the whole of his various
qualities were directed upon one single thing, of that greatness which is
the crown of simplicity. Ambition was the keynote of his life; not an
unworthy keynote, by any means, if only the ambition be sound; but one
serious defect of Columbus's ambition was that it was retrospective
rather than perspective. He may have had, before he sailed from Palos,
an ambition to be the discoverer of a New World; but I do not think he
had. He believed there were islands or land to be discovered in the West
if only he pushed on far enough; and he was ambitious to find them and
vindicate his belief. Afterwards, when he had read a little more, and
when he conceived the plan of pretending that he had all along meant to
discover the Indies and a new road to the East, he acted in accordance
with that pretence; he tried to make his acts appear retrospectively as
though they had been prompted by a design quite different from that by
which they had really been prompted. When he found that his discovery
was regarded as a great scientific feat, he made haste to pretend that it
had all along been meant as such, and was in fact the outcome of an
elaborate scientific theory. In all this there is nothing for praise or
admiration. It indicates the presence of moral disease; but fortunately
it is functional rather than organic disease. He was right and sound at
heart; but he spread his sails too readily to the great winds of popular
favour, and the result was instability to himself, and often danger of
shipwreck to his soul.

The ultimate test of a man's character is how he behaves in certain
circumstances when there is no great audience to watch him, and when
there is no sovereign close at hand with bounties and rewards to offer.
In a word, what matters most is a man's behaviour, not as an admiral, or
a discoverer, or a viceroy, or a courtier, but as a man. In this respect
Columbus's character rings true. If he was little on little occasions,
he was also great on great occasions. The inner history of his fourth
voyage, if we could but know it and could take all the circumstances into
account, would probably reveal a degree of heroic endurance that has
never been surpassed in the history of mankind. Put him as a man face to
face with a difficulty, with nothing but his wits to devise with and his
two hands to act with, and he is never found wanting. And that is the
kind of man of whom discoverers are made. The me