Columbus: The Grand Voyage

The Imagination Station has dropped Lawrence Hodges into a Spanish monastery in the year 1492, where Friar Diego takes him for a work-shirking urchin possessed by a demon that wants beating out. Lawrence bolts and blunders straight into Queen Isabella at her prayers. When he explains that he wants to sail with the great explorer Christopher Columbus, whom Spain knows as Cristobal Colon, the queen appoints him her royal messenger and sends him to La Rabida Cloister to summon Columbus to court. The king's chief advisor, Don Rodrigo Delaveaga, slips in a message of his own: the crown is in a generous mood, so Columbus should strike while the iron is hot and demand titles, lands and money.

Lawrence finds a bitter man. Columbus has waited eight years through scorn, ridicule and poverty while the monarchs fought their war, and now he intends to take his plans to France. Lawrence's enthusiasm wins him over - the boy recites Columbus's own dream back to him, down to the chance "to boldly go where no man has gone before" - and with his friend Luis de Santangel urging him on, Columbus agrees to give Spain one last chance. Before the throne he pleads his case so well that Isabella offers to put up her crown jewels to fund the voyage. Then, following Rodrigo's counsel, Columbus demands to be made admiral of the ocean sea, governor and viceroy of every land he discovers, and heir with his sons to a tenth of all the wealth found there. The king is outraged, the queen grieves that greed has poisoned his soul, and Columbus is dismissed in disgrace.

Chasing after him, Lawrence runs into Rodrigo, who gloats over his handiwork. He is no true Spaniard at all but a loyal subject of the king of Portugal, and he baited Columbus into wrecking his own cause. Lawrence, the loose end, is seized, gagged and stowed aboard the Constance, a slave ship bound for the Canary Islands. On the auction block the winning bid, a scant twenty maravedis, comes from Columbus himself, who then invites the trader to hand the boy over for nothing rather than have Queen Isabella learn that her royal messenger has been kidnapped. Everything has turned around: Rodrigo has been caught in treachery and deported, the crown has relented, Luis de Santangel is funding the voyage out of his own pocket, and the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria ride in the harbor. Columbus needs a cabin boy, and Lawrence eagerly signs on.

Weeks of scrubbing decks and scanning empty horizons follow, until Lawrence overhears sailors whispering mutiny - push Colon overboard some night while he is stargazing. Discovered behind the boxes, Lawrence urges them to take their complaint to the captain instead, and Columbus meets it with a promise: if land is not found within one more day, he will turn the ships back to Spain. That night he and Lawrence watch from the deck and glimpse a single light glowing like a candle just above the waterline. When the day runs out, Columbus keeps his word and is giving the order to turn back when a cannon booms across the water. Land, a long shoreline of white sand. Columbus praises God, names the island San Salvador, and takes possession of it for Spain.

Back in the present, Lawrence tells Whit the adventure was great and wonders why his teacher said some people do not like Columbus. Whit allows that the man has been the center of controversy, but calls him an incredibly brave adventurer whose voyage across the Atlantic ranks as one of the great feats of history. Lawrence's answer is to dash off and ride the whole adventure again.