Chateaubriand's memoirs, VI, 3

London, April to September 1822.

Among my fellow-passengers was a young Englishman. Francis Tulloch had served in the artillery; painter, musician and mathematician, he spoke several languages. The Abbé Nagot, the Superior of the Sulpiciens, had met the Anglican officer and made him a true Catholic: he was taking his neophyte to Baltimore.

I befriended Tulloch: as I was a convinced free-thinker at that time, I urged him to return to his parents. The sight we had before our eyes aroused his admiration. We would rise at night, when the deck was given over to the officer of the watch and a few sailors silently smoking their pipes: Tuta aequora silent: the sea calm and silent. The ship rolled at the mercy of the slow and noiseless waves, while sparks of fire coursed with the white foam along her sides. Thousands of stars shining in the sombre azure of the celestial dome, a shore-less sea, infinity in the sky and on the waters! God never impressed me with his greatness more than in those nights when I had immensity over my head and immensity under my feet.

Westerly winds, interspersed with calms, delayed our progress. By the 4th of May we had got no farther than the Azores. On the 6th, at about eight in the morning, we caught sight of the island of Pico; this volcano long dominated unknown seas: a vain beacon by night, an unseen landmark by day.

There is something magical in the sight of land rising from the depths of the sea. Christopher Columbus, in the midst of his mutinous crew, ready to return to Europe without having achieved the purpose of his voyage, saw a little light, on a beach hidden from him by the night. The flight of birds had guided him towards America; the glow from a savage hearth revealed a new universe to him. Columbus must have experienced the kind of feeling that Scripture grants to the Creator, when, having drawn the earth from nothingness, he saw that his work was good: vidit Deus quod esset bonum. Columbus created a world. One of the first lives of the Genoan navigator is that which Giustiniani, in publishing his Hebrew Psalter, placed as a note beneath the psalm: Caeli enarrant gloriam dei: the heavens declare the glory of God.

Vasco da Gama must have been no less amazed, when in 1498 he touched the coast of Malabar. Then, everything in the world altered: nature appeared anew; the curtain, which had hidden part of the earth for thousands of centuries, lifted: the house of the sun was discovered, the place from which he rose each morning ‘like a bridegroom, or a giant, tanquam sponsus, ut gigas’. The wise and gleaming Orient was seen in all its nakedness, that Orient whose mysterious history involved the voyages of Pythagoras, the conquests of Alexander, the memory of the crusades, and whose perfumes crossed the deserts of Arabia and the seas of Greece to reach us. Europe sent a poet there to praise it: the swan of the Tagus sounded his sad and beautiful voice on the shores of India; Camoëns borrowed their brilliance, their renown and their misfortune; he only left them their riches.