Genius and Discovery

FLIGHT INTO
IMMORTALITY
THE DISCOVERY OF
THE PACIFIC OCEAN
25 September 1513

A Ship Is Fitted Out
When he first returned from the newly discovered
continent of America, Columbus had displayed
countless treasures and curiosities on his triumphal
procession through the crowded streets of Seville
and Barcelona: human beings of a race hitherto
unknown, with reddish skins; animals never seen
before; colourful, screeching parrots; slow-moving
tapirs; then strange plants and fruits that would
soon find a new home in Europe-Indian corn,
tobacco, the coconut. The rejoicing throng marvels
at all these things, but the royal couple and their
counsellors are excited above all by a few boxes
and baskets containing gold. Columbus does not
bring much gold back from the new Indies: a few
pretty things that he has bartered with the natives,
or stolen from them, a few small bars and several
handfuls of loose grains, gold dust rather than solid
gold-the whole of it at most enough to mint a
few hundred ducats. But the inspired Columbus,
who always fanatically believes whatever he wants
to believe at any given time, and who has been
so gloriously proved right about his sea route to
India, boasts effusively and in all honesty that this
is only a tiny foretaste. Reliable news, he adds, has
reached him of gold mines of immeasurable extent
on these new islands; only just below the surface,
the precious metal, he says, lies under a thin layer
of soil in many fields, and you can easily dig it out
with an ordinary spade. Farther south, however,
there are realms where the kings drink from golden
goblets, and gold is worth less than lead at home in
Spain. The ever-avaricious king listens, intoxicated to
hear of this new Ophir that now belongs to him. No
one yet knows Columbus and his sublime folly well
enough to doubt his promises. A great fleet is fitted
out at once for the second voyage, and now there
is no need for recruiting officers and drummers

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Between the wars, Zweig was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he left Austria, and lived in London, Bath and New York--a period during which he produced his most celebrated works: his only novel, Beware of Pity, and his memoir, The World of Yesterday. He eventually settled in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.

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