It came from the west, the wind having blown
for days from that quarter. I ask you will empty billows
fell a tree and trim it and carve it? It is said that a Portuguese pilot picked up one like it off Cape Bojador
when the
wind was southwest. I have heard a man of the Azores
tell of giant reeds pitched upon his shore _from the west_.
There is a story of the finding on the beach of Flores the
bodies of two men not like any that we know either in
color or in feature. For days a west wind had driven in
the seas. And I know of other findings. Whence do these
things come?
"May there not be unknown islands west of Azores?
They might come from there, and still to the west of them
stream all Ocean-Sea, violent and unknown! The learned
think the earth of such a size. Your Arabian holds it
smaller. What if it is larger than the largest calculation?"
He said with disdain, "All the wise men at Salamanca
before whom the King set me six years ago thought it had
no end! Large or small, they called it blasphemy for me,
a poor, plain seaman, son of a wool-comber and not even
a Spanish wool-comber, to try to stretch mind over it!
Ocean-Sea had never been overpassed, and by that token
could not be overpassed! None had met its dangers, so
dangers there must be of a most strange and fearful nature!
But if you were put to sea at fourteen and have lived
there long, water becomes water! A speck on the horizon
will turn out ship or land.
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