Books: With Columbus

To THE INDIES—C. S. Forester—Little, Brown ($2.50).

Cecil Scott Forester’s narrative is so excellent that it cries out loud for the one thing it lacks: a touch of the terse hypnosis that Hemingway manages with words. Aside from this lack, there is nothing to regret about To the Indies.

Don Narciso Rich, like Forester’s Horatio Hornblower (TIME, May i, 1939), is capable of intelligent reflection; but he is not by nature a man of action. He is, rather, a sort of Leopold Bloom light-ballasted for a more adventurous sailing pace: plump, humane, timorous, uneasily involved in thoughts which set him, in the late Middle Ages, on the borderlands of heresy and of the Renaissance. Without quite understanding why, he has committed himself, in the middle of a tabby life, to sail with Columbus on his third voyage, as guardian of the Spanish King’s interests in the New World. On the voyage his mind fumbles toward the invention of the sextant, the use of Indian hammocks at sea, of pumps for bilge, copper sheathing against marine borers. He is fascinated —and so is the reader—by every detail of medieval navigation, by Columbus (half inspired zany, fur-collared “thespian”), by the cloudy jumble of zombie myth and fetal science which throng Columbus’ mind.

On fresh-found Trinidad he sees his first Indians—as touching a set of noble savages as any romantic could wish; and poking along the Orinoco Delta he suspects, by the size of the river, the vast land that bears it. But Columbus is too sure he has found the Earthly Paradise to waste conjecture on a mere South America.

When they get to Española (Haiti) Don Narciso sees what just six years of white rule can do: Christianized Indians who die rather than work and who, through mere imprisonment, die in a few days “like fish in a bucket.” Hardly has Don Narciso got his shore legs when he witnesses the burning alive of sixteen here tics; he sees next what happens to 20,000 Indians in spontaneous desperate rebellion. Stark naked, all of them, men, women and children, they advance in a brown wave, using stones and sharpened sticks, to dissolve into panic before the first volley from the crossbows. Narciso is enough a man of his time to get bloody excitement out of his first kills: when, with four hours’ daylight left, his companions begin to slaughter merely for sport, he “followed fascinated.” It was easy enough to see what had been in credible: how, in six years, half of these Indians — a million— had been obliterated.

Columbus’ brothers, in charge of Española, are by no means trustworthy, his ex-valet Roldan is in open revolt. Columbus himself is arrogantly, piteously aware that there is not a man on earth he can trust. It is Don Narciso’s business to report to his King that “the Admiral was not fit to govern a farmyard, let alone an empire.” He dislikes his task, but takes comfort in the thought of sailing, on the morrow, for Spain and the quiet life. Kidnapping, hurricane, shipwreck, a Crusoe sequence delay his return. When he finally sails, a more distinguished passenger is Columbus, in chains, with a ham actor’s pride in his martyrdom; still hopeful, hot-eyed, still straining after the Golden City of Cambaluc.

C. S. Forester so skillfully constructs the silences of unbruised continents, the dreadfulness of events, that he inevitably challenges the memory of Archibald MacLeish’s Conquistador. His story has the pity of that poem, some of its beauty and power.