[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 17]
[Senate]
[Pages 24647-24649]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                           COLUMBUS DAY 1999

  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, many Americans are preparing to enjoy a 
three-day weekend. Most could tell you that their holiday was to honor 
Christopher Columbus, and a fair number might be able to recite ``in 
fourteen-hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue'' on 
his way to discovering America. An even smaller number might be able to 
recount the ongoing controversy over just where along the continent 
Columbus first came to land. But few, I hazard to guess, can truly 
appreciate the magnitude of his great daring, though we all appreciate 
the bounty of his great mistake. Few may even realize that it is next 
Tuesday, October 12, that is the true anniversary of Christopher 
Columbus' discovery of the New World, some 507 years ago.
  Oh, Columbus, that scion of Eratosthenes, that son of Ptolemy, that 
kin in spirit to Marco Polo, what fascinating history he built upon 
when first he set out on his great journey. Although he was surely a 
brave man, Columbus did not sail blindly off to the west not knowing 
whether he would drop off the edge, as some children's books might lead 
one to believe. No, Columbus had the wisdom of the ancients to guide 
him and the lure of another adventurer's tales to entice him. He had 
history, mathematics, and science as his guides and greed as his goad 
to whip him along his journey.
  Long before Columbus' day, Eratosthenes, the ancient Greek scholar 
commonly called the Father of Geography, had determined with amazing 
accuracy the circumference of the earth. Born around 276 B.C. at a 
Greek colony in Cyrene, Libya, Eratosthenes was educated at the 
academies in Athens and was appointed to run the Great Library at 
Alexandria, in what is now Egypt, in 240 B.C. During his time there, he 
wrote a comprehensive volume about the world, called ``Geography,'' the 
first known coining of that word. Eratosthenes used known distances and 
geometry on a grand scale to calculate the circumference of the earth 
to within 100 miles of its true girth at the equator, 24,901 miles. His 
work was still available in Columbus' time.
  A later Greek geographer, Posidonius, felt that Eratosthenes' 
circumference was too large and recalculated the figure at 18,000 
miles, some 7,000 miles too short. What is interesting about this fact 
is that Christopher Columbus deliberately used Posidonius's shorter 
figure to convince his backers that he could quickly reach Asia by 
sailing west from Europe. It may not have been the first time that 
financial backers have been duped using doctored numbers, but I am 
confident that it has not been the last!
  So, we know that Columbus knew the earth was round--no fear of 
falling off the edge--and that it was between 18,000 or 25,000 miles 
around at its midpoint--still a very long journey in either case for 
ships the size that Columbus sailed on. But what led him to think 
sailing west from Europe to Asia was feasible? For that, Columbus would 
have looked to a Roman scholar, Claudius Ptolemaeus, more commonly 
known as Ptolemy. Like Eratosthenes before him, Ptolemy, who lived from 
approximately 90 to 170 A.D., worked in the Great Library at 
Alexandria, from 127 to 150 A.D. Perhaps inspired by Eratosthenes' 
work, Ptolemy also published a scholarly work called ``Geography,'' in 
addition to a volume on astronomy and geometry, and a work on

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astrology. Ptolemy's ``Geography'' consisted of eight volumes, and it 
introduced critical elements of map-making to the world. Ptolemy 
advanced the efforts of mapmakers in representing the spherical world 
on flat paper, in what are known as map projections. He is responsible 
for the now universal practice of placing north at the top of the map. 
Ptolemy also invented latitude and longitude--that is, he created a 
grid system to lay over the globe in order to chart locations. His 
volumes charted some eight thousand places around the world he knew, 
revealing for future generations a geographic knowledge of the Roman 
empire of the second century.
  Like many ancient works, Ptolemy's ``Geography'' was lost for over a 
thousand years after it was first published. But in the early fifteenth 
century, his work was rediscovered, translated into Latin, and 
published in multiple editions. It would have been readily available to 
Christopher Columbus, who was influenced both by Ptolemy's erroneous 
shorter circumference of the earth and by his depiction of the Indian 
Ocean as a large inland sea, bordered on the south by beguiling Terra 
Incognita, the unknown land. I think there can be few things more 
mysterious, more alluring, than an old map with large blank land masses 
labeled simply ``terra incognita'' or, on some medieval maps, by the 
phrase ``here be dragons.''
  Marco Polo's fantastic tales of Cathay and the exotic spices and 
goods that he brought back to Italy sparked a huge appetite for such 
things, which only increased when the returning Crusaders opened the 
overland trade routes between Europe and the Orient. However, when 
Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, two years after Columbus was 
born, the overland spice routes between Europe and Asia were closed 
off. Every power in Europe was eager--eager--to reopen the very 
profitable trade, by land or by some unknown sea route. Seeking an 
eastern sea route, Bartholomeu Dias reached the Cape of Good Hope in 
Africa in 1488, and Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498, but the 
eastern voyages were long and perilous. Anyone who could find a shorter 
route would make a fortune for himself and his backers.
  Columbus himself was born in Genoa in 1451 to Susanna Fontanarossa 
and Domenico Colombo, the eldest of their five children. Growing up in 
a major port city, Columbus would have learned a lot about the sea, in 
addition to hearing and reading the tales of riches beyond the horizon.
  True to his adventurous inclinations, Christopher Columbus took to 
the sea. After an attack by the French at sea in the Strait of 
Gibraltar in 1476, the ship Columbus was sailing on was sunk, forcing 
him to swim to land. He was able to grab an oar and swim to land in 
Portugal. Three years later, he married into the Portuguese aristocracy 
when he wed Felipa Perestrelo. The marriage resulted in one son, Diego, 
and an entre into the financial backing of the Portuguese and Spanish 
nobility. In the simple history of Christopher Columbus that we may 
recall from elementary school, which was a long time ago for me, it was 
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain who finally provided the 
ships, the fabled Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria, in which Columbus set 
off on August 3, 1492, to discover the western shortcut to the fabled 
wealth of the Indies. At roughly 2 a.m. on October 12, 1492, after 71 
grueling days at sea trusting in God, Eratosthenes, Ptolemy, and Polo, 
Columbus made landfall in what he believed was the Indies.
  Columbus found no gold, silks, spices or valuable wood in his 
misnamed Indies, but he did bring tobacco back to Europe. After 
establishing a fort called Natividad, built of timbers from the wrecked 
Santa Maria, Columbus returned to Spain.
  Columbus made three other journeys to his new-found land, which he 
named Hispaniola. His second voyage left Spain in September 1493 and 
returned to Spain in 1496 after establishing a more substantial colony. 
His third voyage led to his return to Spain in chains, prisoner of the 
colonists who rose up against his bad management. Columbus was able to 
clear his name and made a fourth and final voyage to the New World 
before he died in Spain on May 20, 1506. The great irony, however, is 
that Christopher Columbus believing that he had discovered some 
untouched part of the Indies, or distant outpost of China, not a 
continent previously unknown to the Europeans. He had made a mistake, 
but what a glorious mistake it was! For us, it was a very fortunate 
mistake. Christopher Columbus had discovered what for Europeans was 
truly Terra Incognita, a new and unknown land, a treasury of natural 
riches that we, as his heirs, enjoy to this day.
  I am glad that we celebrate this brave man. We celebrate a man who 
made a great gamble, a man who set off to seek a back door to the Far 
East by setting his sights west and trusting in ancient scholars. We 
celebrate a man who appreciated the romance of a traveler's tales and 
who sensed the riches and wonders that await the bold. We celebrate an 
imperfect man, a man who failed in his goal but who achieved much 
nonetheless. We celebrate a man whose daring, whose courage, who sheer 
persistence, moved history forward.
  We talk about profiles in courage. These are profiles in political 
courage. Here was an intrepid man who perhaps could claim the 
greatest--or one of the greatest--profiles ever written on the record 
of humankind. Imagine him out there on the deep waters. He had no 
wireless telegraph; he had no radio; he had no weather forecasters. All 
he had was the compass. There were no ships in the area to rescue him 
if his ship sank. There was no way to hear back from home or to speak 
to those back home if he became ill. There was no helicopter to take 
him to the nearby hospital or to a sister ship. There he was, alone on 
the great blue waters.
  Just imagine what courage he must have had, never knowing whether he 
would be able to return against the winds that were blowing from the 
east, no refrigerator in which to keep the hard tack. His son, 
Ferdinand, who accompanied him on his fourth journey, I believe it was, 
wrote that he, Ferdinand, had seen the sailors wait until after dark 
before they ate the hard tack so it would not be possible to see the 
maggots on the hard tack. No sanitation with respect to the water and 
the food was cooked in an open stove with wood on the decks of the 
small ship.
  What intrepidity. But how fortunate we are today that there was a man 
who was so intrepid as to face down the mutinous crew and who persisted 
in his faith to say an oath.
  Today we look forward to that weekend and to next Tuesday, which is 
actually the day, 507 years later, when Columbus made the great 
discovery. We will celebrate the life and the accomplishments of 
Christopher Columbus, the first European to see the low green land on 
the horizon that was North America.
  I would like to close with the words of Joaquin Miller:

     Behind him lay the gray Azores,
     Behind the gates of Hercules!
     Before him not the ghost of shores,
     Before him only shoreless seas.
     The good mate said: ``Now must we pray,
     For lo! The very stars are gone.
     Brave Adm'rl, speak; what shall I say?''
     ``Why, say: `Sail on! sail on! and on!' ''

     ``My men grow mutinous day by day;
     My men grow ghastly wan and weak.''
     The stout mate thought of home; a spray
     Of salt wave washed his swarthy cheek.
     ``What shall I say, brave Admiral, say,
     If we sight naught but seas at dawn?''
     ``Why you shall say at break of day,
     Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!' ''

     They sailed and sailed, as winds might blow,
     Until at last the blanched mate said:
     ``Why, now not even God would know
     Should I and all my men fall dead.
     These very winds forget their way.
     For God from these dread seas is gone.
     Now speak, brave Admiral; speak and say.''
     He said: ``Sail on! sail on! and on!''

     They sailed. They sailed. Then spake the mate:
     ``This mad sea shows his teeth tonight.
     He curls his lip, he lies in wait,
     With lifted teeth, as if to bite!
     Brave Adm'rl, say but one good word:
     What shall we do when hope is gone?''
     The words leapt like a leaping sword:
     ``Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!''

     Then pale and worn, he kept his deck,
     And peered through darkness. Ah, that night
     Of all dark nights! And then a speck--

[[Page 24649]]

     A light! a light! a light! a light!
     It grew, a starlet flag unfurled.
     It grew to be Time's burst of dawn.
     He gained a world; he gave that world
     It's grandest lesson: ``On! sail on!''

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair wishes to express the gratitude of 
the Senate to the revered senior Senator from West Virginia for his 
eloquent and moving address on this easily overlooked occasion.
  Mr. BYRD. I thank the chair.

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