CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

 AND THE NEW WORLD OF HIS DISCOVERY

 A NARRATIVE BY FILSON YOUNG

 TO THE RIGHT HON. SIR HORACE PLUNKETT, K. C. V. O. , D. C. L. , F. R. S. 

MY DEAR HORACE, Often while I have been studying the records of colonisation in the NewWorld I have thought of you and your difficult work in Ireland; and Ihave said to myself, "What a time he would have had if he had beenViceroy of the Indies in 1493!" There, if ever, was the chance for aDepartment such as yours; and there, if anywhere, was the place for theEconomic Man. Alas! there war only one of him; William Ires or Eyre, byname, from the county Galway; and though he fertilised the soil he did itwith his blood and bones. A wonderful chance; and yet you see what cameof it all. It would perhaps be stretching truth too far to say that youare trying to undo some of Columbus's work, and to stop up the hole hemade in Ireland when he found a channel into which so much of what wasbest in the Old Country war destined to flow; for you and he have eachyour places in the great circle of Time and Compensation, and though youmay seem to oppose one another across the centuries you are reallyanswering the same call and working in the same vineyard. For we all setout to discover new worlds; and they are wise who realise early thathuman nature has roots that spread beneath the ocean bed, that neitherlatitude nor longitude nor time itself can change it to anything richeror stranger than what it is, and that furrows ploughed in it are furrowsploughed in the sea sand. Columbus tried to pour the wine ofcivilisation into very old bottles; you, more wisely, are trying to pourthe old wine of our country into new bottles. Yet there is no greatunlikeness between the two tasks: it is all a matter of bottling; thevintage is the same, infinite, inexhaustible, and as punctual as the sunand the seasons. It was Columbus's weakness as an administrator that hethought the bottle was everything; it is your strength that you care forthe vintage, and labour to preserve its flavour and soft fire. 

 Yours, FILSON YOUNG. RUAN MINOR, September 1906. 

 PREFACE

The writing of historical biography is properly a work of partnership, towhich public credit is awarded too often in an inverse proportion to thelabours expended. One group of historians, labouring in the obscurestdepths, dig and prepare the ground, searching and sifting the documentarysoil with infinite labour and over an area immensely wide. They arefollowed by those scholars and specialists in history who give theirlives to the study of a single period, and who sow literature in thefurrows of research prepared by those who have preceded them. Last ofall comes the essayist, or writer pure and simple, who reaps the harvestso laboriously prepared. The material lies all before him; the documentshave been arranged, the immense contemporary fields of record andknowledge examined and searched for stray seeds of significance that mayhave blown over into them; the perspective is cleared for him, therelation of his facts to time and space and the march of humancivilisation duly established; he has nothing to do but reap the field ofharvest where it suits him, grind it in the wheels of whatever machineryhis art is equipped with, and come before the public with the finishedproduct. And invariably in this unequal partnership he reaps most richlywho reaps latest. 

I am far from putting this narrative forward as the fine and ultimateproduct of all the immense labour and research of the historians ofColumbus; but I am anxious to excuse myself for my apparent presumptionin venturing into a field which might more properly be occupied by theexpert historian. It would appear that the double work of acquiring thefacts of a piece of human history and of presenting them through themedium of literature can hardly ever be performed by one and the sameman. A lifetime must be devoted to the one, a year or two may sufficefor the other; and an entirely different set of qualities must beemployed in the two tasks. I cannot make it too clear that I make noclaim to have added one iota of information or one fragment of originalresearch to the expert knowledge regarding the life of ChristopherColumbus; and when I add that the chief collection of facts and documentsrelating to the subject, the 'Raccolta Columbiana, '--[Raccolta diDocumenti e Studi Publicati dalla R. Commissione Colombiana, &c. Auspiceil Ministero della Publica Istruzione. Rome, 1892-4. ]--is a workconsisting of more than thirty folio volumes, the general reader will bethe more indulgent to me. But when a purely human interest led me sometime ago to look into the literature of Columbus, I was amazed to findwhat seemed to me a striking disproportion between the extent of themodern historians' work on that subject and the knowledge or interest init displayed by what we call the general reading public. I am surprisedto find how many well-informed people there are whose knowledge ofColumbus is comprised within two beliefs, one of them erroneous and theother doubtful: that he discovered America, and performed a trick withan egg. Americans, I think, are a little better informed on the subjectthan the English; perhaps because the greater part of modern criticalresearch on the subject of Columbus has been the work of Americans. It is to bridge the immense gap existing between the labours of thehistorians and the indifference of the modern reader, between theRaccolta Columbiana, in fact, and the story of the egg, that I havewritten my narrative. 

It is customary and proper to preface a work which is based entirely onthe labours of other people with an acknowledgment of the sources whenceit is drawn; and yet in the case of Columbus I do not know where tobegin. In one way I am indebted to every serious writer who has evenremotely concerned himself with the subject, from Columbus himself andLas Casas down to the editors of the Raccolta. The chain of historianshas been so unbroken, the apostolic succession, so to speak, has passedwith its heritage so intact from generation to generation, that thelatest historian enshrines in his work the labours of all the rest. Yet there are necessarily some men whose work stands out as being moreimmediately seizable than that of others; in the period of whose care thelamp of inspiration has seemed to burn more brightly. In a matter ofthis kind I cannot pretend to be a judge, but only to state my ownexperience and indebtedness; and in my work I have been chiefly helped byLas Casas, indirectly of course by Ferdinand Columbus, Herrera, Oviedo, Bernaldez, Navarrete, Asensio, Mr. Payne, Mr. Harrisse, Mr. Vignaud, Mr. Winsor, Mr. Thacher, Sir Clements Markham, Professor de Lollis, and S. Salvagnini. It is thus not among the dusty archives of Seville, Genoa, or San Domingo that I have searched, but in the archive formed bythe writings of modern workers. To have myself gone back to originalsources, even if I had been competent to do so, would have been in thecase of Columbian research but a waste of time and a doing over againwhat has been done already with patience, diligence, and knowledge. Thehistorians have been committed to the austere task of finding out andexamining every fact and document in connection with their subject; andmany of these facts and documents are entirely without human interestexcept in so far as they help to establish a date, a name, or a sum ofmoney. It has been my agreeable and lighter task to test and assay themasses of bed-rock fact thus excavated by the historians for traces ofthe particular ore which I have been seeking. In fact I have tried todiscover, from a reverent examination of all these monographs, essays, histories, memoirs, and controversies concerning what ChristopherColumbus did, what Christopher Columbus was; believing as I do that anylabour by which he can be made to live again, and from the dust of morethan four hundred years be brought visibly to the mind's eye, will not beentirely without use and interest. Whether I have succeeded in doing soor not I cannot be the judge; I can only say that the labour ofresuscitating a man so long buried beneath mountains of untruth andcontroversy has some times been so formidable as to have seemed hopeless. And yet one is always tempted back by the knowledge that ChristopherColumbus is not only a name, but that the human being whom we so describedid actually once live and walk in the world; did actually sail and lookupon seas where we may also sail and look; did stir with his feet theindestructible dust of this old Earth, and centre in himself, as we alldo, the whole interest and meaning of the Universe. Truly the mostcommonplace fact, yet none the less amazing; and often when in the dustof documents he has seemed most dead and unreal to me I have foundcourage from the entertainment of some deep or absurd reflection; such asthat he did once undoubtedly, like other mortals, blink and cough andblow his nose. And if my readers could realise that fact throughoutevery page of this book, I should say that I had succeeded in my task. 

To be more particular in my acknowledgments. In common with every modernwriter on Columbus--and modern research on the history of Columbus isonly thirty years old--I owe to the labours of Mr. Henry Harrisse, thechief of modern Columbian historians, the indebtedness of the gold-minerto the gold-mine. In the matters of the Toscanelli correspondence andthe early years of Columbus I have followed more closely Mr. HenryVignaud, whose work may be regarded as a continuation and reexamination--in some cases destructive--of that of Mr. Harrisse. Mr. Vignaud's workis happily not yet completed; we all look forward eagerly to thecompletion of that part of his 'Etudes Critiques' dealing with the secondhalf of the Admiral's life; and Mr. Vignaud seems to me to stand higherthan all modern workers in this field in the patient and fearlessdiscovery of the truth regarding certain very controversial matters, and also in ability to give a sound and reasonable interpretation tothose obscurer facts or deductions in Columbus's life that seem doomednever to be settled by the aid of documents alone. It may be unseemly inme not to acknowledge indebtedness to Washington Irving, but I cannotconscientiously do so. If I had been writing ten or fifteen years ago Imight have taken his work seriously; but it is impossible that anythingso one-sided, so inaccurate, so untrue to life, and so profoundly dullcould continue to exist save in the absence of any critical knowledge orlight on the subject. All that can be said for him is that he kept thelamp of interest in Columbus alive for English readers during the periodthat preceded the advent of modern critical research. Mr. Major'sedition' of Columbus's letters has been freely consulted by me, as itmust be by any one interested in the subject. Professor Justin Winsor'swork has provided an invaluable store of ripe scholarship in matters ofcosmography and geographical detail; Sir Clements Markham's book, by farthe most trustworthy of modern English works on the subject, and avaluable record of the established facts in Columbus's life, has proved asound guide in nautical matters; while the monograph of Mr. Elton, whichapparently did not promise much at first, since the author has followedsome untrustworthy leaders as regards his facts, proved to be full of afragrant charm produced by the writer's knowledge of and interest insub-tropical vegetation; and it is delightfully filled with the names ofgums and spices. To Mr. Vignaud I owe special thanks, not only for thebenefits of his research and of his admirable works on Columbus, but alsofor personal help and encouragement. Equally cordial thanks are due toMr. John Boyd Thacher, whose work, giving as it does so large aselection of the Columbus documents both in facsimile, transliteration, and translation, is of the greatest service to every English writer onthe subject of Columbus. It is the more to be regretted, since thedocumentary part of Mr. Thacher's work is so excellent, that in hiscritical studies he should have seemed to ignore some of the moreimportant results of modern research. I am further particularly indebtedto Mr. Thacher and to his publishers, Messrs. Putnam's Sons, forpermission to reproduce certain illustrations in his work, and to availmyself also of his copies and translations of original Spanish andItalian documents. I have to thank Commendatore Guido Biagi, the keeperof the Laurentian Library in Florence, for his very kind help and lettersof introduction to Italian librarians; Mr. Raymond Beazley, of MertonCollege, Oxford, for his most helpful correspondence; and Lord Dunravenfor so kindly bringing, in the interests of my readers, his practicalknowledge of navigation and seamanship to bear on the first voyage ofColumbus. Finally my work has been helped and made possible by manyintimate and personal kindnesses which, although they are not specified, are not the less deeply acknowledged. 

September 1906. 

 CONTENTS

THE INNER LIGHT

I THE STREAM OF THE WORLD

II THE HOME IN GENOA

III YOUNG CHRISTOPHER

IV DOMENICO

V SEA THOUGHTS

VI IN PORTUGAL

VII ADVENTURES BODILY AND SPIRITUAL

VIII THE FIRE KINDLES

IX WANDERINGS WITH AN IDEA

X OUR LADY OF LA RABIDA

XI THE CONSENT OF SPAIN

XII THE PREPARATIONS AT PALOS

XIII EVENTS OF THE FIRST VOYAGE

XIV LANDFALL

THE NEW WORLD

I THE ENCHANTED ISLANDS

II THE EARTHLY PARADISE

III THE VOYAGE HOME

IV THE HOUR OF TRIUMPH

V GREAT EXPECTATIONS

VI THE SECOND VOYAGE

VII THE EARTHLY PARADISE REVISITED

DESPERATE REMEDIES

I THE VOYAGE TO CUBA

II THE CONQUEST OF ESPANOLA

III UPS AND DOWNS

IV IN SPAIN AGAIN

V THE THIRD VOYAGE

VI AN INTERLUDE

VII THE THIRD VOYAGE (continued)

TOWARDS THE SUNSET

I DEGRADATION

II CRISIS IN THE ADMIRAL'S LIFE

III THE LAST VOYAGE

IV HEROIC ADVENTURES BY LAND AND SEA

V THE ECLIPSE OF THE MOON

VI RELIEF OF THE ADMIRAL

VII THE HERITAGE OF HATRED

VIII THE ADMIRAL COMES HOME

IX THE LAST DAYS

X THE MAN COLUMBUS

 THY WAY IS THE SEA, AND THY PATH IN THE GREAT WATERS, AND THY FOOTSTEPS ARE NOT KNOWN. 

THE INNER LIGHT

BOOK I. 

CHAPTER I

THE STREAM OF THE WORLD

A man standing on the sea-shore is perhaps as ancient and as primitive asymbol of wonder as the mind can conceive. Beneath his feet are thestones and grasses of an element that is his own, natural to him, in somedegree belonging to him, at any rate accepted by him. He has place andcondition there. Above him arches a world of immense void, fleecysailing clouds, infinite clear blueness, shapes that change and dissolve;his day comes out of it, his source of light and warmth marches acrossit, night falls from it; showers and dews also, and the quiet influenceof stars. Strange that impalpable element must be, and for everunattainable by him; yet with its gifts of sun and shower, its furnitureof winged life that inhabits also on the friendly soil, it has links andpartnerships with life as he knows it and is a complement of earthlyconditions. But at his feet there lies the fringe of another element, another condition, of a vaster and more simple unity than earth or air, which the primitive man of our picture knows to be not his at all. It isfluent and unstable, yet to be touched and felt; it rises and falls, moves and frets about his very feet, as though it had a life and entityof its own, and was engaged upon some mysterious business. Unlike thesilent earth and the dreaming clouds it has a voice that fills his worldand, now low, now loud, echoes throughout his waking and sleeping life. Earth with her sprouting fruits behind and beneath him; sky, and larkssinging, above him; before him, an eternal alien, the sea: he standsthere upon the shore, arrested, wondering. He lives, --this man of ourfigure; he proceeds, as all must proceed, with the task and burden oflife. One by one its miracles are unfolded to him; miracles of fire andcold, and pain and pleasure; the seizure of love, the terrible magic ofreproduction, the sad miracle of death. He fights and lusts and endures;and, no more troubled by any wonder, sleeps at last. But throughout thedays of his life, in the very act of his rude existence, this greattumultuous presence of the sea troubles and overbears him. Sometimes inits bellowing rage it terrifies him, sometimes in its tranquillity itallures him; but whatever he is doing, grubbing for roots, chippingexperimentally with bones and stones, he has an eye upon it; and in hispassage by the shore he pauses, looks, and wonders. His eye is led fromthe crumbling snow at his feet, past the clear green of the shallows, beyond the furrows of the nearer waves, to the calm blue of the distance;and in his glance there shines again that wonder, as in his breast stirsthe vague longing and unrest that is the life-force of the world. 

What is there beyond? It is the eternal question asked by the finite ofthe infinite, by the mortal of the immortal; answer to it there is nonesave in the unending preoccupation of life and labour. And if this oldquestion was in truth first asked upon the sea-shore, it was asked mostoften and with the most painful wonder upon western shores, whence thejourneying sun was seen to go down and quench himself in the sea. Thegenerations that followed our primitive man grew fast in knowledge, andperhaps for a time wondered the less as they knew the more; but we may besure they never ceased to wonder at what might lie beyond the sea. Howmuch more must they have wondered if they looked west upon the waters, and saw the sun of each succeeding day sink upon a couch of glory wherethey could not follow? All pain aspires to oblivion, all toil to rest, all troubled discontent with what is present to what is unfamiliar andfar away; and no power of knowledge and scientific fact will ever preventhuman unhappiness from reaching out towards some land of dreams of whichthe burning brightness of a sea sunset is an image. Is it very hard tobelieve, then, that in that yearning towards the miracle of a sunquenched in sea distance, felt and felt again in human hearts throughcountless generations, the westward stream of human activity on thisplanet had its rise? Is it unreasonable to picture, on an earth spinningeastward, a treadmill rush of feet to follow the sinking light? Thehistory of man's life in this world does not, at any rate, contradict us. Wisdom, discovery, art, commerce, science, civilisation have all movedwest across our world; have all in their cycles followed the sun; haveall, in their day of power, risen in the East and set in the West. 

This stream of life has grown in force and volume with the passage ofages. It has always set from shore to sea in countless currents ofadventure and speculation; but it has set most strongly from East toWest. On its broad bosom the seeds of life and knowledge have beencarried throughout the world. It brought the people of Tyre and Carthageto the coasts and oceans of distant worlds; it carried the English fromJutland across cold and stormy waters to the islands of their conquest;it carried the Romans across half the world; it bore the civilisation ofthe far East to new life and virgin western soils; it carried the newWest to the old East, and is in our day bringing back again the new Eastto the old West. Religions, arts, tradings, philosophies, vices and lawshave been borne, a strange flotsam, upon its unchanging flood. It hashad its springs and neaps, its trembling high-water marks, its hour ofaffluence, when the world has been flooded with golden humanity; its ebband effluence also, when it has seemed to shrink and desert the kingdomsset upon its shores. The fifteenth century in Western Europe found it ata pause in its movements: it had brought the trade and the learning ofthe East to the verge of the Old World, filling the harbours of theMediterranean with ships and the monasteries of Italy and Spain withwisdom; and in the subsequent and punctual decadence that followed thisflood, there gathered in the returning tide a greater energy and volumewhich was to carry the Old World bodily across the ocean. And yet, forall their wisdom and power, the Spanish and Portuguese were still in theattitude of our primitive man, standing on the sea-shore and looking outin wonder across the sea. 

The flood of the life-stream began to set again, and little by little torise and inundate Western Europe, floating off the galleys and caravelsof King Alphonso of Portugal, and sending them to feel their way alongthe coasts of Africa; a little later drawing the mind of Prince Henry theNavigator to devote his life to the conquest and possession of theunknown. In his great castle on the promontory of Sagres, with the voiceof the Atlantic thundering in his ears, and its mists and sprays boundinghis vision, he felt the full force of the stream, and stretched his armsto the mysterious West. But the inner light was not yet so brightlykindled that he dared to follow his heart; his ships went south and southagain, to brave on each voyage the dangers and terrors that lay along theunknown African coast, until at length his captains saw the Cape of GoodHope. South and West and East were in those days confusing terms; for itwas the East that men were thinking of when they set their faces to thesetting sun, and it was a new road to the East that they sought when theyfelt their way southward along the edge of the world. But the risingtide of discovery was working in that moment, engaging the brains ofinnumerable sages, stirring the wonder of innumerable mariners; reachingalso, little by little, to quarters less immediately concerned with thebusiness of discovery. Ships carried the strange tidings of new coastsand new islands from port to port throughout the Mediterranean; Venetianson the lagoons, Ligurians on the busy trading wharves of Genoa, werediscussing the great subject; and as the tide rose and spread, it floatedone ship of life after another that was destined for the great businessof adventure. Some it inspired to dream and speculate, and to do no morethan that; many a heart also to brave efforts and determinations thatwere doomed to come to nothing and to end only in failure. And amongothers who felt the force and was swayed and lifted by the prevailinginfluence, there lived, some four and a half centuries ago, a little boyplaying about the wharves of Genoa, well known to his companions asChristoforo, son of Domenico the wool-weaver, who lived in the VicoDritto di Ponticello. 

CHAPTER II

THE HOME IN GENOA

It is often hard to know how far back we should go in the ancestry of aman whose life and character we are trying to reconstruct. The life thatis in him is not his own, but is mysteriously transmitted through thelife of his parents; to the common stock of his family, flesh of theirflesh, bone of their bone, character of their character, he has but addedhis own personality. However far back we go in his ancestry, there issomething of him to be traced, could we but trace it; and although itsoon becomes so widely scattered that no separate fraction of it seems tobe recognisable, we know that, generations back, we may come upon somesympathetic fact, some reservoir of the essence that was him, in which wecan find the source of many of his actions, and the clue, perhaps, to hischaracter. 

In the case of Columbus we are spared this dilemma. The past is reticentenough about the man himself; and about his ancestors it is almostsilent. We know that he had a father and grandfather, as all grandsonsof Adam have had; but we can be certain of very little more than that. He came of a race of Italian yeomen inhabiting the Apennine valleys; andin the vale of Fontanabuona, that runs up into the hills behind Genoa, the two streams of family from which he sprang were united. His fatherfrom one hamlet, his mother from another; the towering hills behind, theMediterranean shining in front; love and marriage in the valley; and alittle boy to come of it whose doings were to shake the world. 

His family tree begins for us with his grandfather, Giovanni Colombo ofTerra-Rossa, one of the hamlets in the valley--concerning whom many humanfacts may be inferred, but only three are certainly known; that he lived, begot children, and died. Lived, first at Terra Rossa, and afterwardsupon the sea-shore at Quinto; begot children in number three--Antonio, Battestina, and Domenico, the father of our Christopher; and died, because one of the two facts in his history is that in the year 1444 hewas not alive, being referred to in a legal document as quondam, or, aswe should say, "the late. " Of his wife, Christopher's grandmother, sinceshe never bought or sold or witnessed anything requiring the record oflegal document, history speaks no word; although doubtless some pleasantand picturesque old lady, or lady other than pleasant and picturesque, had place in the experience or imagination of young Christopher. Of thepair, old Quondam Giovanni alone survives the obliterating drift ofgenerations, which the shores and brown slopes of Quinto al Mare, wherehe sat in the sun and looked about him, have also survived. Doubtlessold Quondam could have told us many things about Domenico, and hisover-sanguine buyings and sellings; have perhaps told us something aboutChristopher's environment, and cleared up our doubts concerning his firsthome; but he does not. He will sit in the sun there at Quinto, and siphis wine, and say his Hail Marys, and watch the sails of the feluccasleaning over the blue floor of the Mediterranean as long as you please;but of information about son or family, not a word. He is content tohave survived, and triumphantly twinkles his two dates at us across thenight of time. 1440, alive; 1444, not alive any longer: and so hail andfarewell, Grandfather John. 

Of Antonio and Battestina, the uncle and aunt of Columbus, we know nextto nothing. Uncle Antonio inherited the estate of Terra-Rossa, AuntBattestina was married in the valley; and so no more of either of them;except that Antonio, who also married, had sons, cousins of Columbus, whoin after years, when he became famous, made themselves unpleasant, aspoor relations will, by recalling themselves to his remembrance andsuggesting that something might be done for them. I have a belief, supported by no historical fact or document, that between the families ofDomenico and Antonio there was a mild cousinly feud. I believe they didnot like each other. Domenico, as we shall see presently, was sanguineand venturesome, a great buyer and seller, a maker of bargains in whichhe generally came off second best. Antonio, who settled in Terra-Rossa, the paternal property, doubtless looked askance at these enterprises fromhis vantage-ground of a settled income; doubtless also, on the occasionof visits exchanged between the two families, he would comment upon theunfortunate enterprises of his brother; and as the children of bothbrothers grew up, they would inherit and exaggerate, as children will, this settled difference between their respective parents. This, ofcourse, may be entirely untrue, but I think it possible, and even likely;for Columbus in after life displayed a very tender regard for members ofhis family, but never to our knowledge makes any reference to thesecousins of his, till they send emissaries to him in his hour of triumph. At any rate, among the influences that surrounded him at Genoa we mayreckon this uncle and aunt and their children--dim ghosts to us, but tohim real people, who walked and spoke, and blinked their eyes and movedtheir limbs, like the men and women of our own time. Less of a ghost tous, though still a very shadowy and doubtful figure, is Domenico himself, Christopher's father. He at least is a man in whom we can feel a warminterest, as the one who actually begat and reared the man of our story. We shall see him later, and chiefly in difficulties; executing deeds andleases, and striking a great variety of legal attitudes, to thewitnessing of which various members of his family were called in. Littleenough good did they to him at the time, poor Domenico; but he was abenefactor to posterity without knowing it, and in these grave notarialdocuments preserved almost the only evidence that we have as to the earlydays of his illustrious son. A kind, sanguine man, this Domenico, who, if he failed to make a good deal of money in his various enterprises, at least had some enjoyment of them, as the man who buys and sells andstrikes legal attitudes in every age desires and has. He was awool-carder by trade, but that was not enough for him; he must buylittle bits of estates here and there; must even keep a tavern, where heand his wife could entertain the foreign sailors and hear the news ofthe world; where also, although perhaps they did not guess it, a sharppair of ears were also listening, and a pair of round eyes gazing, andan inquisitive face set in astonishment at the strange tales that wentabout. 

There is one fragment of fact about this Domenico that greatly enlargesour knowledge of him. He was a wool-weaver, as we know; he also kept atavern, and no doubt justified the adventure on the plea that it wouldbring him customers for his woollen cloth; for your buyer and sellernever lacks a reason either for his selling or buying. Presently he isbuying again; this time, still with striking of legal attitudes, callingtogether of relations, and accompaniments of crabbed Latin notarialdocuments, a piece of ground in the suburbs of Genoa, consisting of scruband undergrowth, which cannot have been of any earthly use to him. Butalso, according to the documents, there went some old wine-vats with theland. Domenico, taking a walk after Mass on some feast-day, sees theland and the wine-vats; thinks dimly but hopefully how old wine-vats, ifof no use to any other human creature, should at least be of use to atavern-keeper; hurries back, overpowers the perfunctory objections of hiscomplaisant wife, and on the morrow of the feast is off to the notary'soffice. We may be sure the wine-vats lay and rotted there, and furnishedno monetary profit to the wool-weaving tavern-keeper; but doubtless theyfurnished him a rich profit of another kind when he walked about hisnewly-acquired property, and explained what he was going to do with thewine-vats. 

And besides the weaving of wool and pouring of wine and buying andselling of land, there were more human occupations, which Domenico wasnot the man to neglect. He had married, about the year 1450, oneSusanna, a daughter of Giacomo of Fontana-Rossa, a silk weaver who livedin the hamlet near to Terra-Rossa. Domenico's father was of the moreconsequence of the two, for he had, as well as his home in the valley, ahouse at Quinto, where he probably kept a felucca for purposes of tradewith Alexandria and the Islands. Perhaps the young people were marriedat Quinto, but if so they did not live there long, moving soon intoGenoa, where Domenico could more conveniently work at his trade. Thewool-weavers at that time lived in a quarter outside the old city walls, between them and the outer borders of the city, which is now occupied bythe park and public gardens. Here they had their dwellings andworkshops, their schools and institutions, receiving every protection andencouragement from the Signoria, who recognised the importance of thewool trade and its allied industries to Genoa. Cloth-weavers, blanket-makers, silk-weavers, and velvet-makers all lived in thisquarter, and held their houses under the neighbouring abbey of SanStefano. There are two houses mentioned in documents which seem to havebeen in the possession of Domenico at different times. One was in thesuburbs outside the Olive Gate; the other was farther in, by St. Andrew's Gate, and quite near to the sea. The house outside the OliveGate has disappeared; and it was probably here that our Christopherfirst saw the light, and pleased Domenico's heart with his little criesand struggles. Neither the day nor even the year is certainly known, butthere is most reason to believe that it was in the year 1451. They musthave moved soon afterwards to the house in the Vico Dritto diPonticello, No. 37, in which most of Christopher's childhood wascertainly passed. This is a house close to St. Andrew's Gate, whichgate still stands in a beautiful and ruinous condition. 

From the new part of Genoa, and from the Via XX Settembre, you turn intothe little Piazza di Ponticello just opposite the church of San Stefano. In a moment you are in old Genoa, which is to-day in appearance virtuallythe same as the place in which Christopher and his little brothers andsisters made the first steps of their pilgrimage through this world. Ifthe Italian, sun has been shining fiercely upon you, in the great modernthoroughfare, you will turn into this quarter of narrow streets and highhouses with grateful relief. The past seems to meet you there; and fromthe Piazza, gay with its little provision-shops and fruit stalls, youwalk up the slope of the Vico Dritto di Ponticello, leaving the sunlightbehind you, and entering the narrow street like a traveller entering amountain gorge. 

It is a very curious street this; I suppose there is no street in theworld that has more character. Genoa invented sky-scrapers long beforeColumbus had discovered America, or America had invented steel frames forhigh building; but although many of the houses in the Vico Dritto diPonticello are seven and eight storeys high, the width of the street fromhouse-wall to house-wall does not average more than nine feet. Thestreet is not straight, moreover; it winds a little in its ascent to theold city wall and St. Andrew's Gate, so that you do not even see the skymuch as you look forward and upwards. The jutting cornices of the roofs, often beautifully decorated, come together in a medley of angles andcorners that practically roof the street over; and only here and there doyou see a triangle or a parallelogram of the vivid brilliant blue that isthe sky. Besides being seven or eight storeys high, the houses are thenarrowest in the world; I should think that their average width on thestreet front is ten feet. So as you walk up this street where youngChristopher lived you must think of it in these three dimensions toweringslices of houses, ten or twelve feet in width: a street often not morethan eight and seldom more than fifteen feet in width; and the walls ofthe houses themselves, painted in every colour, green and pink and greyand white, and trellised with the inevitable green window-shutters of theSouth, standing like cliffs on each side of you seven or eight roomshigh. There being so little horizontal space for the people to livethere, what little there is is most economically used; and all across thetops of the houses, high above your head, the cliffs are joined by wiresand clothes-lines from which thousands of brightly-dyed garments arealways hanging and fluttering; higher still, where the top storeys of thehouses become merged in roof, there are little patches of garden andgreenery, where geraniums and delicious tangling creepers uphold thushigh above the ground the fertile tradition of earth. You walk slowly upthe paved street. One of its characteristics, which it shares with theold streets of most Italian towns, is that it is only used byfoot-passengers, being of course too narrow for wheels; and it is pavedacross with flagstones from door to door, so that the feet and thevoices echo pleasantly in it, and make a music of their own. Withoutexception the ground floor of every house is a shop--the gayest, busiestmost industrious little shops in the world. There are shops forprovisions, where the delightful macaroni lies in its various bins, andall kinds of frugal and nourishing foods are offered for sale. Thereare shops for clothes and dyed finery; there are shops for boots, whereboots hang in festoons like onions outside the window--I have never seenso many boot-shops at once in my life as I saw in the streetssurrounding the house of Columbus. And every shop that is not aprovision-shop or a clothes-shop or a boot-shop, is a wine-shop--or atleast you would think so, until you remember, after you have walkedthrough the street, what a lot of other kinds of shops you have seen onyour way. There are shops for newspapers and tobacco, for cheapjewellery, for brushes, for chairs and tables and articles of wood;there are shops with great stacks and piles of crockery; there are shopsfor cheese and butter and milk--indeed from this one little street inGenoa you could supply every necessary and every luxury of a humblelife. 

As you still go up, the street takes a slight bend; and immediatelybefore you, you see it spanned by the lofty crumbled arch of St. Andrew's Gate, with its two mighty towers one on each side. Just as yousee it you are at Columbus's house. The number is thirty-seven; it islike any of the other houses, tall and narrow; and there is a slab builtinto the wall above the first storey, on which is written thisinscription:--

 NVLLA DOMVS TITVLO DIGNIOR HEIC PATERNIS IN AEDIBV CHRISTOPHORVS COLVMBVS PVERITIAM PRIMAMQVE IVVENTAM TRANSEGIT

You stop and look at it; and presently you become conscious of adifference between it and all the other houses. They are all alert, busy, noisy, crowded with life in every storey, oozing vitality fromevery window; but of all the narrow vertical strips that make up thehouses of the street, this strip numbered thirty-seven is empty, silent, and dead. The shutters veil its windows; within it is dark, empty offurniture, and inhabited only by a memory and a spirit. It is a strangeplace in which to stand and to think of all that has happened since theman of our thoughts looked forth from these windows, a common little boy. The world is very much alive in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello; the littlefreshet of life that flows there flows loud and incessant; and yet intowhat oceans of death and silence has it not poured since it carried forthChristopher on its stream! One thinks of the continent of that New Worldthat he discovered, and all the teeming millions of human lives that havesprung up and died down, and sprung up again, and spread and increasedthere; all the ploughs that have driven into its soil, the harvests thathave ripened, the waving acres and miles of grain that have answered thecall of Spring and Autumn since first the bow of his boat grated on theshore of Guanahani. And yet of the two scenes this narrow shutteredhouse in a bye-street of Genoa is at once the more wonderful and morecredible; for it contains the elements of the other. Walls and floorsand a roof, a place to eat and sleep in, a place to work and found afamily, and give tangible environment to a human soul--there is all humanenterprise and discovery, effort, adventure, and life in that. 

If Christopher wanted to go down to the sea he would have to pass underthe Gate of St. Andrew, with the old prison, now pulled down to make roomfor the modern buildings, on his right, and go down the Salita delPrione, which is a continuation of the Vico Dritto di Ponticello. Itslopes downwards from the Gate as the first street sloped upwards to it;and it contains the same assortment of shops and of houses, the samemixture of handicrafts and industries, as were seen in the Vico Dritto diPonticello. Presently he would come to the Piazza dell' Erbe, wherethere is no grass, but only a pleasant circle of little houses and shops, with already a smack of the sea in them, chiefly suggested by the shopsof instrument-makers, where to-day there are compasses and sextants andchronometers. Out of the Piazza you come down the Via di San Donato andinto the Piazza of that name, where for over nine centuries the church ofSan Donato has faced the sun and the weather. From there Christopher'syoung feet would follow the winding Via di San Bernato, a street alsoinhabited by craftsmen and workers in wood and metal; and at the lastturn of it, a gash of blue between the two cliffwalls of houses, you seethe Mediterranean. 

Here, then, between the narrow little house by the Gate and the clamourand business of the sea-front, our Christopher's feet carried him dailyduring some part of his childish life. What else he did, what he thoughtand felt, what little reflections he had, are but matters of conjecture. Genoa will tell you nothing more. You may walk over the very spot wherehe was born; you may unconsciously tread in the track of his vanishedfeet; you may wander about the wharves of the city, and see the shipsloading and unloading--different ships, but still trafficking incommodities not greatly different from those of his day; you may climbthe heights behind Genoa, and look out upon the great curving Gulf fromPorto Fino to where the Cape of the western Riviera dips into the sea;you may walk along the coast to Savona, where Domenico had one of hismany habitations, where he kept the tavern, and whither Christopher'syoung feet must also have walked; and you may come back and search againin the harbour, from the old Mole and the Bank of St. George to where theport and quays stretch away to the medley of sailing-ships and steamers;but you will not find any sign or trace of Christopher. No echo of thelittle voice that shrilled in the narrow street sounds in the VicoDritto; the houses stand gaunt and straight, with a brilliant strip ofblue sky between their roofs and the cool street beneath; but they giveyou nothing of what you seek. If you see a little figure running towardsyou in a blue smock, the head fair-haired, the face blue-eyed and alittle freckled with the strong sunshine, it is not a real figure; it isa child of your dreams and a ghost of the past. You may chase him whilehe runs about the wharves and stumbles over the ropes, but you will nevercatch him. He runs before you, zigzagging over the cobbles, up the sunnystreet, into the narrow house; out again, running now towards the Duomo, hiding in the porch of San Stefano, where the weavers held theirmeetings; back again along the wharves; surely he is hiding behind thatmooring-post! But you look, and he is not there--nothing but the oldharbour dust that the wind stirs into a little eddy while you look. Forhe belongs not to you or me, this child; he is not yet enslaved to thegreat purpose, not yet caught up into the machinery of life. His eye hasnot yet caught the fire of the sun setting on a western sea; he is stillfree and happy, and belongs only to those who love him. Father andmother, brothers Bartolomeo and Giacomo, sister Biancinetta, aunts, uncles, and cousins possibly, and possibly for a little while an oldgrandmother at Quinto--these were the people to whom that child belonged. The little life of his first decade, unviolated by documents or history, lives happily in our dreams, as blank as sunshine. 

CHAPTER III

YOUNG CHRISTOPHER

Christopher was fourteen years old when he first went to sea. Thatis his own statement, and it is one of the few of his autobiographicalutterances that we need not doubt. From it, and from a knowledge ofcertain other dates, we are able to construct some vague picture of hisdoings before he left Italy and settled in Portugal. Already in hisyoung heart he was feeling the influence that was to direct and shapehis destiny; already, towards his home in Genoa, long ripples from thecommotion of maritime adventure in the West were beginning to spread. At the age of ten he was apprenticed to his father, who undertook, according to the indentures, to provide him with board and lodging, ablue gabardine and a pair of good shoes, and various other matters inreturn for his service. But there is no reason to suppose that he everoccupied himself very much with wool-weaving. He had a vocation quiteother than that, and if he ever did make any cloth there must have beensome strange thoughts and imaginings woven into it, as he plied theshuttle. Most of his biographers, relying upon a doubtful statement inthe life of him written by his son Ferdinand, would have us send him atthe age of twelve to the distant University of Pavia, there, poor mite, to sit at the feet of learned professors studying Latin, mathematics, andcosmography; but fortunately it is not necessary to believe so improbablea statement. What is much more likely about his education--for educationhe had, although not of the superior kind with which he has beencredited--is that in the blank, sunny time of his childhood he was sentto one of the excellent schools established by the weavers in their ownquarter, and that there or afterwards he came under some influence, bothreligious and learned, which stamped him the practical visionary that heremained throughout his life. Thereafter, between his sea voyagings andexpeditions about the Mediterranean coasts, he no doubt acquiredknowledge in the only really practical way that it can be acquired; thatis to say, he received it as and when he needed it. What we know is thathe had in later life some knowledge of the works of Aristotle, JuliusCaesar, Seneca, Pliny, and Ptolemy; of Ahmet-Ben-Kothair the Arabicastronomer, Rochid the Arabian, and the Rabbi Samuel the Jew; of Isadorethe Spaniard, and Bede and Scotus the Britons; of Strabo the German, Gerson the Frenchman, and Nicolaus de Lira the Italian. These namescover a wide range, but they do not imply university education. Some ofthem merely suggest acquaintance with the 'Imago Mundi'; others implythat selective faculty, the power of choosing what can help a man'spurpose and of rejecting what is useless to it, that is one of the marksof genius, and an outward sign of the inner light. 

We must think of him, then, at school in Genoa, grinding out the tasksthat are the common heritage of all small boys; working a little at theweaving, interestedly enough at first, no doubt, while the importance ofhaving a loom appealed to him, but also no doubt rapidly cooling off inhis enthusiasm as the pastime became a task, and the restriction ofindoor life began to be felt. For if ever there was a little boy wholoved to idle about the wharves and docks, here was that little boy. It was here, while he wandered about the crowded quays and listened tothe medley of talk among the foreign sailors, and looked beyond the mastsof the ships into the blue distance of the sea, that the desire to wanderand go abroad upon the face of the waters must first have stirred in hisheart. The wharves of Genoa in those days combined in themselves all therichness of romance and adventure, buccaneering, trading, andtreasure-snatching, that has ever crowded the pages of romance. Therewere galleys and caravels, barques and feluccas, pinnaces and caraccas. There were slaves in the galleys, and bowmen to keep the slaves insubjection. There were dark-bearded Spaniards, fair-haired Englishmen;there were Greeks, and Indians, and Portuguese. The bales of goods onthe harbour-side were eloquent of distant lands, and furnished objectlessons in the only geography that young Christopher was likely to belearning. There was cotton from Egypt, and tin and lead fromSouthampton. There were butts of Malmsey from Candia; aloes and cassiaand spices from Socotra; rhubarb from Persia; silk from India; wool fromDamascus, raw wool also from Calais and Norwich. No wonder if thelittle house in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello became too narrow for theboy; and no wonder that at the age of fourteen he was able to have hisway, and go to sea. One can imagine him gradually acquiring aninfluence over his father, Domenico, as his will grew stronger andfirmer--he with one grand object in life, Domenico with none; he with asingle clear purpose, and Domenico with innumerable cloudy ones. Andso, on some day in the distant past, there were farewells and anxioushearts in the weaver's house, and Christopher, member of the crew ofsome trading caravel or felucca, a diminishing object to the wet eyesof his mother, sailed away, and faded into the blue distance. 

They had lost him, although perhaps they did not realise it; from themoment of his first voyage the sea claimed him as her own. Wideninghorizons, slatting of cords and sails in the wind, storms and stars andstrange landfalls and long idle calms, thunder of surges, tingle ofspray, and eternal labouring and threshing and cleaving of infinitewaters--these were to be his portion and true home hereafter. Attendances at Court, conferences with learned monks and bishops, sojourns on lonely islands, love under stars in the gay, sun-smittenSpanish towns, governings and parleyings in distant, undreamed-of lands--these were to be but incidents in his true life, which was to befulfilled in the solitude of sea watches. 

When he left his home on this first voyage, he took with him one otherthing besides the restless longing to escape beyond the line of sea andsky. Let us mark well this possession of his, for it was his companionand guiding-star throughout a long and difficult life, his chart andcompass, astrolabe and anchor, in one. Religion has in our days falleninto decay among men of intellect and achievement. The world has thrownit, like a worn garment or an old skin, from off its body, the thingitself being no longer real and alive, and in harmony with the life ofan age that struggles towards a different kind of truth. It is hard, therefore, for us to understand exactly how the religion of Columbusentered so deeply into his life and brooded so widely over his thoughts. 

Hardest of all is it for people whose only experience of religion is ofPuritan inheritance to comprehend how, in the fifteenth century, thestrong intellect was strengthened, and the stout heart fortified, by thethought of hosts of saints and angels hovering above a man's incomingsand outgoings to guide and protect him. Yet in an age that really hadthe gift of faith, in which religion was real and vital, and part of thebusiness of every man's daily life; in which it stood honoured in theworld, loaded with riches, crowned with learning, wielding governmentboth temporal and spiritual, it was a very brave panoply for the soul ofman. The little boy in Genoa, with the fair hair and blue eyes and gravefreckled face that made him remarkable among his dark companions, had nodoubt early received and accepted the vast mysteries of the Christianfaith; and as that other mystery began to grow in his mind, and that ideaof worlds that might lie beyond the sea-line began to take shape in histhoughts, he found in the holy wisdom of the prophets, and the inspiredwritings of the fathers, a continual confirmation of his faith. The fullconviction of these things belongs to a later period of his life; butprobably, during his first voyagings in the Mediterranean, there hung inhis mind echoes of psalms and prophecies that had to do with thingsbeyond the world of his vision and experience. The sun, whose goingforth is to the end of heaven, his circuit back to the end of it, andfrom whose heat there is nothing hid; the truth, holy and prevailing, that knows no speech nor language where its voice is not heard; the greatand wide sea, with its creeping things innumerable, and beasts small andgreat--no wonder if these things impressed him, and if gradually, as hisway fell clearer before him, and the inner light began to shine moresteadily, he came to believe that he had a special mission to carry thetorch of the faith across the Sea of Darkness, and be himself the bearerof a truth that was to go through all the earth, and of words that wereto travel to the world's end. 

In this faith, then, and with this equipment, and about the year 1465, Christopher Columbus began his sea travels. His voyages would bedoubtless at first much along the coasts, and across to Alexandria andthe Islands. There would be returnings to Genoa, and glad welcomings bythe little household in the narrow street; in 1472 and 1473 he was withhis father at Savona, helping with the wool-weaving and tavern-keeping;possibly also there were interviews with Benincasa, who was at that timeliving in Genoa, and making his famous sea-charts. Perhaps it was in hisstudio that Christopher first saw a chart, and first fell in love withthe magic that can transfer the shapes of oceans and continents to apiece of paper. Then he would be off again in another ship, to theGolden Horn perhaps, or the Black Sea, for the Genoese had a greatCrimean trade. This is all conjecture, but very reasonable conjecture;what we know for a fact is that he saw the white gum drawn from thelentiscus shrubs in Chio at the time of their flowering; that fragrantmemory is preserved long afterwards in his own writings, evoked by someincident in the newly-discovered islands of the West. There are vaguerumours and stories of his having been engaged in various expeditions--among them one fitted out in Genoa by John of Anjou to recover thekingdom of Naples for King Rene of Provence; but there is no reason tobelieve these rumours: good reason to disbelieve them, rather. 

The lives that the sea absorbs are passed in a great variety of adventureand experience, but so far as the world is concerned they are passed in aprofound obscurity; and we need not wonder that of all the mariners whoused those seas, and passed up and down, and held their course by thestars, and reefed their sails before the sudden squalls that came downfrom the mountains, and shook them out again in the calm sunshine thatfollowed, there is no record of the one among their number who wasafterwards to reef and steer and hold his course to such mighty purpose. For this period, then, we must leave him to the sea, and to the vastanonymity of sea life. 

CHAPTER IV

DOMENICO

Christopher is gone, vanished over that blue horizon; and the tale oflife in Genoa goes on without him very much as before, except thatDomenico has one apprentice less, and, a matter becoming of someimportance in the narrow condition of his finances, one boy less to feedand clothe. For good Domenico, alas! is no economist. Those hardyadventures of his in the buying and selling line do not prosper him; thetavern does not pay; perhaps the tavern-keeper is too hospitable; at anyrate, things are not going well. And yet Domenico had a good start; ashis brother Antonio has doubtless often told him, he had the best of oldGiovanni's inheritance; he had the property at Quinto, and other propertyat Ginestreto, and some ground rents at Pradella; a tavern at Savona, ashop there and at Genoa--really, Domenico has no excuse for hisdifficulties. In 1445 he was selling land at Quinto, presumably with theconsent of old Giovanni, if he was still alive; and if he was not living, then immediately after his death, in the first pride of possession. 

In 1450 he bought a pleasant house at Quarto, a village on the sea-shoreabout a mile to the west of Quinto and about five miles to the east ofGenoa. It was probably a pure speculation, as he immediately leased thehouse for two years, and never lived in it himself, although it was apleasant place, with an orchard of olives and figs and various othertrees--'arboratum olivis ficubus et aliis diversis arboribus'. His nextrecorded transaction is in 1466, when he went security for a friend, doubtless with disastrous results. In 1473 he sold the house at theOlive Gate, that suburban dwelling where probably Christopher was born, and in 1474 he invested the proceeds of that sale in a piece of landwhich I have referred to before, situated in the suburbs of Savona, withwhich were sold those agreeable and useless wine-vats. Domenico wasliving at Savona then, and the property which he so fatuously acquiredconsisted of two large pieces of land on the Via Valcalda, containing afew vines, a plantation of fruit-trees, and a large area of shrub andunderwood. The price, however, was never paid in full, and was the causeof a lawsuit which dragged on for forty years, and was finally settled byDon Diego Columbus, Christopher's son, who sent a special authority fromHispaniola. 

Owing, no doubt, to the difficulties that this un fortunate purchaseplunged him into, Domenico was obliged to mortgage his house at St. Andrew's Gate in the year 1477; and in 1489 he finally gave it up toJacob Baverelus, the cheese-monger, his son-in-law. Susanna, who hadbeen the witness of his melancholy transactions for so many years, andpossibly the mainstay of that declining household, died in 1494; but not, we may hope, before she had heard of the fame of her son Christopher. Domenico, in receipt of a pension from the famous Admiral of the Ocean, and no doubt talking with a deal of pride and inaccuracy about thediscovery of the New World, lived on until 1498; when he died also, andvanished out of this world. He had fulfilled a noble destiny in beingthe father of Christopher Columbus. 

CHAPTER V

SEA THOUGHTS

The long years that Christopher Columbus spent at sea in making voyagesto and from his home in Genoa, years so blank to us, but to him who livedthem so full of life and active growth, were most certainly fruitful intraining and equipping him for that future career of which as yet, perhaps, he did not dream. The long undulating waves of theMediterranean, with land appearing and dissolving away in the morning andevening mists, the business of ship life, harsh and rough in detail, butnot too absorbing to the mind of a common mariner to prevent any thoughtshe might have finding room to grow and take shape; sea breezes, seastorms, sea calms; these were the setting of his knowledge and experienceas he fared from port to port and from sea to sea. He is a very elusivefigure in that environment of misty blue, very hard to hold and identify, very shy of our scrutiny, and inaccessible even to our speculation. Ifwe would come up with him, and place ourselves in some kind of sympathywith the thoughts that were forming in his brain, it is necessary that weshould, for the moment, forget much of what we know of the world, andassume the imperfect knowledge of the globe that man possessed in thoseyears when Columbus was sailing the Mediterranean. 

That the earth was a round globe of land and water was a fact that, aftermany contradictions and uncertainties, intelligent men had by this timeaccepted. A conscious knowledge of the world as a whole had been a partof human thought for many hundreds of years; and the sphericity of theearth had been a theory in the sixth century before Christ. In thefourth century Aristotle had watched the stars and eclipses; in the thirdcentury Eratosthenes had measured a degree of latitude, and measured itwrong;--[Not so very wrong. D. W. ]--in the second century thephilosopher Crates had constructed a rude sort of globe, on which weremarked the known kingdoms of the earth, and some also unknown. With thecoming of the Christian era the theory of the roundness of the earthbegan to be denied; and as knowledge and learning became gathered intothe hands of the Church they lost something of their clarity andsingleness, and began to be used arbitrarily as evidence for or againstother and less material theories. St. Chrysostom opposed the theory ofthe earth's roundness; St. Isidore taught it; and so also did St. Augustine, as we might expect from a man of his wisdom who lived so longin a monastery that looked out to sea from a high point, and who wrotethe words 'Ubi magnitudo, ibi veritas'. In the sixth century of theChristian era Bishop Cosmas gave much thought to this matter of a roundworld, and found a new argument which to his mind (poor Cosmas!) disposedof it very clearly; for he argued that, if the world were round, thepeople dwelling at the antipodes could not see Christ at His coming, andthat therefore the earth was not round. But Bede, in the eighth century, established it finally as a part of human knowledge that the earth andall the heavenly bodies were spheres, and after that the fact was notagain seriously disputed. 

What lay beyond the frontier of the known was a speculation inseparablefrom the spirit of exploration. Children, and people who do not travel, are generally content, when their thoughts stray beyond the paths troddenby their feet, to believe that the greater world is but a continuation onevery side of their own environment; indeed, without the help of sight orsuggestion, it is almost impossible to believe anything else. If youstand on an eminence in a great plain and think of the unseen countrythat lies beyond the horizon, trying to visualise it and imagine that yousee it, the eye of imagination can only see the continuance or projectionof what is seen by the bodily sight. If you think, you can occupy theinvisible space with a landscape made up from your own memory andknowledge: you may think of mountain chains and rivers, although thereare none visible to your sight, or you may imagine vast seas and islands, oceans and continents. This, however, is thought, not pure imagination;and even so, with every advantage of thought and knowledge, you will notbe able to imagine beyond your horizon a space of sea so wide that thefarther shore is invisible, and yet imagine the farther shore also. Youwill see America across the Atlantic and Japan across the Pacific; butyou cannot see, in one single effort of the imagination, an Atlantic ofempty blue water stretching to an empty horizon, another beyond thatequally vast and empty, another beyond that, and so on until you havespanned the thousand horizons that lie between England and America. Themind, that is to say, works in steps and spans corresponding to the spansof physical sight; it cannot clear itself enough from the body, or risehigh enough beyond experience, to comprehend spaces so much vaster thananything ever seen by the eye of man. So also with the stretching of thehorizon which bounded human knowledge of the earth. It moved step bystep; if one of Prince Henry's captains, creeping down the west coast ofAfrica, discovered a cape a hundred miles south of the known world, themost he could probably do was to imagine that there might lie, stillanother hundred miles farther south, another cape; to sail for it infaith and hope, to find it, and to imagine another possibility yetanother hundred miles away. So far as experience went back, faith couldlook forward. It is thus with the common run of mankind; yesterday'smarch is the measure of to-morrow's; as much as they have done once, theymay do again; they fear it will be not much more; they hope it may be notmuch less. 

The history of the exploration of the world up to the day when Columbusset sail from Palos is just such a history of steps. The Phoenicianscoasting from harbour to harbour through the Mediterranean; the Romansmarching from camp to camp, from country to country; the Jutes venturingin their frail craft into the stormy northern seas, making voyages alittle longer and more daring every time, until they reached England; thecaptains of Prince Henry of Portugal feeling their way from voyage tovoyage down the coast of Africa--there are no bold flights into theincredible here, but patient and business-like progress from onestepping-stone to another. Dangers and hardships there were, and bravefollowings of the faint will-o'-the-wisp of faith in what lay beyond; butthere were no great launchings into space. They but followed a line thatwas the continuance or projection of the line they had hitherto followed;what they did was brave and glorious, but it was reasonable. WhatColumbus did, on the contrary, was, as we shall see later, against allreason and knowledge. It was a leap in the dark towards some starinvisible to all but him; for he who sets forth across the desert sand orsea must have a brighter sun to guide him than that which sets and riseson the day of the small man. 

Our familiarity with maps and atlases makes it difficult for us to thinkof the world in other terms than those of map and diagram; knowledge andscience have focussed things for us, and our imagination has inconsequence shrunk. It is almost impossible, when thinking of the earthas a whole, to think about it except as a picture drawn, or as a smallglobe with maps traced upon it. I am sure that our imagination has a farnarrower angle--to borrow a term from the science of lenses--than theimagination of men who lived in the fifteenth century. They thought ofthe world in its actual terms--seas, islands, continents, gulfs, rivers, oceans. Columbus had seen maps and charts--among them the famous'portolani' of Benincasa at Genoa; but I think it unlikely that he was sofamiliar with them as to have adopted their terms in his thoughts aboutthe earth. He had seen the Mediterranean and sailed upon it before hehad seen a chart of it; he knew a good deal of the world itself before hehad seen a map of it. He had more knowledge of the actual earth and seathan he had of pictures or drawings of them; and therefore, if we are tokeep in sympathetic touch with him, we must not think too closely ofmaps, but of land and sea themselves. 

The world that Columbus had heard about as being within the knowledge ofmen extended on the north to Iceland and Scandinavia, on the south to acape one hundred miles south of the Equator, and to the east as far asChina and Japan. North and South were not important to the spirit ofthat time; it was East and West that men thought of when they thought ofthe expansion and the discovery of the world. And although they admittedthat the earth was a sphere, I think it likely that they imagined(although the imagination was contrary to their knowledge) that the lineof West and East was far longer, and full of vaster possibilities, thanthat of North and South. North was familiar ground to them--one voyageto England, another to Iceland, another to Scandinavia; there was nothingimpossible about that. Southward was another matter; but even here therewas no ambition to discover the limit of the world. It is an errorcontinually made by the biographers of Columbus that the purpose ofPrince Henry's explorations down the coast of Africa was to find a searoad to the West Indies by way of the East. It was nothing of the kind. There was no idea in the minds of the Portuguese of the land whichColumbus discovered, and which we now know as the West Indies. Mr. Vignaud contends that the confusion arose from the very loose way inwhich the term India was applied in the Middle Ages. Several Indias wererecognised. There was an India beyond the Ganges; a Middle India betweenthe Ganges and the Indus; and a Lesser India, in which were includedArabia, Abyssinia, and the countries about the Red Sea. These divisionswere, however, quite vague, and varied in different periods. In the timeof Columbus the word India meant the kingdom of Prester John, thatfabulous monarch who had been the subject of persistent legends since thetwelfth century; and it was this India to which the Portuguese sought asea road. They had no idea of a barrier cape far to the south, thedoubling of which would open a road for them to the west; nor were they, as Mr. Vignaud believes, trying to open a route for the spice trade withthe Orient. They had no great spice trade, and did not seek more; whatthey did seek was an extension of their ordinary trade with Guinea andthe African coast. To the maritime world of the fifteenth century, then, the South as a geographical region and as a possible point of discoveryhad no attractions. 

To the west stretched what was known as the Sea of Darkness, about whicheven the cool knowledge of the geographers and astronomers could notthink steadily. Nothing was known about it, it did not lead anywhere, there were no people there, there was no trade in that direction. Thetides of history and of life avoided it; only now and then some terrifiedmariner, blown far out of his course, came back with tales of seamonsters and enchanted disappearing islands, and shores that receded, andcoasts upon which no one could make a landfall. The farthest land knownto the west was the Azores; beyond that stretched a vague and impossibleocean of terror and darkness, of which the Arabian writer Xerif alEdrisi, whose countrymen were the sea-kings of the Middle Ages, wrote asfollows:

 "The ocean encircles the ultimate bounds of the inhabited earth, and all beyond it is unknown. No one has been able to verify anything concerning it, on account of its difficult and perilous navigation, its great obscurity, its profound depth, and frequent tempests; through fear of its mighty fishes and its haughty winds; yet there are many islands in it, some peopled, others uninhabited. There is no mariner who dares to enter into its deep waters; or if any have done so, they have merely kept along its coasts, fearful of departing from them. The waves of this ocean, although they roll as high as mountains, yet maintain themselves without breaking; for if they broke it would be impossible for a ship to plough them. "

It is another illustration of the way in which discovery and imaginationhad hitherto gone by steps and not by flights, that geographicalknowledge reached the islands of the Atlantic (none of which were at avery great distance from the coast of Europe or from each other) at acomparatively early date, and stopped there until in Columbus there wasfound a man with faith strong enough to make the long flight beyond themto the unknown West. And yet the philosophers, and later thecartographers, true to their instinct for this pedestrian kind ofimagination, put mythical lands and islands to the westward of the knownislands as though they were really trying to make a way, to sink steppingstones into the deep sea that would lead their thoughts across theunknown space. In the Catalan map of the world, which was the standardexample of cosmography in the early days of Columbus, most of thesemythical islands are marked. There was the island of Antilia, which wasplaced in 25 deg. 35' W. , and was said to have been discovered by DonRoderick, the last of the Gothic kings of Spain, who fled there afterhis defeat by the Moors. There was the island of the Seven Cities, which is sometimes identified with this Antilia, and was the object of apersistent belief or superstition on the part of the inhabitants of theCanary Islands. They saw, or thought they saw, about ninety leagues tothe westward, an island with high peaks and deep valleys. The vision wasintermittent; it was only seen in very clear weather, on some of thosepure, serene days of the tropics when in the clear atmosphere distantobjects appear to be close at hand. In cloudy, and often in clearweather also, it was not to be seen at all; but the inhabitants of theCanaries, who always saw it in the same place, were so convinced of itsreality that they petitioned the King of Portugal to allow them to go andtake possession of it; and several expeditions were in fact despatched, but none ever came up with that fairy land. It was called the island ofthe Seven Cities from a legend of seven bishops who had fled from Spainat the time of the Moorish conquest, and, landing upon this island, hadfounded there seven splendid cities. There was the island of St. Brandan, called after the Saint who set out from Ireland in the sixthcentury in search of an island which always receded before his ships;this island was placed several hundred miles to the west of the Canarieson maps and charts through out the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There was the island of Brazil, to the west of Cape St. Vincent; theislands of Royllo, San Giorgio, and Isola di Mam; but they were allislands of dreams, seen by the eyes of many mariners in that imaginativetime, but never trodden by any foot of man. To Columbus, however, andthe mariners of his day, they were all real places, which a man mightreach by special good fortune or heroism, but which, all thingsconsidered, it was not quite worth the while of any man to attempt toreach. They have all disappeared from our charts, like the Atlantis ofPlato, that was once charted to the westward of the Straits of Gibraltar, and of which the Canaries were believed to be the last peaks unsubmerged. 

Sea myths and legends are strange things, and do not as a rule persist inthe minds of men unless they have had some ghostly foundation; so it ispossible that these fabled islands of the West were lands that hadactually been seen by living eyes, although their position could never beproperly laid down nor their identity assured. Of all the wanderingseamen who talked in the wayside taverns of Atlantic seaports, some musthave had strange tales to tell; tales which sometimes may have been true, but were never believed. Vague rumours hung about those shores, likespray and mist about a headland, of lands seen and lost again in theunknown and uncharted ocean. Doubtless the lamp of faith, the innerlight, burned in some of these storm-tossed men; but all they had was aglimpse here and there, seen for a moment and lost again; not the clearsight of faith by which Columbus steered his westward course. 

The actual outposts of western occupation, then, were the Azores, whichwere discovered by Genoese sailors in the pay of Portugal early in thefourteenth century; the Canaries, which had been continuously discoveredand rediscovered since the Phoenicians occupied them and Pliny chose themfor his Hesperides; and Madeira, which is believed to have beendiscovered by an Englishman under the following very romantic and movingcircumstances. 

In the reign of Edward the Third a young man named Robert Machin fell inlove with a beautiful girl, his superior in rank, Anne Dorset or d'Urfeyby name. She loved him also, but her relations did not love him; andtherefore they had Machin imprisoned upon some pretext or other, andforcibly married the young lady to a nobleman who had a castle on theshores of the Bristol Channel. 

The marriage being accomplished, and the girl carried away by herbridegroom to his seat in the West, it was thought safe to releaseMachin. Whereupon he collected several friends, and they followed thenewly-married couple to Bristol and laid their plans for an abduction. One of the friends got himself engaged as a groom in the service of theunhappy bride, and found her love unchanged, and if possible increased bythe present misery she was in. An escape was planned; and one day, whenthe girl and her groom were riding in the park, they set spurs to theirhorses, and galloped off to a place on the shores of the Bristol Channelwhere young Robert had a boat on the beach and a ship in the offing. They set sail immediately, intending to make for France, where thereunited lovers hoped to live happily; but it came on to blow when theywere off the Lizard, and a southerly gale, which lasted for thirteendays, drove them far out of their course. 

The bride, from her joy and relief, fell into a state of the gloomiestdespondency, believing that the hand of God was turned against her, and that their love would never be enjoyed. The tempest fell on thefourteenth day, and at the break of morning the sea-worn company sawtrees and land ahead of them. In the sunrise they landed upon an islandfull of noble trees, about which flights of singing birds were hovering, and in which the sweetest fruits, the most lovely flowers, and the purestand most limpid waters abounded. Machin and his bride and their friendsmade an encampment on a flowery meadow in a sheltered valley, where forthree days they enjoyed the sweetness and rest of the shore and thecompanionship of all kinds of birds and beasts, which showed no signs offear at their presence. On the third day a storm arose, and raged for anight over the island; and in the morning the adventurers found thattheir ship was nowhere to be seen. The despair of the little company wasextreme, and was increased by the condition of poor Anne, upon whomterror and remorse again fell, and so preyed upon her mind that in threedays she was dead. Her lover, who had braved so much and won her sogallantly, was turned to stone by this misfortune. Remorse and achingdesolation oppressed him; from the moment of her death he scarcely atenor spoke; and in five days he also was dead, surely of a broken heart. They buried him beside his mistress under a spreading tree, and put up awooden cross there, with a prayer that any Christians who might come tothe island would build a chapel to Jesus the Saviour. The rest of theparty then repaired their little boat and put to sea; were cast upon thecoast of Morocco, captured by the Moors, and thrown into prison. Withthem in prison was a Spanish pilot named Juan de Morales, who listenedattentively to all they could tell him about the situation and conditionof the island, and who after his release communicated what he knew toPrince Henry of Portugal. The island of Madeira was thus rediscovered in1418, and in 1425 was colonised by Prince Henry, who appointed asGovernor Bartolomeo de Perestrello, whose daughter was afterwards tobecome the wife of Columbus. 

So much for the outposts of the Old World. Of the New World, about thepossibility of which Columbus is beginning to dream as he sails theMediterranean, there was no knowledge and hardly any thought. Though newin the thoughts of Columbus, it was very old in itself; generations ofmen had lived and walked and spoken and toiled there, ever since men cameupon the earth; sun and shower, the thrill of the seasons, birth and lifeand death, had been visiting it for centuries and centuries. And it isquite possible that, long before even the civilisation that producedColumbus was in its dawn, men from the Old World had journeyed there. There are two very old fragments of knowledge which indicate at least thepossibility of a Western World of which the ancients had knowledge. There is a fragment, preserved from the fourth century before Christ, ofa conversation between Silenus and Midas, King of Phrygia, in whichSilenus correctly describes the Old World--Europe, Asia, and Africa--asbeing surrounded by the sea, but also describes, far to the west of it, ahuge island, which had its own civilisation and its own laws, where theanimals and the men were of twice our stature, and lived for twice ouryears. There is also the story told by Plato of the island of Atlantis, which was larger than Africa and Asia together, and which in anearthquake disappeared beneath the waves, producing such a slime upon thesurface that no ship was able to navigate the sea in that place. This isthe story which the priests of Sais told to Solon, and which was embodiedin the sacred inscriptions in their temples. It is strange that any oneshould think of this theory of the slime who had not seen or heard of theSargasso Sea--that great bank of floating seaweed that the ocean currentscollect and retain in the middle of the basin of the North Atlantic. 

The Egyptians, the Tartars, the Canaanites, the Chinese, the Arabians, the Welsh, and the Scandinavians have all been credited with thecolonisation of America; but the only race from the Old World which hadalmost certainly been there were the Scandinavians. In the year 983 thecoast of Greenland was visited by Eric the Red, the son of a Norwegiannoble, who was banished for the crime of murder. Some fifteen yearslater Eric's son Lief made an expedition with thirty-five men and a shipin the direction of the new land. They came to a coast where there werenothing but ice mountains having the appearance of slate; this countrythey named Helluland--that is, Land of Slate. This country is ourNewfoundland. Standing out to sea again, they reached a level woodedcountry with white sandy cliffs, which they called Markland, or Land ofWood, which is our Nova Scotia. Next they reached an island east ofMarkland, where they passed the winter, and as one of their number whohad wandered some distance inland had found vines and grapes, Lief namedthe country Vinland or Vine Land, which is the country we call NewEngland. The Scandinavians continued to make voyages to the West andSouth; and finally Thorfinn Karlsefne, an Icelander, made a greatexpedition in the spring of 1007 with ships and material forcolonisation. He made much progress to the southwards, and the Icelandicaccounts of the climate and soil and characteristics of the country leaveno doubt that Greenland and Nova Scotia were discovered and colonised atthis time. 

It must be remembered, however, that then and in the lifetime of ColumbusGreenland was supposed to--be a promontory of the coast of Europe, andwas not connected in men's minds with a western continent. Its earlydiscovery has no bearing on the significance of Columbus's achievement, the greatness of which depends not on his having been the first man fromthe Old World to set foot upon the shores of the New, but on the factthat by pure faith and belief in his own purpose he did set out for andarrive in a world where no man of his era or civilisation had ever beforeset foot, or from which no wanderer who may have been blown there everreturned. It is enough to claim for him the merit of discovery in thetrue sense of the word. The New World was covered from the Old by a veilof distance, of time and space, of absence, invisibility, virtualnon-existence; and he discovered it. 

CHAPTER VI

IN PORTUGAL

There is no reason to believe that before his twenty-fifth year Columbuswas anything more than a merchant or mariner, sailing before the mast, and joining one ship after another as opportunities for good voyagesoffered themselves. A change took place later, probably after hismarriage, when he began to adapt himself rapidly to a new set ofsurroundings, and to show his intrinsic qualities; but all the attemptsthat have been made to glorify him socially--attempts, it must beremembered, in which he himself and his sons were in after years theleaders--are entirely mistaken. That strange instinct for consistencywhich makes people desire to see the outward man correspond, in terms ofmomentary and arbitrary credit, with the inner and hidden man of theheart, has in truth led to more biographical injustice than is fullyrealised. If Columbus had been the man some of his biographers wouldlike to make him out--the nephew or descendant of a famous FrenchAdmiral, educated at the University of Pavia, belonging to a family ofnoble birth and high social esteem in Genoa, chosen by King Rene to bethe commander of naval expeditions, learned in scientific lore, in theclassics, in astronomy and in cosmography, the friend and correspondentof Toscanelli and other learned scientists--we should find it hard indeedto forgive him the shifts and deceits that he practised. It is far moreinteresting to think of him as a common craftsman, of a lowly conditionand poor circumstances, who had to earn his living during the formativeperiod of his life by the simplest and hardest labour of the hand. Thequalities that made him what he was were of a very simple kind, and hischaracter owed its strength, not to any complexity or subtlety oftraining and education, but rather to that very bareness and simplicityof circumstance that made him a man of single rather than manifold ideas. He was not capable of seeing both sides of a question; he saw only oneside. But he came of a great race; and it was the qualities of his race, combined with this simplicity and even perhaps vacancy of mind, that gaveto his idea, when once the seed of it had lodged in his mind, so muchvigour in growth and room for expansion. Think of him, then, at the ageof twenty-five as a typical plebeian Genoese, bearing all thecharacteristic traits of his century and people--the spirit of adventure, the love of gold and of power, a spirit of mysticism, and more than atouch of crafty and elaborate dissimulation, when that should benecessary. 

He had been at sea for ten or eleven years, making voyages to and fromGenoa, with an occasional spell ashore and plunge into the paternalaffairs, when in the year 1476 he found himself on board a Genoese vesselwhich formed one of a convoy going, to Lisbon. This convoy was attackedoff Cape St. Vincent by Colombo, or Colomb, the famous French corsair, ofwhom Christopher himself has quite falsely been called a relative. Onlytwo of the Genoese vessels escaped, and one of these two was the shipwhich carried Columbus. It arrived at Lisbon, where Columbus went ashoreand took up his abode. 

This, so far as can be ascertained, is the truth about the arrival ofColumbus in Portugal. The early years of an obscure man who leaps intofame late in life are nearly always difficult to gather knowledge about, because not only are the annals of the poor short and simple and in mostcases altogether unrecorded, but there is always that instinct, to whichI have already referred, to make out that the circumstances of a man wholate in life becomes great and remarkable were always, at every point inhis career, remarkable also. We love to trace the hand of destinyguiding her chosen people, protecting them from dangers, and preservingthem for their great moment. It is a pleasant study, and one to whichthe facts often lend themselves, but it leads to a vicious method ofbiography which obscures the truth with legends and pretences that haveafterwards laboriously to be cleared away. It was so in the case ofColumbus. Before his departure on his first voyage of discovery there isabsolutely no temporary record of him except a few dates in notarialregisters. The circumstances of his life and his previous conditionswere supplied afterwards by himself and his contemporaries; and both heand they saw the past in the light of the present, and did their best tomake it fit a present so wonderful and miraculous. The whole trend ofrecent research on the subject of Columbus has been unfortunately in thedirection of proving the complete insincerity of his own speech andwritings about his early life, and the inaccuracy of Las Casas writingshis contemporary biographer, and the first historian of the West Indies. Those of my readers, then, who are inclined to be impatient with themeagreness of the facts with which I am presenting them, and thedisproportionate amount of theory to fact with regard to these earlyyears of Columbus, must remember three things. First, that the onlyrecord of the early years of Columbus was written long after those yearshad passed away, and in circumstances which did not harmonise with them;second, that there is evidence, both substantive and presumptive, thatmuch of those records, even though it came from the hands of Columbus andhis friends, is false and must be discarded; and third, that the only wayin which anything like the truth can be arrived at is by circumstantialand presumptive evidence with regard to dates, names, places, and eventsupon which the obscure life of Columbus impinged. Columbus is known tohave written much about himself, but very little of it exists or remainsin his own handwriting. It remains in the form of quotation by others, all of whom had their reasons for not representing quite accurately whatwas, it must be feared, not even itself a candid and accurate record. The evidence for these very serious statements is the subject ofnumberless volumes and monographs, which cannot be quoted here; for it ismy privilege to reap the results, and not to reproduce the material, ofthe immense research and investigation to which in the last fifty yearsthe life of Columbus has been subjected. 

We shall come to facts enough presently; in the meantime we have but thevaguest knowledge of what Columbus did in Lisbon. The one technicalpossession which he obviously had was knowledge of the sea; he had also ahead on his shoulders, and plenty of judgment and common sense; he hadlikely picked up some knowledge of cartography in his years at Genoa, since (having abandoned wool-weaving) he probably wished to make progressin the profession of the sea; and it is, therefore, believed that hepicked up a living in Lisbon by drawing charts and maps. Such a livingwould only be intermittent; a fact that is indicated by his periodicexcursions to sea again, presumably when funds were exhausted. Therewere other Genoese in Lisbon, and his own brother Bartholomew was withhim there for a time. He may actually have been there when Columbusarrived, but it was more probable that Columbus, the pioneer of thefamily, seeing a better field for his brother's talent in Lisbon than inGenoa, sent for him when he himself was established there. ThisBartholomew, of whom we shall see a good deal in the future, is merely anoutline at this stage of the story; an outline that will later be filledup with human features and fitted with a human character; at present heis but a brother of Christopher, with a rather bookish taste, a betterknowledge of cartography than Christopher possessed, and some littleexperience of the book-selling trade. He too made charts in Lisbon, andsold books also, and no doubt between them the efforts of the brothers, supplemented by the occasional voyages of Christopher, obtained them asufficient livelihood. The social change, in the one case from thesociety of Genoese wool-weavers, and in the other from the company ofmerchant sailors, must have been very great; for there is evidence thatthey began to make friends and acquaintances among a rather differentclass than had been formerly accessible to them. The change to a newcountry also and to a new language makes a deep impression at the age oftwenty-five; and although Columbus in his sea-farings had been in manyports, and had probably picked up a knowledge both of Portuguese and ofSpanish, his establishment in the Portuguese capital could not fail toenlarge his outlook upon life. 

There is absolutely no record of his circumstances in the first year ofhis life at Lisbon, so we may look once more into the glass ofimagination and try to find a picture there. It is very dim, veryminute, very, very far away. There is the little shop in a steep Lisbonstreet, somewhere near the harbour we may be sure, with the shadows ofthe houses lying sharp on the white sunlight of the street; the cooldarkness of the shop, with its odour of vellum and parchment, its rollsof maps and charts; and somewhere near by the sounds and commotion of thewharves and the shipping. Often, when there was a purchaser in the shop, there would be talk of the sea, of the best course from this place tothat, of the entrance to this harbour and the other; talk of the westernislands too, of the western ocean, of the new astrolabe which the GermanMuller of Konigsberg, or Regiomontanus, as they called him in Portugal, had modified and improved. And if there was sometimes an evening walk, it would surely be towards the coast or on a hill above the harbour, witha view of the sun being quenched in the sea and travelling down into theunknown, uncharted West. 

CHAPTER VII

ADVENTURES BODILY AND SPIRITUAL

Columbus had not been long in Portugal before he was off again to sea, this time on a longer voyage than any he had yet undertaken. Ourknowledge of it depends on his own words as reported by Las Casas, and, like so much other knowledge similarly recorded, is not to be receivedwith absolute certainty; but on the whole the balance of probability isin favour of its truth. The words in which this voyage is recorded aregiven as a quotation from a letter of Columbus, and, stripped of certainobvious interpolations of the historian, are as follows:--

 "In the month of February, and in the year 1477, I navigated as far as the island of Tile [Thule], a hundred leagues; and to this island, which is as large as England, the English, especially those of Bristol, go with merchandise; and when I was there the sea was not frozen over, although there were very high tides, so much so that in some parts the sea rose twenty-five 'brazas', and went down as much, twice during the day. "

The reasons for doubting that this voyage took place are due simply toColumbus's habit of being untruthful in regard to his own past doings, and his propensity for drawing the long bow; and the reason that has beenaccepted by most of his biographers who have denied the truth of thisstatement is that, in the year 1492, when Columbus was addressing theKing and Queen of Spain on his qualifications as a navigator, and when hewished to set forth his experience in a formidable light, he said nothingabout this voyage, but merely described his explorations as havingextended from Guinea on the south to England on the north. A shrewdestimate of Columbus's character makes it indeed seem incredible that, if he had really been in Iceland, he should not have mentioned the facton this occasion; and yet there is just one reason, also quitecharacteristic of Columbus, that would account for the suppression. It is just possible that when he was at Thule, by which he meant Iceland, he may have heard of the explorations in the direction of Greenland andNewfoundland; and that, although by other navigators these lands wereregarded as a part of the continent of Europe, he may have had someglimmerings of an idea that they were part of land and islands in theWest; and he was much too jealous of his own reputation as the great andonly originator of the project for voyaging to the West, to give away anyhints that he was not the only person to whom such ideas had occurred. There is deception and untruth somewhere; and one must make one's choicebetween regarding the story in the first place as a lie, or accepting itas truth, and putting down Columbus's silence about it on a lateroccasion to a rare instinct of judicious suppression. There are otherfacts in his life, to which, we shall come later, that are in accordancewith this theory. There is no doubt, moreover, that Columbus had a verygreat experience of the sea, and was one of the greatest practicalseamen, if not the greatest, that has ever lived; and it would be foolishto deny, except for the greatest reasons, that he made a voyage to thefar North, which was neither unusual at the time nor a very greatachievement for a seaman of his experience. 

Christopher returned from these voyages, of which we know nothing exceptthe facts that he has given us, towards the end of 1477; and it wasprobably in the next year that an event very important in his life andcareer took place. Hitherto there has been no whisper of love in thatarduous career of wool-weaving, sailoring, and map-making; and it is notunlikely that his marriage represents the first inspiration of love inhis life, for he was, in spite of his southern birth, a cool-blooded man, for whom affairs of the heart had never a very serious interest. But atLisbon, where he began to find himself with some footing and place in theworld, and where the prospect of at least a livelihood began to open outbefore him, his thoughts took that turn towards domesticity and familylife which marks a moment in the development of almost every man. Andnow, since he has at last to emerge from the misty environment ofsea-spray that has veiled him so long from our intimate sight, we maytake a close look at him as he was in this year 1478. 

Unlike the southern Italians, he was fair in colouring; a man ratherabove the middle height, large limbed, of a shapely breadth andproportion, and of a grave and dignified demeanour. His face was ruddy, and inclined to be freckled under the exposure to the sun, his hair atthis age still fair and reddish, although in a few years later it turnedgrey, and became white while he was still a young man. His nose wasslightly aquiline, his face long and rather full; his eyes of a clearblue, with sharply defined eyebrows--seamen's eyes, which get anunmistakable light in them from long staring into the sea distances. Altogether a handsome and distinguished-looking young man, noticeableanywhere, and especially among a crowd of swarthy Portuguese. He was nota lively young man; on the contrary, his manner was rather heavy, andeven at times inclined to be pompous; he had a very good opinion ofhimself, had the clear calculating head and tidy intellectual methods ofthe able mariner; was shrewd and cautious--in a word, took himself andthe world very seriously. A strictly conventional man, as theconventions of his time and race went; probably some of his gayer andlighter-hearted contemporaries thought him a dull enough dog, who wouldnot join in a carouse or a gallant adventure, but would probably get thebetter of you if he could in any commercial deal. He was a greatstickler for the observances of religion; and never a Sunday or feast-daypassed, when he was ashore, without finding him, like the dutiful son ofthe Church that he was, hearing Mass and attending at Benediction. Not, indeed, a very attractive or inspiring figure of a man; not the man whosecompany one would likely have sought very much, or whose conversation onewould have found very interesting. A man rather whose character was castin a large and plain mould, without those many facets which add so muchto the brightness of human intercourse, and which attract and reflect thelight from other minds; a man who must be tried in large circumstances, and placed in a big setting, if his qualities are to be seen to advantage. . . . I seem to see him walking up from the shop near the harbourat Lisbon towards the convent of Saints; walking gravely and firmly, witha dignified demeanour, with his best clothes on, and glad, for themoment, to be free of his sea acquaintances, and to be walking in thedirection of that upper-class world after which he has a secret hankeringin his heart. There are a great many churches in Lisbon nearer his housewhere he might hear Mass on Sundays; but he prefers to walk up to therich and fashionable convent of Saints, where everybody is well dressed, and where those kindling eyes of his may indulge a cool taste forfeminine beauty. 

While the chapel bell is ringing other people are hurrying through thesunny Lisbon streets to Mass at the convent. Among the fashionablethrong are two ladies, one young, one middle-aged; they separate at thechurch door, and the younger one leaves her mother and takes her place inthe convent choir. This is Philippa Moniz, who lives alone with hermother in Lisbon, and amuses herself with her privileges as a cavaliera, or dame, in one of the knightly orders attached to the rich convent ofSaints. Perhaps she has noticed the tall figure of the young Genoese inthe strangers' part of the convent, perhaps not; but his roving blue eyehas noticed her, and much is to come of it. The young Genoese continueshis regular and exemplary attendance at the divine Office, the young ladyis zealous in observing her duties in the choir; some kind friendintroduces them; the audacious young man makes his proposals, and, in spite of the melancholy protests of the young lady's exceedinglyrespectable and highly-connected relatives, the young people arebetrothed and actually married before the elders have time to recoverbreath from their first shock at the absurdity of the suggestion. 

There is a very curious fact in connection with his marriage that isworthy of our consideration. In all his voluminous writings, letters, memoirs, and journals, Columbus never once mentions his wife. His solereference to her is in his will, made at Valladolid many years later, long after her death; and is contained in the two words "my wife. "He ordains that a chapel shall be erected and masses said for the reposeof the souls of his father, his mother, and his wife. He who wrote somuch, did not write of her; he who boasted so much, never boasted of her;he who bemoaned so much, never bemoaned her. There is a blank silenceon his part about everything connected with his marriage and his wife. I like to think that it was because this marriage, which incidentallyfurnished him with one of the great impulses of his career, was in itselfplacid and uneventful, and belongs to that mass of happy days that do notmake history. Columbus was not a passionate man. I think that love hada very small place in his life, and that the fever of passion was withhim brief and soon finished with; but I am sure he was affectionate, andgrateful for any affection and tenderness that were bestowed upon him. He was much away too, at first on his voyages to Guinea and afterwards onthe business of his petitions to the Portuguese and Spanish Courts; andone need not be a cynic to believe that these absences did nothing tolessen the affection between him and his wife. Finally, their marriedlife was a short one; she died within ten years, and I am sure did notoutlive his affections; so that there may be something solemn, somesecret memories of the aching joy and sorrow that her coming into hislife and passing out of it brought him, in this silence of Columbusconcerning his wife. 

This marriage was, in the vulgar idiom of to-day, a great thing forColumbus. It not only brought him a wife; it brought him a home, society, recognition, and a connection with maritime knowledge andadventure that was of the greatest importance to him. Philippa MonizPerestrello was the daughter of Bartolomeo Perestrello, who had beenappointed hereditary governor of the island of Porto Santo on itscolonisation by Prince Henry in 1425 and who had died there in 1457. Her grandfather was Gil Ayres Moniz, who was secretary to the famousConstable Pereira in the reign of John I, and is chiefly interesting tous because he founded the chapel of the "Piedad" in the CarmeliteMonastery at Lisbon, in which the Moniz family had the right of intermentfor ever, and in which the body of Philippa, after her brief pilgrimagein this world was over, duly rested; and whence her son ordered itsdisinterment and re-burial in the church of Santa Clara in San Domingo. Philippa's mother, Isabel Moniz, was the second or third wife ofPerestrello; and after her husband's death she had come to live inLisbon. She had another daughter, Violante by name, who had married oneMulier, or Muliartes, in Huelva; and a son named Bartolomeo, who was theheir to the governorship of Porto Santo; but as he was only a little boyat the time of his father's death his mother ceded the governorship toPedro Correa da Cunha, who had married Iseult, the daughter of oldBartolomeo by his first wife. The governorship was thus kept in thefamily during the minority of Bartolomeo, who resumed it later when hecame of age. 

This Isabel, mother of Philippa, was a very important acquaintance indeedfor Columbus. It must be noted that he left the shop and poorBartholomew to take care of themselves or each other, and went to live inthe house of his mother-in-law. This was a great social step for thewool-weaver of Genoa; and it was probably the result of a kind ofcompromise with his wife's horrified relatives at the time of hermarriage. It was doubtless thought impossible for her to go and liveover the chart-maker's shop; and as you can make charts in one house aswell as another, it was decided that Columbus should live with hismother-in-law, and follow his trade under her roof. Columbus, in fact, seems to have been fortunate in securing the favour of his femalerelatives-in-law, and it was probably owing to the championship ofPhilippa's mother that a marriage so much to his advantage ever tookplace at all. His wife had many distinguished relatives in theneighbourhood of Lisbon; her cousin was archbishop at this very time;but I can neither find that their marriage was celebrated with thearchiepiscopal blessing or that he ever got much help or countenance fromthe male members of the Moniz family. Archbishops even today do not muchlike their pretty cousins marrying a man of Columbus's position, whetheryou call him a woolweaver, a sailor, a map-maker, or a bookseller. "Adventurer" is perhaps the truest description of him; and the word wasas much distrusted in the best circles in Lisbon in the fifteenth centuryas it is to-day. 

Those of his new relatives, however, who did get to know him soon beganto see that Philippa had not made such a bad bargain after all. With theconfidence and added belief in himself that the recognition andencouragement of those kind women brought him, Columbus's mind andimagination expanded; and I think it was probably now that he began towonder if all his knowledge and seamanship, his quite useful smatteringof cartography and cosmography, his real love of adventure, and all hisdreams and speculations concerning the unknown and uncharted seas, couldnot be turned to some practical account. His wife's step-sister Iseultand her husband had, moreover, only lately returned to Lisbon from theirlong residence in Porto Santo; young Bartolomeo Perestrello, her brother, was reigning there in their stead, and no doubt sending home interestingaccounts of ships and navigators that put in at Madeira; and all thecircumstances would tend to fan the spark of Columbus's desire to havesome adventure and glory of his own on the high seas. He would wishto show all these grandees, with whom his marriage had broughthim acquainted, that you did not need to be born a Perestrello--or Pallastrelli, as the name was in its original Italian form--to makea name in the world. Donna Isabel, moreover, was never tired of talkingabout Porto Santo and her dead husband, and of all the voyages and seaadventures that had filled his life. She was obviously a good teller oftales, and had all the old history and traditions of Madeira at herfingers' ends; the story of Robert Machin and Anne Dorset; the story ofthe isle of Seven Cities; and the black cloud on the horizon that turnedout in the end to be Madeira. She told Christopher how her husband, whenhe had first gone to Porto Santo, had taken there a litter of rabbits, and how the rabbits had so increased that in two seasons they had eatenup everything on the island, and rendered it uninhabitable for some time. 

She brought out her husband's sea-charts, memoranda, and log-books, the sight of which still farther inflamed Christopher's curiosity andambition. The great thing in those days was to discover something, if itwas only a cape down the African coast or a rock in the Atlantic. Thekey to fame, which later took the form of mechanical invention, and laterstill of discovery in the region of science, took the form then of actualdiscovery of parts of the earth's surface. The thing was in the air;news was coming in every day of something new seen, something newcharted. If others had done so much, and the field was still halfunexplored, could not he do something also? It was not an unlikelythought to occur to the mind of a student of sea charts and horizons. 

CHAPTER VIII

THE FIRE KINDLES

The next step in Columbus's career was a move to Porto Santo, whichprobably took place very soon after his marriage--that is to say, in theyear 1479. It is likely that he had the chance of making a voyage there;perhaps even of commanding a ship, for his experience of the sea andskill as a navigator must by this time have raised him above the rank ofan ordinary seaman; and in that case nothing would be more natural thanthat he should take his young wife with him to visit her brotherBartolomeo, and to see the family property. It is one of the charms ofthe seaman's profession that he travels free all over the world; and ifhe has no house or other fixed possessions that need to be looked afterhe has the freedom of the world, and can go where he likes free of cost. Porto Santo and Madeira, lying in the track of the busiest trade on theAtlantic coast, would provide Columbus with an excellent base from whichto make other voyages; so it was probably with a heart full of eageranticipation for the future, and sense of quiet happiness in the present, that in the year 1479 Signor Cristoforo Colombo (for he did not yet callhimself Senor Cristoval Colon) set out for Porto Santo--a lonely rocksome miles north of Madeira. Its southern shore is a long sweeping bayof white sand, with a huddle of sand-hills beyond, and cliffs and peaksof basalt streaked with lava fringing the other shores. When Columbusand his bride arrived there the place was almost as bare as it is to-day. There were the governor's house; the settlement of Portuguese who workedin the mills and sugar-fields; the mills themselves, with the cultivatedsugar-fields behind them; and the vineyards, with the dwarf Malmsey vinespegged down to the ground, which Prince Henry had imported from Candiafifty years before. The forest of dragon-trees that had once covered theisland was nearly all gone. The wood had all been used either forbuilding, making boats, or for fuel; and on the fruit of the few treesthat were left a herd of pigs was fattened. There was frequentcommunication by boat with Madeira, which was the chief of all theAtlantic islands, and the headquarters of the sugar trade; and PortoSanto itself was a favourite place of call for passing ships. So that itwas by no means lonely for Christopher Columbus and his wife, even ifthey had not had the society of the governor and his settlement. 

We can allow him about three years in Porto Santo, although for a part ofthis time at least he must have been at sea. I think it not unlikelythat it was the happiest time of his life. He was removed from theuncomfortable environment of people who looked down upon him because ofhis obscure birth; he was in an exquisite climate; and living by thesea-shore, as a sailor loves to do; he got on well with Bartolomeo, whowas no doubt glad enough of the company of this grave sailor who hadseen so much and had visited so many countries; above all he had hiswife there, his beautiful, dear, proud Philippa, all to himself, and outof reach of those abominable Portuguese noblemen who paid so muchattention to her and so little to him, and made him so jealous; andthere was a whispered promise of some one who was coming to make himhappier still. It is a splendid setting, this, for the sea adventurer;a charming picture that one has of him there so long ago, walking on thewhite shores of the great sweeping bay, with the glorious purpleAtlantic sparkling and thundering on the sands, as it sparkles andthunders to-day. A place empty and vivid, swept by the mellow winds;silent, but for the continuous roar of the sea; still, but for thescuttling of the rabbits among the sand-hills and the occasional passageof a figure from the mills up to the sugar-fields; but brilliant withsunshine and colour and the bright environment of the sea. It was uponsuch scenes that he looked during this happy pause in his life; theywere the setting of Philippa's dreams and anxieties as the time ofmotherhood drew near; and it was upon them that their little son firstopened his eyes, and with the boom of the Atlantic breakers that hefirst mingled his small. Voice. 

It is but a moment of rest and happiness; for Christopher the scene issoon changed, and he must set forth upon a voyage again, while Philippais left, with a new light in her eyes, to watch over the atom that wakesand weeps and twists and struggles and mews, and sleeps again, in hercharge. Sleep well, little son! Yet a little while, and you too shallmake voyages and conquests; new worlds lie waiting for you, who are sogreatly astonished at this Old World; far journeys by land and sea, andthe company of courtiers and kings; and much honour from the name anddeeds of him who looked into your eyes with a laugh and, a sob, and wasso very large and overshadowing! But with her who quietly sings to you, whose hands soothe and caress you, in whose eyes shines that wonderfullight of mother's love--only a little while longer. 

While Diego, as this son was christened, was yet only a baby in hiscradle, Columbus made an important voyage to the, coast of Guinea as allthe western part of the African continent was then called. His solid andpractical qualities were by this time beginning to be recognised even byPhilippa's haughty family, and it was possibly through the interest ofher uncle, Pedro Noronhas, a distinguished minister of the King ofPortugal, that he got the command of a caravel in the expedition whichset out for Guinea in December 1481. A few miles from Cape Coast Castle, and on the borders of the Dutch colony, there are to-day the ruinedremains of a fort; and it is this fort, the fortress of St. George, thatthe expedition was sent out to erect. On the 11th of December the littlefleet set sail for [from? D. W. ] Lisbon--ten caravels, and two barges orlighters laden with the necessary masonry and timber-work for the fort. Columbus was in command of one of the caravels, and the whole fleet wascommanded by the Portuguese Admiral Azumbaga. They would certainly seePorto Santo and Madeira on their way south, although they did not callthere; and Philippa was no doubt looking out for them, and watching fromthe sand-hills the fleet of twelve ships going by in the offing. Theycalled at Cape Verde, where the Admiral was commissioned to present oneof the negro kings with some horses and hawks, and incidentally to obtainhis assent to a treaty. On the 19th of January 1482, having made a verygood voyage, they, landed just beyond the Cape of the Three Points, andimmediately set about the business of the expedition. 

There was a state reception, with Admiral Azumbaga walking in front inscarlet and brocade, followed by his captains, Columbus among them, dressed in gorgeous tunics and cloaks with golden collars and, wellhidden beneath their finery, good serviceable cuirasses. The banner ofPortugal was ceremoniously unfurled and dis played from the top of a talltree. An altar was erected and consecrated by the chaplain to theexpedition, and a mass was sung for the repose of the soul of PrinceHenry. The Portugal contingent were then met by Caramansa, the king ofthe country, who came, surrounded by a great guard of blacks armed withassegais, their bodies scantily decorated with monkey fur and palmleaves. The black monarch must have presented a handsome appearance, for his arms and legs were decked with gold bracelets and rings, he hada kind of dog-collar fitted with bells round his neck, and some pieces ofgold were daintily twisted into his beard. With these aids to diplomacy, and doubtless also with the help of a dram or two of spirits or of thewine of Oporto, the treaty was soon concluded, and a very shrewd strokeof business accomplished for the King of Portugal; for it gave him thesole right of exchanging gaudy rubbish from Portugal for the preciousgold of Ethiopia. When the contents of the two freight-ships had beenunloaded they were beached and broken up by the orders of King John, whowished it to be thought that they had been destroyed in the whirlpools ofthat dangerous sea, and that the navigation of those rough waters wasonly safe for the caravels of the Navy. The fort was built in twentydays, and the expedition returned, laden with gold and ivory; AdmiralAzumbaga remained behind in command of the garrison. 

This voyage, which was a bold and adventurous one for the time, may beregarded as the first recognition of Columbus as a man of importance, for the expedition was manned and commanded by picked men; so it was forall reasons a very fortunate one for him, although the possession of thedangerous secret as to the whereabouts of this valuable territory mighthave proved to be not very convenient to him in the future. 

Columbus went back to Porto Santo with his ambitions thoroughly kindled. He had been given a definite command in the Portuguese Navy; he had beensailing with a fleet; he had been down to the mysterious coast of Africa;he had been trafficking with strange tribes; he had been engaged in adifficult piece of navigation such as he loved; and on the long dreamydays of the voyage home, the caravels furrowing the blue Atlantic beforethe steady trade-wind, he determined that he would find some way ofputting his knowledge to use, and of earning distinction for himself. Living, as he had been lately, in Atlantic seaports overlooking thewestern ocean it is certain that the idea of discovering something inthat direction occupied him more and more. What it was that he was todiscover was probably very vague in his mind, and was likely notdesignated by any name more exact than "lands. " In after years he triedto show that it was a logical and scientific deduction which led him togo and seek the eastern shore of the Indian continent by sailing west;but we may be almost certain that at this time he thought of no suchthing. He had no exact scientific knowledge at this date. His mapmaking had taught him something, and naturally he had kept his ears open, and knew all the gossip and hearsay about the islands of the West; andthere gradually grew in his mind the intuition or conviction--I refuse tocall it an opinion--that, over that blue verge of the West, there wasland to be found. How this seed of conviction first lodged in his mindit would be impossible to say; in any one of the steps through which wehave followed him, it might have taken its root; but there it was, beginning to occupy his mind very seriously indeed; and he began to lookout, as all men do who wish to act upon faith or conviction which theycannot demonstrate to another person, for some proofs that his convictionwas a sound one. 

And now, just at the moment when he needs it most, comes an incidentthat, to a man of his religious and superstitious habit, seems like thepointing finger of Providence. The story of the shipwrecked pilot hasbeen discredited by nearly all the modern biographers of Columbus, chiefly because it does not fit in with their theory of his scientificstudies and the alleged bearing of these on his great discovery; but itis given by Las Casas, who says that it was commonly believed byColumbus's entourage at Hispaniola. Moreover, amid all the tangles oftheory and argument in which the achievement of Columbus has beeninvolved, this original story of shipwrecked mariners stands out with astrength and simplicity that cannot be entirely disregarded by thehistorian who permits himself some light of imagination by which to work. It is more true to life and to nature that Columbus should have receivedhis last impulse, the little push that was to set his accumulated energyand determination in motion, from a thing of pure chance, than that heshould have built his achievement up in a logical superstructure restingon a basis of profound and elaborate theory. 

In the year following Columbus's return from Guinea, then, he, andprobably his family, had gone over to Madeira from Porto Santo, and werestaying there. While they were there a small ship put in to Madeira, much battered by storms and bad weather, and manned by a crew of fivesick mariners. Columbus, who was probably never far from the shore atFunchal when a ship came into the harbour, happened to see them. Struckby their appearance, and finding them in a quite destitute and grievouslyinvalid condition, he entertained them in his house until some otherprovision could be made for them. But they were quite worn out. One byone they succumbed to weakness and illness, until one only, a pilot fromHuelva, was left. He also was sinking, and when it was obvious that hisend was near at hand, he beckoned his good host to his bedside, and, ingratitude for all his kindness, imparted to him some singular knowledgewhich he had acquired, and with which, if he had lived, he had hoped towin distinction for himself. 

The pilot's story, in so far as it has been preserved, and taking themean of four contemporary accounts of it, was as follows. This man, whose name is doubtful, but is given as Alonso Sanchez, was sailing on avoyage from one of the Spanish ports to England or Flanders. He had acrew of seventeen men. When they had got well out to sea a severeeasterly gale sprung up, which drove the vessel before it to thewestward. Day after day and week after week, for twenty-eight days, thisgale continued. The islands were all left far behind, and the ship wascarried into a region far beyond the limits of the ocean marked on thecharts. At last they sighted some islands, upon one of which they landedand took in wood and water. The pilot took the bearings of the island, in so far as he was able, and made some observations, the only one ofwhich that has remained being that the natives went naked; and, the windhaving changed, set forth on his homeward voyage. This voyage was longand painful. The wind did not hold steady from the west; the pilot andhis crew had a very hazy notion of where they were; their dead reckoningwas confused; their provisions fell short; and one by one the crewsickened and died until they were reduced to five or six--the ones who, worn out by sickness and famine, and the labours of working the shipshort-handed and in their enfeebled condition, at last made the island ofMadeira, and cast anchor in the beautiful bay of Funchal, only to diethere. All these things we may imagine the dying man relating insnatches to his absorbed listener; who felt himself to be receiving apearl of knowledge to be guarded and used, now that its finder mustdepart upon the last and longest voyage of human discovery. Suchobservations as he had made--probably a few figures giving the bearingsof stars, an account of dead reckoning, and a quite useless andinaccurate chart or map--the pilot gave to his host; then, havingdelivered his soul of its secret, he died. This is the story; not animpossible or improbable one in its main outlines. Whether the pilotreally landed on one of the Antilles is extremely doubtful, although itis possible. Superstitious and storm-tossed sailors in those days wereonly too ready to believe that they saw some of the fabled islands of theAtlantic; and it is quite possible that the pilot simply announced thathe had seen land, and that the details as to his having actually set footupon it were added later. That does not seem to me important in so faras it concerns Columbus. Whether it were true or not, the man obviouslybelieved it; and to the mind of Columbus, possessed with an idea and ablind faith in something which could not be seen, the whole incidentwould appear in the light of a supernatural sign. The bit of paper orparchment with the rude drawing on it, even although it were the drawingof a thing imagined and not of a thing seen, would still have for him akind of authority that he would find it hard to ignore. It seemsunnecessary to disbelieve this story. It is obviously absurd to regardit as the sole origin of Columbus's great idea; it probably belongs tothat order of accidents, small and unimportant in themselves, which areso often associated with the beginnings of mighty events. Walking on theshore at Madeira or Porto Santo, his mind brooding on the great andgrowing idea, Columbus would remember one or two other instances which, in the light of his growing conviction and know ledge, began to take on asignificant hue. He remembered that his wife's relative, Pedro Correa, who had come back from Porto Santo while Columbus was living in Lisbon, had told him about some strange flotsam that came in upon the shores ofthe island. He had seen a piece of wood of a very dark colour curiouslycarved, but not with any tool of metal; and some great canes had alsocome ashore, so big that, every joint would hold a gallon of wine. Thesecanes, which were utterly unlike any thing known in Europe or the islandsof the Atlantic, had been looked upon as such curiosities that they hadbeen sent to the King at Lisbon, where they remained, and where Columbushimself afterwards saw them. Two other stories, which he heard also atthis time, went to strengthen his convictions. One was the tale ofMartin Vincenti, a pilot in the Portuguese Navy, who had found in thesea, four hundred and twenty leagues to the west of Cape St. Vincent, another piece of wood, curiously carved, that had evidently not beenlaboured with an iron instrument. Columbus also remembered that theinhabitants of the Azores had more than once found upon their coasts thetrunks of huge pine-trees, and strangely shaped canoes carved out ofsingle logs; and, most significant of all, the people of Flares had takenfrom the water the bodies of two dead men, whose faces were of a strangebroad shape, and whose features differed from those of any known race ofmankind. All these objects, it was supposed, were brought by westerlywinds to the shores of Europe; it was not till long afterwards, when thecurrents of the Atlantic came to be studied, that the presence of suchflotsam came to be attributed to the ocean currents, deflected by theCape of Good Hope and gathered in the Gulf of Mexico, which are sprayedout across the Atlantic. 

The idea once fixed in his mind that there was land at a not impossibledistance to the west, and perhaps a sea-road to the shores of Asiaitself, the next thing to be done, was to go and discover it. Rather aformidable task for a man without money, a foreigner in a strangeland, among people who looked down upon him because of his obscure birth, and with no equipment except a knowledge of the sea, a great mastery ofthe art and craft of seamanship, a fearless spirit of adventure, and aninner light! Some one else would have to be convinced before anythingcould be done; somebody who would provide ships and men and money andprovisions. Altogether rather a large order; for it was not an unusualthing in those days for master mariners, tired of the shore, to suggestto some grandee or other the desirability of fitting out a ship or two togo in search of the isle of St. Brandon, or to look up Antilia, or theisland of the Seven Cities. It was very hard to get an audience even forsuch a reasonable scheme as that; but to suggest taking a flotillastraight out to the west and into the Sea of Darkness, down that curvinghill of the sea which it might be easy enough to slide down, but up whichit was known that no ship could ever climb again, was a thing that hardlyany serious or well-informed person would listen to. A young man fromGenoa, without a knowledge either of the classics or of the Fathers, andwith no other argument except his own fixed belief and some vague talkabout bits of wood and shipwrecked mariners, was not the person toinspire the capitalists of Portugal. Yet the thing had to be done. Obviously it could not be done at Porto Santo, where there were no shipsand no money. Influence must be used; and Columbus knew that hisproposals, if they were to have even a chance of being listened to, mustbe presented in some high-flown and elaborate form, giving reasons andoffering inducements and quoting authorities. He would have to get someone to help him in that; he would have to get up some scientific facts;his brother Bartholomew could help him, and some of those disagreeablerelatives-in-law must also be pressed into the service of the Idea. Obviously the first thing was to go back to Lisbon; which accordinglyColumbus did, about the year 1483.