This is the first of seven illustrations that Turner produced for ‘The Voyage of Columbus’, a miniature epic poem which is the final work in the published volume of Rogers’s
Poems. The poem purports to be a translation of a sixteenth-century Castilian manuscript found at the Convent of la Rabida in Palos, Spain. Writing in the voice of a medieval chronicler, Rogers describes Columbus as a noble Christian hero who brought the light of revelation to the benighted peoples of the Americas, heretofore governed by primitive evil spirits. The verses, replete with supernatural figures and references to the struggle of Christianity against paganism, inspired some of Turner’s most inventive and mysterious vignette illustrations. As Jan Piggott has observed, they were also particularly successful engravings, since the dramatic black and white palette effectively conveyed the struggle between light and darkness played out in Rogers’s text.
1 The engraver for all of the prints was Edward Goodall.
2Columbus and his Son appeared in the 1834 edition of
Poems as the head-piece to an introductory note meant to have been inscribed on the original manuscript.
3 The note describes the hero’s arrival at the Convent of La Rabida to ask for some bread and water for his young son, Diego. Turner highlighted with pencil several lines in his own copy of the 1827 edition of
Poems (see Tate
D36330; Turner Bequest CCCLXVI pp.235–6):
In RABIDA’S monastic fane
...
No earthly thought has here a place,
The cowl let down on every face;
...
From GENOA when COLUMBUS came,
(At once her glory and her shame)
’Twas here he caught the holy flame.
’Twas here the generous vow he made;
His banners on the altar laid.
(Poems, p.220)
However, the final vignette illustrates more closely a verse which does not appear in the earlier edition but which was added later:
Here, tempest-worn and desolate,
A Pilot, journeying thro’ the wild,
Stopt to solicit at the gate
A pittance for his child.
’Twas here, unknowing and unknown,
He stood upon the threshold-stone.
But hope was his – a faith sublime,
That triumphs over place and time
(Poems, pp.220–1)
