politic relations with kings; the great administrator
may found a wonderful colony; but it is the man with the wits and the
hands, and some bigness of heart to tide him over daunting passages, that
wins through the first elementary risks of any great discovery. Properly
considered, Columbus's fame should rest simply on the answer to the
single question, "Did he discover new lands as he said he would?" That
was the greatest thing he could do, and the fact that he failed to do a
great many other things afterwards, failed the more conspicuously because
his attempts were so conspicuous, should have no effect on our estimate
of his achievement. The fame of it could no more be destroyed by himself
than it can be destroyed by us.

True understanding of a man and estimate of his character can only be
arrived at by methods at once more comprehensive and more subtle than
those commonly employed among men. Everything that he sees, does, and
suffers has its influence on the moulding of his character; and he must
be considered in relation to his physical environment, no less than to
his race and ancestry. Christopher Columbus spent a great part of his
active life on the sea; it was sea-life which inspired him with his great
Idea, it was by the conquest of the sea that he realised it; it was on
the sea that all his real triumphs over circumstance and his own weaker
self were won. The influences at work upon a man whose life is spent on
the sea are as different from those at work upon one who lives on the
fields as the environment of a gannet is different from the environment
of a skylark: and yet how often do we really attempt to make due
allowance for this great factor and try to estimate the extent of its
moulding influence?

To live within sound or sight of the sea is to be conscious of a voice or
countenance that holds you in unyielding bonds. The voice, being
continuous, creeps into the very pulses and becomes part of the pervading
sound or silence of a man's environment; and the face, although it never
regards him, holds him with its changes and occupies his mind with its
everlasting riddle. Its profound inattention to man is part of its power
over his imagination; for although it is so absorbed and busy, and has
regard for sun and stars and a melancholy frowning concentration upon the
foot of cliffs, it is never face to face with man: he can never come
within the focus of its great glancing vision. It is somewhere be