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SAUNTERINGS
SAUNTERINGS CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER MISAPPREHENSIONS CORRECTED
I should not like to ask an indulgent and idle public to saunter
about with me under a misapprehension. It would be more agreeable to
invite it to go nowhere than somewhere; for almost every one has been
somewhere and has written about it. The only compromise I can
suggest is that we shall go somewhere and not learn anything about
it. The instinct of the public against any thing like information in
a volume of this kind is perfectly justifiable; and the reader will
perhaps discover that this is illy adapted for a text-book in
schools or for the use of competitive candidates in the
civil-service examinations.
Years ago people used to saunter over the Atlantic and spend weeks
in filling journals with their monotonous emotions. That is all
changed now and there is a misapprehension that the Atlantic has
been practically subdued; but no one ever gets beyond the "rolling
forties" without having this impression corrected.
I confess to have been deceived about this Atlantic the roughest and
windiest of oceans. If you look at it on the map it does n't appear
to be much and indeed it is spoken of as a ferry. What with the
eight and nine days' passages over it and the laying of the cable
which annihilates distance I had the impression that its tedious
three thousand and odd miles had been somehow partly done away
with; but they are all there. When one has sailed a thousand miles
due east and finds that he is then nowhere in particular but is
still out pitching about on an uneasy sea under an inconstant sky
and that a thousand miles more will not make any perceptible change
he begins to have some conception of the unconquerable ocean.
Columbus rises in my estimation.
I was feeling uncomfortable that nothing had been done for the memory
of Christopher Columbus when I heard some months ago that thirty-
seven guns had been fired off for him in Boston. It is to be hoped
that they were some satisfaction to him. They were discharged by
countrymen of his who are justly proud that he should have been
able after a search of only a few weeks to find a land where the
hand-organ had never been heard. The Italians as a people have not
profited much by this discovery; not so much indeed as the
Spaniards who got a reputation by it which even now gilds their
decay. That Columbus was born in Genoa entitles the Italians to
celebrate the great achievement of his life; though why they should
discharge exactly thirty-seven guns I do not know. Columbus did not
discover the United States: that we partly found ourselves and
partly bought and gouged the Mexicans out of. He did not even
appear to know that there was a continent here. He discovered the
West Indies which he thought were the East; and ten guns would be
enough for them. It is probable that he did open the way to the
discovery of the New World. If he had waited however somebody else
would have discovered it--perhaps some Englishman; and then we might
have been spared all the old French and Spanish wars. Columbus let
the Spaniards into the New World; and their civilization has
uniformly been a curse to it. If he had brought Italians who
neither at that time showed nor since have shown much inclination
to come we should have had the opera and made it a paying
institution by this time. Columbus was evidently a person who liked
to sail about and did n't care much for consequences.
Perhaps it is not an open question whether Columbus did a good thing
in first coming over here one that we ought to celebrate with
salutes and dinners. The Indians never thanked him for one party.
The Africans had small ground to be gratified for the market he
opened for them. Here are two continents that had no use for him.
He led Spain into a dance of great expectations which ended in her
gorgeous ruin. He introduced tobacco into Europe and laid the
foundation for more tracts and nervous diseases than the Romans had
in a thousand years. He introduced the potato into Ireland
indirectly; and that caused such a rapid increase of population that
the great famine was the result and an enormous emigration to New
York--hence Tweed and the constituency of the Ring. Columbus is
really responsible for New York. He is responsible for our whole
tremendous experiment of democracy open to all comers the best
three in five to win. We cannot yet tell how it is coming out what
with the foreigners and the communists and the women. On our great
stage we are playing a piece of mingled tragedy and comedy with what
denouement we cannot yet say. If it comes out well we ought to
erect a monument to Christopher as high as the one at Washington
expects to be; and we presume it is well to fire a salute
occasionally to keep the ancient mariner in mind while we are trying
our great experiment. And this reminds me that he ought to have had
a naval salute.
There is something almost heroic in the idea of firing off guns for a
man who has been stone-dead for about four centuries. It must have
had a lively and festive sound in Boston when the meaning of the
salute was explained. No one could hear those great guns without a
quicker beating of the heart in gratitude to the great discoverer who
had made Boston possible. We are trying to "realize" to ourselves
the importance of the 12th of October as an anniversary of our
potential existence. If any one wants to see how vivid is the
gratitude to Columbus let him start out among our business-houses
with a subscription-paper to raise money for powder to be exploded in
his honor. And yet Columbus was a well-meaning man; and if he did
not discover a perfect continent he found the only one that was
left.
Columbus made voyaging on the Atlantic popular and is responsible
for much of the delusion concerning it. Its great practical use in
this fast age is to give one an idea of distance and of monotony.
I have listened in my time with more or less pleasure to very
rollicking songs about the sea the flashing brine the spray and the
tempest's roar the wet sheet and the flowing sea a life on the
ocean wave and all the rest of it. To paraphrase a land proverb
let me write the songs of the sea and I care not who goes to sea and
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