met by Columbus, and to check the islands and features discovered and identify them with their present names.

It is patent, from the picture that Mr Morison draws, that Columbus was a man of very deep and abiding religious faith, as evidenced by the conduct of his ships and the names he bestowed on his discoveries. Indeed. the enlargement of the

teachings of the Christian Church was uppermost in his mind And it was this faith that sustained him in his many troubles, both at sea and on land. As a sailor and leader of men Columbus was superb, and as a navigator, aided by the primitive instruments of the time and some very good guesses, he excelled. As an explorer, or explorer-geographer, however, he did not perhaps rate so high, for he decided, almost in advance and certainlv without conclusive evidence, what land he had discovered. Thus, having made the facts fit his preconceived theory, he died without knowing the magnitude of his discovery. and still convinced that he had found a sea route to some province of China, and that in doing so he had discovered a group of islands. Columbus, born of humble parents, rose to a position of fame (“Admiral of the Ocean Sea”) and wealth, ‘and died in comoarative poverty and obscurity of an illness which plagued his later years. His name is unlikely to be forgotten, since the day on which he had his first glimpse of the New World is observed throughout the Americas.

It was. says Mr Morison in his introduction ... “a delightful interlude to sail once more, in imagination, with Christopher Columbus; to write this short biography of him whom I believe to have been one of the greatest mariner*, if not the very greatest, of ell time/’ To this

one may add that it was equally delightful to read; at the same time begging leave, with thoughts of Ferdinand Magellan and James Cook in mind, to disagree with “if not the very greatest.*