1492

A strange light was around us, as though the tempest itself made a light. By it I marked the Admiral, upright where he could best command the whole. He had lashed himself there, for the ship tossed excessively. His great figure stood; his white, blowing hair, in that strange light, made for him a nimbus. It was strange, how the light seemed to seize that and his brow and his gray-blue eyes.... He looked what he was, something more than a bold man and a brave sea captain, and there streamed from him comfort. It touched his mariners; it came among them like tongues of flame.-from Chapter XXXIThis 1922 book, published in England under the title Admiral of the Ocean-Sea, is a fictionalized account of Christopher Columbus's famous 1492 voyage, told from the point of view of one of his sailors, Jayme de Marchena, a Spanish Jew whose kabbalistic perspective lends the tale an air of mystery and mysticism. A classic of historical fiction, it is a stirring adventure of exploration of the wide world and the inner soul.MARY JOHNSTON (1870-1936) also wrote Lewis Rand, Pioneers of the Old South, and To Have and to Hold.