The Sea of Darkness
Before America was ever heard of, over four hundred years ago, a boy lived in Genoa the Proud City.
He was just one of hundreds of boys in that beautiful Italian town, whose palaces, marble villas, and churches climbed her picturesque hillsides. The boy’s name was Christopher Columbus.
Whenever he could leave his father’s workshop, where he was learning to comb wool, for his father was a weaver, how eagerly the boy must have run down to the wharfs and sat there watching the ships come and go.
They came from all those parts of the world which people knew about then, from Iceland and England, from European and Asiatic ports, and from North Africa. Caravels, galleys, and galleons, and sailing craft of all kinds, came laden with the wealth that made Genoa one of the richest cities of her time.
The sailors, who lounged on the wharfs, spun wonderful yarns. They told how beyond the Pillars of Hercules which guarded the straits of Gibraltar, there rolled a vast, unknown sea, called the Atlantic Ocean or the Sea of Darkness.
No one, they said, had ever crossed it. No one knew what lay beyond it. All was mystery. And any mariners, the sailors said, who had ventured far out on its black waters had never returned.
Fearful things had happened to such mariners, the sailors added, for the Sea of Darkness swarmed with spectres, devils, and imps. And when night fell, slimy monsters crawled and swam in its boiling waves. Among these monsters, was an enormous nautilus large enough to crush a whole ship in its squirming arms, and a serpent fifty leagues long with flaming eyes and horse’s mane. Sea-elephants, sea-lions, and sea-tigers, fed in beds of weeds. Harpies and winged terrors flew over the surface of the water.
And horrible, they said, was the fate which overtook the ship of any foolhardy mariners who ventured too far out on that gloomy ocean. A gigantic hand was thrust up through the waves, and grasped the ship. A polypus, spouting two water-spouts as high as the sky, made such a whirlpool that the vessel, spinning round and round like a top, was sucked down into the roaring abyss.
These frightful sea-yarns and many like them, the sailors told about the Atlantic Ocean, and people believed them. But the eyes of the boy Columbus, as he sat listening, must have sparkled as he longed to explore those mysterious waters of the Sea of Darkness, and follow them to the very edge of the world.
For all that lay to the west of the Azores, was a great and fascinating mystery, when Columbus was a boy, before America was discovered.