distance is going to widen and widen! What's to keep
needle from swinging right south? Then will we never get home to Palos
and our wives and children--never and never and never!"

Said the Admiral, "It will not change further, or if it does a very
little further!" In his most decisive, most convincing voice he
explained why the needle no longer pointed precisely to the star. The
deviation marked and allowed for, it was near enough for practical
purposes, and the reasons for the wandering--

I do not know if the wisdom of our descendants will confirm his
explanation. It is so often to explain the explanation! But one as well
as another might do here. What the _Santa Maria_ wanted was reassurance,
general and large, stretching from the Canaries to India and Cathay and
back again. He knew that, and after no great time spent with compass
needle and circularly traveling polar star, he began to talk gold and
estate, and the pearls and silk and spices they would surely take for
gifts to their family and neighbors, Palos or Huelva or Fishertown!

It was truly the hope that upheld many on a voyage that they chose to
think a witches' one. He talked now out of Marco Polo and he clad what
that traveler had said in more gorgeous attire. He meant nothing false;
his exalted imagination saw it so. He was painter of great pageants,
heightening and remodeling, deepening and purifying colors, making
humdrum and workaday over to his heart's desire. The Venetian in his
book, and other travelers in their books, had related wonders enough.
These grew with him, it might be said--and indeed in his lifetime was
often said--into wonders without a foot upon earth. But if one took as
figures and symbols his gold roofs and platters, temples and gardens,
every man a merchant in silks and spices, strange fruit-dropping trees
and pearls in carcanets, the Grand Khan and Prester John--who could say
that in the long, patient life of Time the Admiral was over-esteeming?
The pity of it was that most here could not live in great lengths of
time. They wanted riches now, now! And they wanted only one kind of
riches; here and now, or at the most in another month, in the hands and
laps of Pedro and Fernando and Diego.

CHAPTER XIII

THERE grew at times an excited feeling that he was a prophet, and that
there were fabulously great things before us. As I doctored some small
ill one day in the forecastle, a great fellow named Francisco from
Huelva would