Deeply embedded in the history of America there is a strange quality of expectancy. We have somehow inherited a sense of wonder, a feeling that our strange progress toward the future is a fantastic and incomprehensible adventure that moves constantly past the bounds of imagination. We are permanently oriented, so to speak, in the direction of the improbable, and the fact that we do not always know what to do when the improbable turns out to be real makes very little difference. From the moment of our beginning we have been looking for something on the far side of the horizon—from which it follows that we are never convinced that any horizon is ever final.

This is in large part our heritage from the open sea. America could not exist until somebody went questing for it. It had to be discovered, and the discovery required an undying curiosity and a prodigious act of faith. Someone, in other words, had to get in a ship and go out beyond the limits of knowledge. When he had gone as far as he could go, other men had to do likewise; and for the better part of five centuries the American story has been bright with the names of great voyages.

The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus, by his son Ferdinand , translated and annotated by Benjamin Keen. The Rutgers University Press. 316 pp. $7.50.

Greatest of all, of course, was the first one, the earthchanging voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492. The story is almost too familiar to us. It is one of the first stories drummed into us in school. The great Admiral and his three little ships, Santa Maria, Pinta , and Nina , move out from Palos like shapes in a pageant, romantic but vaguely unreal. We learn how Queen Isabella pawned certain jewels to make the voyage possible, how the sailors feared the unknown and came close to mutiny, how the Admiral saw a light on the dark sky line just when hope seemed lost, and how at last this man who had found an authentic new world believed that he had simply reached the East Indiesconceiving, as do most of us, that the world holds fewer surprises than is really the case. We get, in short, the familiar legend, and we let it go at that; which is a pity, for here is one of the most significant stories in all American history, the story that sets the key for everything that has happened since.

It is a good story to return to, and an excellent approach is to be found in the biography which Columbus’ son Ferdinand wrote in the 1530’s, some years after the Admiral’s death. Translated and annotated by Benjamin Keen, The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus is now available to the general reader.

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