sole claim to our admiration is, that in the teeth of all precedent and
likelihood, he succeeded by one mistake in making another: because he
fancied that by sailing west he could find the Indies, he blundered upon a
land whose identity he never discovered. Doubtless his blunder was of
unspeakable value; but a blunder not the less it was; while as to his
courage and perseverance, as much has been shown by a thousand other
scientific and philosophical heretics, whose names have not survived,
because the thing they imagined turned out an error.

From another point of view, however, Columbus is specially a creature of
his age. It was an age which felt, it knew not why, that something new
must come to pass. The resources of Europe were exhausted; men had reached
the end of their tether, and demanded admittance to some wider pasturage.
It was much such a predicament as obtains now, four hundred years later;
we feel that changes--enlargements--are due, but know not what or whence.
The conception of a voyage across the Atlantic, in that age, seemed as
captivating, and almost as fantastic, as a trip to the Moon or Mars would,
to an adventurer of our time. Given the vehicle, no doubt many volunteers
would offer for the journey; Columbus could get a ship, but the chances of
his arriving at his proposed destination must have appeared as
problematical to him as the Moon enterprise in a balloon would to a
world-weary globe-trotter of to-day. It was not merely that the ship was
small and the Atlantic large and stormy; there were legends of vast
whirlpools, of abysmal oceanic cataracts, of sea-monsters, malignant
genii, and other portents not less terrifying and fatal. Columbus would
not have been surprised at falling in with any of these things; but the
physical courage which must have been his most prominent trait, added to
incorrigible pride of opinion, brought him through.

But the significant feature of his achievement is, not that he sailed or