And so, of course, did Christopher Columbus. This greatest and most fascinating of all explorers went looking for a short cut to the East and found instead the infinite West; and although he never quite realized what he had done—the enormous dimensions of his achievement were in fact too big for any of his contemporaries to grasp—he was very well aware that he had sailed out of one era and into another, and that nothing again would ever be quite the same. He compelled men to remake all of their maps, a process which would last for four centuries and more, and the business changed the mapmakers as much as it changed the maps. Mankind behaves differently when the world grows larger. It finds new capacities and develops the urge to use them.

Naturally, it is impossible for anyone today to know precisely what was in Columbus’ mind when he made that first voyage. Yet it is not altogether a mystery, for the man did keep a journal, and although this has not survived, we do have an abstract made by the Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas, who appears to have consulted the original and to have copied certain parts of it. Las Casas introduced some material of his own, for which he was later criticized, but by and large his manuscript is accepted as being fairly faithful to the spirit of Columbus’ own work; and an excellent edition of The Journal of Christopher Columbus , translated by Cecil Jane, with a foreword by L. A. Vigneras and an appendix by R. A. Skelton, has recently been published.

Out of these jottings we can at least see that as he sailed from island to island on the far side of the ocean, Columbus was forever bemused by a sense of wonder. The entries in his log become lyrical; over and over he assures the King and Queen of Spain (to whom he delivered his log book, on his return to Spain) that no one who was not actually present could understand how marvelous it all was.

“There are fish here,” Columbus writes, “so unlike ours that it is a marvel … and the colors are so fine that no man would not wonder at them or be anything but delighted to see them.” And again: “I walked among the trees, and they were the loveliest sight I have yet seen … and all the trees are as different from ours as night is from day, and so is the fruit and the grasses and the stones and everything else. … Your Highnesses may believe that this is the best and most fertile and temperate and level and good land that there is in the world.”

In places Las Casas summarizes what Columbus wrote instead of making a direct copy, and the same boundless enthusiasm comes through: “The admiral says that he had never seen anything so beautiful.