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+Project Gutenberg's Christopher Columbus, Volume 1, by Filson Young
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Christopher Columbus, Volume 1
+       And The New World Of His Discovery, A Narrative
+
+Author: Filson Young
+
+Release Date: December 5, 2004 [EBook #4108]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, VOLUME 1 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+                         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 New
+World I have thought of you and your difficult work in Ireland; and I
+have said to myself, "What a time he would have had if he had been
+Viceroy of the Indies in 1493!"  There, if ever, was the chance for a
+Department such as yours; and there, if anywhere, was the place for the
+Economic Man.  Alas! there war only one of him; William Ires or Eyre, by
+name, from the county Galway; and though he fertilised the soil he did it
+with his blood and bones.  A wonderful chance; and yet you see what came
+of it all.  It would perhaps be stretching truth too far to say that you
+are trying to undo some of Columbus's work, and to stop up the hole he
+made in Ireland when he found a channel into which so much of what was
+best in the Old Country war destined to flow; for you and he have each
+your places in the great circle of Time and Compensation, and though you
+may seem to oppose one another across the centuries you are really
+answering the same call and working in the same vineyard.  For we all set
+out to discover new worlds; and they are wise who realise early that
+human nature has roots that spread beneath the ocean bed, that neither
+latitude nor longitude nor time itself can change it to anything richer
+or stranger than what it is, and that furrows ploughed in it are furrows
+ploughed in the sea sand.  Columbus tried to pour the wine of
+civilisation into very old bottles; you, more wisely, are trying to pour
+the old wine of our country into new bottles.  Yet there is no great
+unlikeness between the two tasks: it is all a matter of bottling; the
+vintage is the same, infinite, inexhaustible, and as punctual as the sun
+and the seasons.  It was Columbus's weakness as an administrator that he
+thought the bottle was everything; it is your strength that you care for
+the 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, to
+which public credit is awarded too often in an inverse proportion to the
+labours expended.  One group of historians, labouring in the obscurest
+depths, dig and prepare the ground, searching and sifting the documentary
+soil with infinite labour and over an area immensely wide.  They are
+followed by those scholars and specialists in history who give their
+lives to the study of a single period, and who sow literature in the
+furrows of research prepared by those who have preceded them.  Last of
+all comes the essayist, or writer pure and simple, who reaps the harvest
+so laboriously prepared.  The material lies all before him; the documents
+have been arranged, the immense contemporary fields of record and
+knowledge examined and searched for stray seeds of significance that may
+have blown over into them; the perspective is cleared for him, the
+relation of his facts to time and space and the march of human
+civilisation duly established; he has nothing to do but reap the field of
+harvest where it suits him, grind it in the wheels of whatever machinery
+his art is equipped with, and come before the public with the finished
+product.  And invariably in this unequal partnership he reaps most richly
+who reaps latest.
+
+I am far from putting this narrative forward as the fine and ultimate
+product of all the immense labour and research of the historians of
+Columbus; but I am anxious to excuse myself for my apparent presumption
+in venturing into a field which might more properly be occupied by the
+expert historian.  It would appear that the double work of acquiring the
+facts of a piece of human history and of presenting them through the
+medium of literature can hardly ever be performed by one and the same
+man.  A lifetime must be devoted to the one, a year or two may suffice
+for the other; and an entirely different set of qualities must be
+employed in the two tasks.  I cannot make it too clear that I make no
+claim to have added one iota of information or one fragment of original
+research to the expert knowledge regarding the life of Christopher
+Columbus; and when I add that the chief collection of facts and documents
+relating to the subject, the 'Raccolta Columbiana,'--[Raccolta di
+Documenti e Studi Publicati dalla R. Commissione Colombiana, &c.  Auspice
+il Ministero della Publica Istruzione.  Rome, 1892-4.]--is a work
+consisting of more than thirty folio volumes, the general reader will be
+the more indulgent to me.  But when a purely human interest led me some
+time ago to look into the literature of Columbus, I was amazed to find
+what seemed to me a striking disproportion between the extent of the
+modern historians' work on that subject and the knowledge or interest in
+it displayed by what we call the general reading public.  I am surprised
+to find how many well-informed people there are whose knowledge of
+Columbus is comprised within two beliefs, one of them erroneous and the
+other doubtful: that he discovered America, and performed a trick with
+an egg.  Americans, I think, are a little better informed on the subject
+than the English; perhaps because the greater part of modern critical
+research on the subject of Columbus has been the work of Americans.
+It is to bridge the immense gap existing between the labours of the
+historians and the indifference of the modern reader, between the
+Raccolta Columbiana, in fact, and the story of the egg, that I have
+written my narrative.
+
+It is customary and proper to preface a work which is based entirely on
+the labours of other people with an acknowledgment of the sources whence
+it is drawn; and yet in the case of Columbus I do not know where to
+begin.  In one way I am indebted to every serious writer who has even
+remotely concerned himself with the subject, from Columbus himself and
+Las Casas down to the editors of the Raccolta.  The chain of historians
+has been so unbroken, the apostolic succession, so to speak, has passed
+with its heritage so intact from generation to generation, that the
+latest historian enshrines in his work the labours of all the rest.
+Yet there are necessarily some men whose work stands out as being more
+immediately seizable than that of others; in the period of whose care the
+lamp of inspiration has seemed to burn more brightly.  In a matter of
+this kind I cannot pretend to be a judge, but only to state my own
+experience and indebtedness; and in my work I have been chiefly helped by
+Las 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 by
+the writings of modern workers.  To have myself gone back to original
+sources, even if I had been competent to do so, would have been in the
+case of Columbian research but a waste of time and a doing over again
+what has been done already with patience, diligence, and knowledge.  The
+historians have been committed to the austere task of finding out and
+examining every fact and document in connection with their subject; and
+many of these facts and documents are entirely without human interest
+except in so far as they help to establish a date, a name, or a sum of
+money.  It has been my agreeable and lighter task to test and assay the
+masses of bed-rock fact thus excavated by the historians for traces of
+the particular ore which I have been seeking.  In fact I have tried to
+discover, from a reverent examination of all these monographs, essays,
+histories, memoirs, and controversies concerning what Christopher
+Columbus did, what Christopher Columbus was; believing as I do that any
+labour by which he can be made to live again, and from the dust of more
+than four hundred years be brought visibly to the mind's eye, will not be
+entirely without use and interest.  Whether I have succeeded in doing so
+or not I cannot be the judge; I can only say that the labour of
+resuscitating a man so long buried beneath mountains of untruth and
+controversy has some times been so formidable as to have seemed hopeless.
+And yet one is always tempted back by the knowledge that Christopher
+Columbus is not only a name, but that the human being whom we so describe
+did actually once live and walk in the world; did actually sail and look
+upon seas where we may also sail and look; did stir with his feet the
+indestructible dust of this old Earth, and centre in himself, as we all
+do, the whole interest and meaning of the Universe.  Truly the most
+commonplace fact, yet none the less amazing; and often when in the dust
+of documents he has seemed most dead and unreal to me I have found
+courage from the entertainment of some deep or absurd reflection; such as
+that he did once undoubtedly, like other mortals, blink and cough and
+blow his nose.  And if my readers could realise that fact throughout
+every 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 modern
+writer on Columbus--and modern research on the history of Columbus is
+only thirty years old--I owe to the labours of Mr. Henry Harrisse, the
+chief of modern Columbian historians, the indebtedness of the gold-miner
+to the gold-mine.  In the matters of the Toscanelli correspondence and
+the early years of Columbus I have followed more closely Mr. Henry
+Vignaud, whose work may be regarded as a continuation and reexamination
+--in some cases destructive--of that of Mr. Harrisse.  Mr. Vignaud's work
+is happily not yet completed; we all look forward eagerly to the
+completion of that part of his 'Etudes Critiques' dealing with the second
+half of the Admiral's life; and Mr. Vignaud seems to me to stand higher
+than all modern workers in this field in the patient and fearless
+discovery of the truth regarding certain very controversial matters,
+and also in ability to give a sound and reasonable interpretation to
+those obscurer facts or deductions in Columbus's life that seem doomed
+never to be settled by the aid of documents alone.  It may be unseemly in
+me not to acknowledge indebtedness to Washington Irving,  but I cannot
+conscientiously do so.  If I had been writing ten or fifteen years ago I
+might have taken his work seriously; but it is impossible that anything
+so one-sided, so inaccurate, so untrue to life, and so profoundly dull
+could continue to exist save in the absence of any critical knowledge or
+light on the subject.  All that can be said for him is that he kept the
+lamp of interest in Columbus alive for English readers during the period
+that preceded the advent of modern critical research.  Mr. Major's
+edition' of Columbus's letters has been freely consulted by me, as it
+must be by any one interested in the subject.  Professor Justin Winsor's
+work has provided an invaluable store of ripe scholarship in matters of
+cosmography and geographical detail; Sir Clements Markham's book, by far
+the most trustworthy of modern English works on the subject, and a
+valuable record of the established facts in Columbus's life, has proved a
+sound guide in nautical matters; while the monograph of Mr. Elton, which
+apparently did not promise much at first, since the author has followed
+some untrustworthy leaders as regards his facts, proved to be full of a
+fragrant charm produced by the writer's knowledge of and interest in
+sub-tropical vegetation; and it is delightfully filled with the names of
+gums and spices.  To Mr. Vignaud I owe special thanks, not only for the
+benefits of his research and of his admirable works on Columbus, but also
+for personal help and encouragement.  Equally cordial thanks are due to
+Mr. John Boyd Thacher,  whose work, giving as it does so large a
+selection of the Columbus documents both in facsimile, transliteration,
+and translation, is of the greatest service to every English writer on
+the subject of Columbus.  It is the more to be regretted, since the
+documentary part of Mr. Thacher's work is so excellent, that in his
+critical studies he should have seemed to ignore some of the more
+important results of modern research.  I am further particularly indebted
+to Mr. Thacher and to his publishers, Messrs.  Putnam's Sons, for
+permission to reproduce certain illustrations in his work, and to avail
+myself also of his copies and translations of original Spanish and
+Italian documents.  I have to thank Commendatore Guido Biagi, the keeper
+of the Laurentian Library in Florence, for his very kind help and letters
+of introduction to Italian librarians; Mr. Raymond Beazley, of Merton
+College, Oxford, for his most helpful correspondence; and Lord Dunraven
+for so kindly bringing, in the interests of my readers, his practical
+knowledge of navigation and seamanship to bear on the first voyage of
+Columbus.  Finally my work has been helped and made possible by many
+intimate 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 a
+symbol of wonder as the mind can conceive.  Beneath his feet are the
+stones and grasses of an element that is his own, natural to him, in some
+degree belonging to him, at any rate accepted by him.  He has place and
+condition there.  Above him arches a world of immense void, fleecy
+sailing clouds, infinite clear blueness, shapes that change and dissolve;
+his day comes out of it, his source of light and warmth marches across
+it, night falls from it; showers and dews also, and the quiet influence
+of stars.  Strange that impalpable element must be, and for ever
+unattainable by him; yet with its gifts of sun and shower, its furniture
+of winged life that inhabits also on the friendly soil, it has links and
+partnerships with life as he knows it and is a complement of earthly
+conditions.  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 is
+fluent 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 entity
+of its own, and was engaged upon some mysterious business.  Unlike the
+silent earth and the dreaming clouds it has a voice that fills his world
+and, now low, now loud, echoes throughout his waking and sleeping life.
+Earth with her sprouting fruits behind and beneath him; sky, and larks
+singing, above him; before him, an eternal alien, the sea: he stands
+there upon the shore, arrested, wondering.  He lives,--this man of our
+figure; he proceeds, as all must proceed, with the task and burden of
+life.  One by one its miracles are unfolded to him; miracles of fire and
+cold, and pain and pleasure; the seizure of love, the terrible magic of
+reproduction, the sad miracle of death.  He fights and lusts and endures;
+and, no more troubled by any wonder, sleeps at last.  But throughout the
+days of his life, in the very act of his rude existence, this great
+tumultuous presence of the sea troubles and overbears him.  Sometimes in
+its bellowing rage it terrifies him, sometimes in its tranquillity it
+allures him; but whatever he is doing, grubbing for roots, chipping
+experimentally with bones and stones, he has an eye upon it; and in his
+passage by the shore he pauses, looks, and wonders.  His eye is led from
+the 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 stirs
+the 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 of
+the infinite, by the mortal of the immortal; answer to it there is none
+save in the unending preoccupation of life and labour.  And if this old
+question was in truth first asked upon the sea-shore, it was asked most
+often and with the most painful wonder upon western shores, whence the
+journeying sun was seen to go down and quench himself in the sea.  The
+generations that followed our primitive man grew fast in knowledge, and
+perhaps for a time wondered the less as they knew the more; but we may be
+sure they never ceased to wonder at what might lie beyond the sea.  How
+much 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 where
+they could not follow?  All pain aspires to oblivion, all toil to rest,
+all troubled discontent with what is present to what is unfamiliar and
+far away; and no power of knowledge and scientific fact will ever prevent
+human unhappiness from reaching out towards some land of dreams of which
+the burning brightness of a sea sunset is an image.  Is it very hard to
+believe, then, that in that yearning towards the miracle of a sun
+quenched in sea distance, felt and felt again in human hearts through
+countless generations, the westward stream of human activity on this
+planet had its rise?  Is it unreasonable to picture, on an earth spinning
+eastward, a treadmill rush of feet to follow the sinking light?  The
+history of man's life in this world does not, at any rate, contradict us.
+Wisdom, discovery, art, commerce, science, civilisation have all moved
+west across our world; have all in their cycles followed the sun; have
+all, 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 of
+ages.  It has always set from shore to sea in countless currents of
+adventure and speculation; but it has set most strongly from East to
+West.  On its broad bosom the seeds of life and knowledge have been
+carried throughout the world.  It brought the people of Tyre and Carthage
+to the coasts and oceans of distant worlds; it carried the English from
+Jutland across cold and stormy waters to the islands of their conquest;
+it carried the Romans across half the world; it bore the civilisation of
+the far East to new life and virgin western soils; it carried the new
+West to the old East, and is in our day bringing back again the new East
+to the old West.  Religions, arts, tradings, philosophies, vices and laws
+have been borne, a strange flotsam, upon its unchanging flood.  It has
+had its springs and neaps, its trembling high-water marks, its hour of
+affluence, when the world has been flooded with golden humanity; its ebb
+and effluence also, when it has seemed to shrink and desert the kingdoms
+set upon its shores.  The fifteenth century in Western Europe found it at
+a pause in its movements: it had brought the trade and the learning of
+the East to the verge of the Old World, filling the harbours of the
+Mediterranean with ships and the monasteries of Italy and Spain with
+wisdom; and in the subsequent and punctual decadence that followed this
+flood, there gathered in the returning tide a greater energy and volume
+which was to carry the Old World bodily across the ocean.  And yet, for
+all their wisdom and power, the Spanish and Portuguese were still in the
+attitude of our primitive man, standing on the sea-shore and looking out
+in wonder across the sea.
+
+The flood of the life-stream began to set again, and little by little to
+rise and inundate Western Europe, floating off the galleys and caravels
+of King Alphonso of Portugal, and sending them to feel their way along
+the coasts of Africa; a little later drawing the mind of Prince Henry the
+Navigator to devote his life to the conquest and possession of the
+unknown.  In his great castle on the promontory of Sagres, with the voice
+of the Atlantic thundering in his ears, and its mists and sprays bounding
+his vision, he felt the full force of the stream, and stretched his arms
+to the mysterious West.  But the inner light was not yet so brightly
+kindled that he dared to follow his heart; his ships went south and south
+again, to brave on each voyage the dangers and terrors that lay along the
+unknown African coast, until at length his captains saw the Cape of Good
+Hope.  South and West and East were in those days confusing terms; for it
+was the East that men were thinking of when they set their faces to the
+setting sun, and it was a new road to the East that they sought when they
+felt their way southward along the edge of the world.  But the rising
+tide of discovery was working in that moment, engaging the brains of
+innumerable sages, stirring the wonder of innumerable mariners; reaching
+also, little by little, to quarters less immediately concerned with the
+business of discovery.  Ships carried the strange tidings of new coasts
+and new islands from port to port throughout the Mediterranean; Venetians
+on the lagoons, Ligurians on the busy trading wharves of Genoa, were
+discussing the great subject; and as the tide rose and spread, it floated
+one ship of life after another that was destined for the great business
+of adventure.  Some it inspired to dream and speculate, and to do no more
+than that; many a heart also to brave efforts and determinations that
+were doomed to come to nothing and to end only in failure.  And among
+others who felt the force and was swayed and lifted by the prevailing
+influence, there lived, some four and a half centuries ago, a little boy
+playing about the wharves of Genoa, well known to his companions as
+Christoforo, son of Domenico the wool-weaver, who lived in the Vico
+Dritto di Ponticello.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE HOME IN GENOA
+
+It is often hard to know how far back we should go in the ancestry of a
+man whose life and character we are trying to reconstruct.  The life that
+is in him is not his own, but is mysteriously transmitted through the
+life of his parents; to the common stock of his family, flesh of their
+flesh, bone of their bone, character of their character, he has but added
+his own personality.  However far back we go in his ancestry, there is
+something of him to be traced, could we but trace it; and although it
+soon becomes so widely scattered that no separate fraction of it seems to
+be recognisable, we know that, generations back, we may come upon some
+sympathetic fact, some reservoir of the essence that was him, in which we
+can find the source of many of his actions, and the clue, perhaps, to his
+character.
+
+In the case of Columbus we are spared this dilemma.  The past is reticent
+enough about the man himself; and about his ancestors it is almost
+silent.  We know that he had a father and grandfather, as all grandsons
+of 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; and
+in the vale of Fontanabuona, that runs up into the hills behind Genoa,
+the two streams of family from which he sprang were united.  His father
+from one hamlet, his mother from another; the towering hills behind, the
+Mediterranean shining in front; love and marriage in the valley; and a
+little boy to come of it whose doings were to shake the world.
+
+His family tree begins for us with his grandfather, Giovanni Colombo of
+Terra-Rossa, one of the hamlets in the valley--concerning whom many human
+facts may be inferred, but only three are certainly known; that he lived,
+begot children, and died.  Lived, first at Terra Rossa, and afterwards
+upon 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 he
+was not alive, being referred to in a legal document as quondam, or, as
+we should say, "the late."  Of his wife, Christopher's grandmother, since
+she never bought or sold or witnessed anything requiring the record of
+legal document, history speaks no word; although doubtless some pleasant
+and picturesque old lady, or lady other than pleasant and picturesque,
+had place in the experience or imagination of young Christopher.  Of the
+pair, old Quondam Giovanni alone survives the obliterating drift of
+generations, which the shores and brown slopes of Quinto al Mare, where
+he sat in the sun and looked about him, have also survived.  Doubtless
+old Quondam could have told us many things about Domenico, and his
+over-sanguine buyings and sellings; have perhaps told us something about
+Christopher's environment, and cleared up our doubts concerning his first
+home; but he does not.  He will sit in the sun there at Quinto, and sip
+his wine, and say his Hail Marys, and watch the sails of the feluccas
+leaning 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 to
+have survived, and triumphantly twinkles his two dates at us across the
+night of time.  1440, alive; 1444, not alive any longer: and so hail and
+farewell, Grandfather John.
+
+
+Of Antonio and Battestina, the uncle and aunt of Columbus, we know next
+to nothing.  Uncle Antonio inherited the estate of Terra-Rossa, Aunt
+Battestina was married in the valley; and so no more of either of them;
+except that Antonio, who also married, had sons, cousins of Columbus, who
+in after years, when he became famous, made themselves unpleasant, as
+poor relations will, by recalling themselves to his remembrance and
+suggesting that something might be done for them.  I have a belief,
+supported by no historical fact or document, that between the families of
+Domenico and Antonio there was a mild cousinly feud.  I believe they did
+not like each other.  Domenico, as we shall see presently, was sanguine
+and venturesome, a great buyer and seller, a maker of bargains in which
+he generally came off second best.  Antonio, who settled in Terra-Rossa,
+the paternal property, doubtless looked askance at these enterprises from
+his vantage-ground of a settled income; doubtless also, on the occasion
+of visits exchanged between the two families, he would comment upon the
+unfortunate enterprises of his brother; and as the children of both
+brothers grew up, they would inherit and exaggerate, as children will,
+this settled difference between their respective parents.  This, of
+course, may be entirely untrue, but I think it possible, and even likely;
+for Columbus in after life displayed a very tender regard for members of
+his family, but never to our knowledge makes any reference to these
+cousins 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 may
+reckon this uncle and aunt and their children--dim ghosts to us, but to
+him real people, who walked and spoke, and blinked their eyes and moved
+their limbs, like the men and women of our own time.  Less of a ghost to
+us, 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 warm
+interest, as the one who actually begat and reared the man of our story.
+We shall see him later, and chiefly in difficulties; executing deeds and
+leases, and striking a great variety of legal attitudes, to the
+witnessing of which various members of his family were called in.  Little
+enough good did they to him at the time, poor Domenico; but he was a
+benefactor to posterity without knowing it, and in these grave notarial
+documents preserved almost the only evidence that we have as to the early
+days 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 and
+strikes legal attitudes in every age desires and has.  He was a
+wool-carder by trade, but that was not enough for him; he must buy
+little bits of estates here and there; must even keep a tavern, where he
+and his wife could entertain the foreign sailors and hear the news of
+the world; where also, although perhaps they did not guess it, a sharp
+pair of ears were also listening, and a pair of round eyes gazing, and
+an inquisitive face set in astonishment at the strange tales that went
+about.
+
+There is one fragment of fact about this Domenico that greatly enlarges
+our knowledge of him.  He was a wool-weaver, as we know; he also kept a
+tavern, and no doubt justified the adventure on the plea that it would
+bring him customers for his woollen cloth; for your buyer and seller
+never lacks a reason either for his selling or buying.  Presently he is
+buying again; this time, still with striking of legal attitudes, calling
+together of relations, and accompaniments of crabbed Latin notarial
+documents, a piece of ground in the suburbs of Genoa, consisting of scrub
+and undergrowth, which cannot have been of any earthly use to him.  But
+also, according to the documents, there went some old wine-vats with the
+land.  Domenico, taking a walk after Mass on some feast-day, sees the
+land and the wine-vats; thinks dimly but hopefully how old wine-vats, if
+of no use to any other human creature, should at least be of use to a
+tavern-keeper; hurries back, overpowers the perfunctory objections of his
+complaisant wife, and on the morrow of the feast is off to the notary's
+office.  We may be sure the wine-vats lay and rotted there, and furnished
+no monetary profit to the wool-weaving tavern-keeper; but doubtless they
+furnished him a rich profit of another kind when he walked about his
+newly-acquired property, and explained what he was going to do with the
+wine-vats.
+
+And besides the weaving of wool and pouring of wine and buying and
+selling of land, there were more human occupations, which Domenico was
+not the man to neglect.  He had married, about the year 1450, one
+Susanna, a daughter of Giacomo of Fontana-Rossa, a silk weaver who lived
+in the hamlet near to Terra-Rossa.  Domenico's father was of the more
+consequence of the two, for he had, as well as his home in the valley, a
+house at Quinto, where he probably kept a felucca for purposes of trade
+with Alexandria and the Islands.  Perhaps the young people were married
+at Quinto, but if so they did not live there long, moving soon into
+Genoa, where Domenico could more conveniently work at his trade.  The
+wool-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 by
+the park and public gardens.  Here they had their dwellings and
+workshops, their schools and institutions, receiving every protection and
+encouragement from the Signoria, who recognised the importance of the
+wool trade and its allied industries to Genoa.  Cloth-weavers,
+blanket-makers, silk-weavers, and velvet-makers all lived in this
+quarter, and held their houses under the neighbouring abbey of San
+Stefano.  There are two houses mentioned in documents which seem to have
+been in the possession of Domenico at different times.  One was in the
+suburbs outside the Olive Gate; the other was farther in, by St.
+Andrew's Gate, and quite near to the sea.  The house outside the Olive
+Gate has disappeared; and it was probably here that our Christopher
+first saw the light, and pleased Domenico's heart with his little cries
+and struggles. Neither the day nor even the year is certainly known, but
+there is most reason to believe that it was in the year 1451.  They must
+have moved soon afterwards to the house in the Vico Dritto di
+Ponticello, No. 37, in which most of Christopher's childhood was
+certainly passed.  This is a house close to St. Andrew's Gate, which
+gate still stands in a beautiful and ruinous condition.
+
+From the new part of Genoa, and from the Via XX Settembre, you turn into
+the 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 virtually
+the same as the place in which Christopher and his little brothers and
+sisters made the first steps of their pilgrimage through this world.  If
+the Italian, sun has been shining fiercely upon you, in the great modern
+thoroughfare, you will turn into this quarter of narrow streets and high
+houses with grateful relief.  The past seems to meet you there; and from
+the Piazza, gay with its little provision-shops and fruit stalls, you
+walk up the slope of the Vico Dritto di Ponticello, leaving the sunlight
+behind you, and entering the narrow street like a traveller entering a
+mountain gorge.
+
+It is a very curious street this; I suppose there is no street in the
+world that has more character.  Genoa invented sky-scrapers long before
+Columbus had discovered America, or America had invented steel frames for
+high building; but although many of the houses in the Vico Dritto di
+Ponticello are seven and eight storeys high, the width of the street from
+house-wall to house-wall does not average more than nine feet.  The
+street is not straight, moreover; it winds a little in its ascent to the
+old city wall and St. Andrew's Gate, so that you do not even see the sky
+much as you look forward and upwards.  The jutting cornices of the roofs,
+often beautifully decorated, come together in a medley of angles and
+corners that practically roof the street over; and only here and there do
+you see a triangle or a parallelogram of the vivid brilliant blue that is
+the sky.  Besides being seven or eight storeys high, the houses are the
+narrowest in the world; I should think that their average width on the
+street front is ten feet.  So as you walk up this street where young
+Christopher lived you must think of it in these three dimensions towering
+slices of houses, ten or twelve feet in width: a street often not more
+than eight and seldom more than fifteen feet in width; and the walls of
+the houses themselves, painted in every colour, green and pink and grey
+and white, and trellised with the inevitable green window-shutters of the
+South, standing like cliffs on each side of you seven or eight rooms
+high.  There being so little horizontal space for the people to live
+there, what little there is is most economically used; and all across the
+tops of the houses, high above your head, the cliffs are joined by wires
+and clothes-lines from which thousands of brightly-dyed garments are
+always hanging and fluttering; higher still, where the top storeys of the
+houses become merged in roof, there are little patches of garden and
+greenery, where geraniums and delicious tangling creepers uphold thus
+high above the ground the fertile tradition of earth.  You walk slowly up
+the paved street.  One of its characteristics, which it shares with the
+old streets of most Italian towns, is that it is only used by
+foot-passengers, being of course too narrow for wheels; and it is paved
+across with flagstones from door to door, so that the feet and the
+voices echo pleasantly in it, and make a music of their own.  Without
+exception the ground floor of every house is a shop--the gayest, busiest
+most industrious little shops in the world.  There are shops for
+provisions, where the delightful macaroni lies in its various bins, and
+all kinds of frugal and nourishing foods are offered for sale.  There
+are shops for clothes and dyed finery; there are shops for boots, where
+boots hang in festoons like onions outside the window--I have never seen
+so many boot-shops at once in my life as I saw in the streets
+surrounding the house of Columbus.  And every shop that is not a
+provision-shop or a clothes-shop or a boot-shop, is a wine-shop--or at
+least you would think so, until you remember, after you have walked
+through the street, what a lot of other kinds of shops you have seen on
+your way.  There are shops for newspapers and tobacco, for cheap
+jewellery, for brushes, for chairs and tables and articles of wood;
+there are shops with great stacks and piles of crockery; there are shops
+for cheese and butter and milk--indeed from this one little street in
+Genoa you could supply every necessary and every luxury of a humble
+life.
+
+As you still go up, the street takes a slight bend; and immediately
+before 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 you
+see it you are at Columbus's house.  The number is thirty-seven; it is
+like any of the other houses, tall and narrow; and there is a slab built
+into the wall above the first storey, on which is written this
+inscription:--
+
+                      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 a
+difference between it and all the other houses.  They are all alert,
+busy, noisy, crowded with life in every storey, oozing vitality from
+every window; but of all the narrow vertical strips that make up the
+houses of the street, this strip numbered thirty-seven is empty, silent,
+and dead.  The shutters veil its windows; within it is dark, empty of
+furniture, and inhabited only by a memory and a spirit.  It is a strange
+place in which to stand and to think of all that has happened since the
+man 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 little
+freshet of life that flows there flows loud and incessant; and yet into
+what oceans of death and silence has it not poured since it carried forth
+Christopher on its stream!  One thinks of the continent of that New World
+that he discovered, and all the teeming millions of human lives that have
+sprung up and died down, and sprung up again, and spread and increased
+there; all the ploughs that have driven into its soil, the harvests that
+have ripened, the waving acres and miles of grain that have answered the
+call of Spring and Autumn since first the bow of his boat grated on the
+shore of Guanahani.  And yet of the two scenes this narrow shuttered
+house in a bye-street of Genoa is at once the more wonderful and more
+credible; for it contains the elements of the other.  Walls and floors
+and a roof, a place to eat and sleep in, a place to work and found a
+family, and give tangible environment to a human soul--there is all human
+enterprise and discovery, effort, adventure, and life in that.
+
+
+If Christopher wanted to go down to the sea he would have to pass under
+the Gate of St. Andrew, with the old prison, now pulled down to make room
+for the modern buildings, on his right, and go down the Salita del
+Prione, which is a continuation of the Vico Dritto di Ponticello.  It
+slopes downwards from the Gate as the first street sloped upwards to it;
+and it contains the same assortment of shops and of houses, the same
+mixture of handicrafts and industries, as were seen in the Vico Dritto di
+Ponticello.  Presently he would come to the Piazza dell' Erbe, where
+there 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 shops
+of instrument-makers, where to-day there are compasses and sextants and
+chronometers.  Out of the Piazza you come down the Via di San Donato and
+into the Piazza of that name, where for over nine centuries the church of
+San Donato has faced the sun and the weather.  From there Christopher's
+young feet would follow the winding Via di San Bernato, a street also
+inhabited by craftsmen and workers in wood and metal; and at the last
+turn of it, a gash of blue between the two cliffwalls of houses, you see
+the Mediterranean.
+
+Here, then, between the narrow little house by the Gate and the clamour
+and business of the sea-front, our Christopher's feet carried him daily
+during some part of his childish life.  What else he did, what he thought
+and felt, what little reflections he had, are but matters of conjecture.
+Genoa will tell you nothing more.  You may walk over the very spot where
+he was born; you may unconsciously tread in the track of his vanished
+feet; you may wander about the wharves of the city, and see the ships
+loading and unloading--different ships, but still trafficking in
+commodities not greatly different from those of his day; you may climb
+the heights behind Genoa, and look out upon the great curving Gulf from
+Porto 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 his
+many habitations, where he kept the tavern, and whither Christopher's
+young feet must also have walked; and you may come back and search again
+in the harbour, from the old Mole and the Bank of St. George to where the
+port 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 the
+little voice that shrilled in the narrow street sounds in the Vico
+Dritto; the houses stand gaunt and straight, with a brilliant strip of
+blue sky between their roofs and the cool street beneath; but they give
+you nothing of what you seek.  If you see a little figure running towards
+you in a blue smock, the head fair-haired, the face blue-eyed and a
+little freckled with the strong sunshine, it is not a real figure; it is
+a child of your dreams and a ghost of the past.  You may chase him while
+he runs about the wharves and stumbles over the ropes, but you will never
+catch him.  He runs before you, zigzagging over the cobbles, up the sunny
+street, into the narrow house; out again, running now towards the Duomo,
+hiding in the porch of San Stefano, where the weavers held their
+meetings; back again along the wharves; surely he is hiding behind that
+mooring-post!  But you look, and he is not there--nothing but the old
+harbour dust that the wind stirs into a little eddy while you look.  For
+he belongs not to you or me, this child; he is not yet enslaved to the
+great purpose, not yet caught up into the machinery of life.  His eye has
+not yet caught the fire of the sun setting on a western sea; he is still
+free and happy, and belongs only to those who love him.  Father and
+mother, brothers Bartolomeo and Giacomo, sister Biancinetta, aunts,
+uncles, and cousins possibly, and possibly for a little while an old
+grandmother 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.  That
+is his own statement, and it is one of the few of his autobiographical
+utterances that we need not doubt.  From it, and from a knowledge of
+certain other dates, we are able to construct some vague picture of his
+doings before he left Italy and settled in Portugal.  Already in his
+young heart he was feeling the influence that was to direct and shape
+his destiny; already, towards his home in Genoa, long ripples from the
+commotion 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, a
+blue gabardine and a pair of good shoes, and various other matters in
+return for his service.  But there is no reason to suppose that he ever
+occupied himself very much with wool-weaving.  He had a vocation quite
+other than that, and if he ever did make any cloth there must have been
+some strange thoughts and imaginings woven into it, as he plied the
+shuttle.  Most of his biographers, relying upon a doubtful statement in
+the life of him written by his son Ferdinand, would have us send him at
+the age of twelve to the distant University of Pavia, there, poor mite,
+to sit at the feet of learned professors studying Latin, mathematics, and
+cosmography; but fortunately it is not necessary to believe so improbable
+a statement.  What is much more likely about his education--for education
+he had, although not of the superior kind with which he has been
+credited--is that in the blank, sunny time of his childhood he was sent
+to one of the excellent schools established by the weavers in their own
+quarter, and that there or afterwards he came under some influence, both
+religious and learned, which stamped him the practical visionary that he
+remained throughout his life.  Thereafter, between his sea voyagings and
+expeditions about the Mediterranean coasts, he no doubt acquired
+knowledge in the only really practical way that it can be acquired; that
+is to say, he received it as and when he needed it.  What we know is that
+he had in later life some knowledge of the works of Aristotle, Julius
+Caesar, Seneca, Pliny, and Ptolemy; of Ahmet-Ben-Kothair the Arabic
+astronomer, Rochid the Arabian, and the Rabbi Samuel the Jew; of Isadore
+the Spaniard, and Bede and Scotus the Britons; of Strabo the German,
+Gerson the Frenchman, and Nicolaus de Lira the Italian.  These names
+cover a wide range, but they do not imply university education.  Some of
+them merely suggest acquaintance with the 'Imago Mundi'; others imply
+that selective faculty, the power of choosing what can help a man's
+purpose and of rejecting what is useless to it, that is one of the marks
+of genius, and an outward sign of the inner light.
+
+We must think of him, then, at school in Genoa, grinding out the tasks
+that are the common heritage of all small boys; working a little at the
+weaving, interestedly enough at first, no doubt, while the importance of
+having a loom appealed to him, but also no doubt rapidly cooling off in
+his enthusiasm as the pastime became a task, and the restriction of
+indoor life began to be felt.  For if ever there was a little boy who
+loved to idle about the wharves and docks, here was that little boy.
+It was here, while he wandered about the crowded quays and listened to
+the medley of talk among the foreign sailors, and looked beyond the masts
+of the ships into the blue distance of the sea, that the desire to wander
+and go abroad upon the face of the waters must first have stirred in his
+heart.  The wharves of Genoa in those days combined in themselves all the
+richness of romance and adventure, buccaneering, trading, and
+treasure-snatching, that has ever crowded the pages of romance.  There
+were galleys and caravels, barques and feluccas, pinnaces and caraccas.
+There were slaves in the galleys, and bowmen to keep the slaves in
+subjection. There were dark-bearded Spaniards, fair-haired Englishmen;
+there were Greeks, and Indians, and Portuguese.  The bales of goods on
+the harbour-side were eloquent of distant lands, and furnished object
+lessons in the only geography that young Christopher was likely to be
+learning.  There was cotton from Egypt, and tin and lead from
+Southampton.  There were butts of Malmsey from Candia; aloes and cassia
+and spices from Socotra; rhubarb from Persia; silk from India; wool from
+Damascus, raw wool also from Calais and Norwich.  No wonder if the
+little house in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello became too narrow for the
+boy; and no wonder that at the age of fourteen he was able to have his
+way, and go to sea.  One can imagine him gradually acquiring an
+influence over his father, Domenico, as his will grew stronger and
+firmer--he with one grand object in life, Domenico with none; he with a
+single clear purpose, and Domenico with innumerable cloudy ones.  And
+so, on some day in the distant past, there were farewells and anxious
+hearts in the weaver's house, and Christopher, member of the crew of
+some trading caravel or felucca, a diminishing object to the wet eyes
+of his mother, sailed away, and faded into the blue distance.
+
+They had lost him, although perhaps they did not realise it; from the
+moment of his first voyage the sea claimed him as her own.  Widening
+horizons, slatting of cords and sails in the wind, storms and stars and
+strange landfalls and long idle calms, thunder of surges, tingle of
+spray, and eternal labouring and threshing and cleaving of infinite
+waters--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-smitten
+Spanish towns, governings and parleyings in distant, undreamed-of lands
+--these were to be but incidents in his true life, which was to be
+fulfilled in the solitude of sea watches.
+
+When he left his home on this first voyage, he took with him one other
+thing besides the restless longing to escape beyond the line of sea and
+sky.  Let us mark well this possession of his, for it was his companion
+and guiding-star throughout a long and difficult life, his chart and
+compass, astrolabe and anchor, in one.  Religion has in our days fallen
+into decay among men of intellect and achievement.  The world has thrown
+it, like a worn garment or an old skin, from off its body, the thing
+itself being no longer real and alive, and in harmony with the life of
+an age that struggles towards a different kind of truth.  It is hard,
+therefore, for us to understand exactly how the religion of Columbus
+entered 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 of
+Puritan inheritance to comprehend how, in the fifteenth century, the
+strong intellect was strengthened, and the stout heart fortified, by the
+thought of hosts of saints and angels hovering above a man's incomings
+and outgoings to guide and protect him.  Yet in an age that really had
+the gift of faith, in which religion was real and vital, and part of the
+business of every man's daily life; in which it stood honoured in the
+world, loaded with riches, crowned with learning, wielding government
+both temporal and spiritual, it was a very brave panoply for the soul of
+man.  The little boy in Genoa, with the fair hair and blue eyes and grave
+freckled face that made him remarkable among his dark companions, had no
+doubt early received and accepted the vast mysteries of the Christian
+faith; and as that other mystery began to grow in his mind, and that idea
+of worlds that might lie beyond the sea-line began to take shape in his
+thoughts, he found in the holy wisdom of the prophets, and the inspired
+writings of the fathers, a continual confirmation of his faith.  The full
+conviction of these things belongs to a later period of his life; but
+probably, during his first voyagings in the Mediterranean, there hung in
+his mind echoes of psalms and prophecies that had to do with things
+beyond the world of his vision and experience.  The sun, whose going
+forth is to the end of heaven, his circuit back to the end of it, and
+from whose heat there is nothing hid; the truth, holy and prevailing,
+that knows no speech nor language where its voice is not heard; the great
+and wide sea, with its creeping things innumerable, and beasts small and
+great--no wonder if these things impressed him, and if gradually, as his
+way fell clearer before him, and the inner light began to shine more
+steadily, he came to believe that he had a special mission to carry the
+torch of the faith across the Sea of Darkness, and be himself the bearer
+of a truth that was to go through all the earth, and of words that were
+to 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 be
+doubtless at first much along the coasts, and across to Alexandria and
+the Islands.  There would be returnings to Genoa, and glad welcomings by
+the little household in the narrow street; in 1472 and 1473 he was with
+his father at Savona, helping with the wool-weaving and tavern-keeping;
+possibly also there were interviews with Benincasa, who was at that time
+living in Genoa, and making his famous sea-charts.  Perhaps it was in his
+studio that Christopher first saw a chart, and first fell in love with
+the magic that can transfer the shapes of oceans and continents to a
+piece of paper.  Then he would be off again in another ship, to the
+Golden Horn perhaps, or the Black Sea, for the Genoese had a great
+Crimean trade.  This is all conjecture, but very reasonable conjecture;
+what we know for a fact is that he saw the white gum drawn from the
+lentiscus shrubs in Chio at the time of their flowering; that fragrant
+memory is preserved long afterwards in his own writings, evoked by some
+incident in the newly-discovered islands of the West.  There are vague
+rumours and stories of his having been engaged in various expeditions
+--among them one fitted out in Genoa by John of Anjou to recover the
+kingdom of Naples for King Rene of Provence; but there is no reason to
+believe these rumours: good reason to disbelieve them, rather.
+
+The lives that the sea absorbs are passed in a great variety of adventure
+and experience, but so far as the world is concerned they are passed in a
+profound obscurity; and we need not wonder that of all the mariners who
+used those seas, and passed up and down, and held their course by the
+stars, and reefed their sails before the sudden squalls that came down
+from the mountains, and shook them out again in the calm sunshine that
+followed, there is no record of the one among their number who was
+afterwards 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 vast
+anonymity of sea life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+DOMENICO
+
+Christopher is gone, vanished over that blue horizon; and the tale of
+life in Genoa goes on without him very much as before, except that
+Domenico has one apprentice less, and, a matter becoming of some
+importance in the narrow condition of his finances, one boy less to feed
+and clothe.  For good Domenico, alas! is no economist.  Those hardy
+adventures of his in the buying and selling line do not prosper him; the
+tavern does not pay; perhaps the tavern-keeper is too hospitable; at any
+rate, things are not going well.  And yet Domenico had a good start; as
+his brother Antonio has doubtless often told him, he had the best of old
+Giovanni's inheritance; he had the property at Quinto, and other property
+at Ginestreto, and some ground rents at Pradella; a tavern at Savona, a
+shop there and at Genoa--really, Domenico has no excuse for his
+difficulties.  In 1445 he was selling land at Quinto, presumably with the
+consent 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-shore
+about a mile to the west of Quinto and about five miles to the east of
+Genoa.  It was probably a pure speculation, as he immediately leased the
+house for two years, and never lived in it himself, although it was a
+pleasant place, with an orchard of olives and figs and various other
+trees--'arboratum olivis ficubus et aliis diversis arboribus'.  His next
+recorded transaction is in 1466, when he went security for a friend,
+doubtless with disastrous results.  In 1473 he sold the house at the
+Olive Gate, that suburban dwelling where probably Christopher was born,
+and in 1474 he invested the proceeds of that sale in a piece of land
+which I have referred to before, situated in the suburbs of Savona, with
+which were sold those agreeable and useless wine-vats.  Domenico was
+living at Savona then, and the property which he so fatuously acquired
+consisted of two large pieces of land on the Via Valcalda, containing a
+few vines, a plantation of fruit-trees, and a large area of shrub and
+underwood.  The price, however, was never paid in full, and was the cause
+of a lawsuit which dragged on for forty years, and was finally settled by
+Don Diego Columbus, Christopher's son, who sent a special authority from
+Hispaniola.
+
+Owing, no doubt, to the difficulties that this un fortunate purchase
+plunged 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 to
+Jacob Baverelus, the cheese-monger, his son-in-law.  Susanna, who had
+been the witness of his melancholy transactions for so many years, and
+possibly 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 the
+discovery of the New World, lived on until 1498; when he died also, and
+vanished out of this world.  He had fulfilled a noble destiny in being
+the father of Christopher Columbus.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+SEA THOUGHTS
+
+The long years that Christopher Columbus spent at sea in making voyages
+to and from his home in Genoa, years so blank to us, but to him who lived
+them so full of life and active growth, were most certainly fruitful in
+training and equipping him for that future career of which as yet,
+perhaps, he did not dream.  The long undulating waves of the
+Mediterranean, with land appearing and dissolving away in the morning and
+evening mists, the business of ship life, harsh and rough in detail, but
+not too absorbing to the mind of a common mariner to prevent any thoughts
+he might have finding room to grow and take shape; sea breezes, sea
+storms, sea calms; these were the setting of his knowledge and experience
+as he fared from port to port and from sea to sea.  He is a very elusive
+figure in that environment of misty blue, very hard to hold and identify,
+very shy of our scrutiny, and inaccessible even to our speculation.  If
+we would come up with him, and place ourselves in some kind of sympathy
+with the thoughts that were forming in his brain, it is necessary that we
+should, for the moment, forget much of what we know of the world, and
+assume the imperfect knowledge of the globe that man possessed in those
+years when Columbus was sailing the Mediterranean.
+
+That the earth was a round globe of land and water was a fact that, after
+many contradictions and uncertainties, intelligent men had by this time
+accepted.  A conscious knowledge of the world as a whole had been a part
+of human thought for many hundreds of years; and the sphericity of the
+earth had been a theory in the sixth century before Christ.  In the
+fourth century Aristotle had watched the stars and eclipses; in the third
+century Eratosthenes had measured a degree of latitude, and measured it
+wrong;--[Not so very wrong.  D.W.]--in the second century the
+philosopher Crates had constructed a rude sort of globe, on which were
+marked the known kingdoms of the earth, and some also unknown.  With the
+coming of the Christian era the theory of the roundness of the earth
+began to be denied; and as knowledge and learning became gathered into
+the hands of the Church they lost something of their clarity and
+singleness, and began to be used arbitrarily as evidence for or against
+other and less material theories.  St. Chrysostom opposed the theory of
+the 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 long
+in a monastery that looked out to sea from a high point, and who wrote
+the words 'Ubi magnitudo, ibi veritas'.  In the sixth century of the
+Christian era Bishop Cosmas gave much thought to this matter of a round
+world, and found a new argument which to his mind (poor Cosmas!) disposed
+of it very clearly; for he argued that, if the world were round, the
+people dwelling at the antipodes could not see Christ at His coming, and
+that therefore the earth was not round.  But Bede, in the eighth century,
+established it finally as a part of human knowledge that the earth and
+all the heavenly bodies were spheres, and after that the fact was not
+again seriously disputed.
+
+What lay beyond the frontier of the known was a speculation inseparable
+from the spirit of exploration.  Children, and people who do not travel,
+are generally content, when their thoughts stray beyond the paths trodden
+by their feet, to believe that the greater world is but a continuation on
+every side of their own environment; indeed, without the help of sight or
+suggestion, it is almost impossible to believe anything else.  If you
+stand on an eminence in a great plain and think of the unseen country
+that lies beyond the horizon, trying to visualise it and imagine that you
+see it, the eye of imagination can only see the continuance or projection
+of what is seen by the bodily sight.  If you think, you can occupy the
+invisible space with a landscape made up from your own memory and
+knowledge: you may think of mountain chains and rivers, although there
+are 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 not
+be able to imagine beyond your horizon a space of sea so wide that the
+farther shore is invisible, and yet imagine the farther shore also.  You
+will see America across the Atlantic and Japan across the Pacific; but
+you cannot see, in one single effort of the imagination, an Atlantic of
+empty blue water stretching to an empty horizon, another beyond that
+equally vast and empty, another beyond that, and so on until you have
+spanned the thousand horizons that lie between England and America.  The
+mind, that is to say, works in steps and spans corresponding to the spans
+of physical sight; it cannot clear itself enough from the body, or rise
+high enough beyond experience, to comprehend spaces so much vaster than
+anything ever seen by the eye of man.  So also with the stretching of the
+horizon which bounded human knowledge of the earth.  It moved step by
+step; if one of Prince Henry's captains, creeping down the west coast of
+Africa, discovered a cape a hundred miles south of the known world, the
+most he could probably do was to imagine that there might lie, still
+another hundred miles farther south, another cape; to sail for it in
+faith and hope, to find it, and to imagine another possibility yet
+another hundred miles away.  So far as experience went back, faith could
+look forward.  It is thus with the common run of mankind; yesterday's
+march is the measure of to-morrow's; as much as they have done once, they
+may do again; they fear it will be not much more; they hope it may be not
+much less.
+
+The history of the exploration of the world up to the day when Columbus
+set sail from Palos is just such a history of steps.  The Phoenicians
+coasting from harbour to harbour through the Mediterranean; the Romans
+marching from camp to camp, from country to country; the Jutes venturing
+in their frail craft into the stormy northern seas, making voyages a
+little longer and more daring every time, until they reached England; the
+captains of Prince Henry of Portugal feeling their way from voyage to
+voyage down the coast of Africa--there are no bold flights into the
+incredible here, but patient and business-like progress from one
+stepping-stone to another.  Dangers and hardships there were, and brave
+followings of the faint will-o'-the-wisp of faith in what lay beyond; but
+there were no great launchings into space.  They but followed a line that
+was the continuance or projection of the line they had hitherto followed;
+what they did was brave and glorious, but it was reasonable.  What
+Columbus did, on the contrary, was, as we shall see later, against all
+reason and knowledge.  It was a leap in the dark towards some star
+invisible to all but him; for he who sets forth across the desert sand or
+sea must have a brighter sun to guide him than that which sets and rises
+on the day of the small man.
+
+
+Our familiarity with maps and atlases makes it difficult for us to think
+of the world in other terms than those of map and diagram; knowledge and
+science have focussed things for us, and our imagination has in
+consequence shrunk.  It is almost impossible, when thinking of the earth
+as a whole, to think about it except as a picture drawn, or as a small
+globe with maps traced upon it.  I am sure that our imagination has a far
+narrower angle--to borrow a term from the science of lenses--than the
+imagination of men who lived in the fifteenth century.  They thought of
+the 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 so
+familiar with them as to have adopted their terms in his thoughts about
+the earth.  He had seen the Mediterranean and sailed upon it before he
+had seen a chart of it; he knew a good deal of the world itself before he
+had seen a map of it.  He had more knowledge of the actual earth and sea
+than he had of pictures or drawings of them; and therefore, if we are to
+keep in sympathetic touch with him, we must not think too closely of
+maps, but of land and sea themselves.
+
+The world that Columbus had heard about as being within the knowledge of
+men extended on the north to Iceland and Scandinavia, on the south to a
+cape one hundred miles south of the Equator, and to the east as far as
+China and Japan.  North and South were not important to the spirit of
+that time; it was East and West that men thought of when they thought of
+the expansion and the discovery of the world.  And although they admitted
+that the earth was a sphere, I think it likely that they imagined
+(although the imagination was contrary to their knowledge) that the line
+of West and East was far longer, and full of vaster possibilities, than
+that of North and South.  North was familiar ground to them--one voyage
+to England, another to Iceland, another to Scandinavia; there was nothing
+impossible about that.  Southward was another matter; but even here there
+was no ambition to discover the limit of the world.  It is an error
+continually made by the biographers of Columbus that the purpose of
+Prince Henry's explorations down the coast of Africa was to find a sea
+road 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 which
+Columbus discovered, and which we now know as the West Indies.  Mr.
+Vignaud contends that the confusion arose from the very loose way in
+which the term India was applied in the Middle Ages.  Several Indias were
+recognised.  There was an India beyond the Ganges; a Middle India between
+the Ganges and the Indus; and a Lesser India, in which were included
+Arabia, Abyssinia, and the countries about the Red Sea.  These divisions
+were, however, quite vague, and varied in different periods.  In the time
+of Columbus the word India meant the kingdom of Prester John, that
+fabulous monarch who had been the subject of persistent legends since the
+twelfth century; and it was this India to which the Portuguese sought a
+sea road.  They had no idea of a barrier cape far to the south, the
+doubling 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 with
+the Orient.  They had no great spice trade, and did not seek more; what
+they did seek was an extension of their ordinary trade with Guinea and
+the African coast.  To the maritime world of the fifteenth century, then,
+the South as a geographical region and as a possible point of discovery
+had no attractions.
+
+To the west stretched what was known as the Sea of Darkness, about which
+even the cool knowledge of the geographers and astronomers could not
+think steadily.  Nothing was known about it, it did not lead anywhere,
+there were no people there, there was no trade in that direction.  The
+tides of history and of life avoided it; only now and then some terrified
+mariner, blown far out of his course, came back with tales of sea
+monsters and enchanted disappearing islands, and shores that receded, and
+coasts upon which no one could make a landfall.  The farthest land known
+to the west was the Azores; beyond that stretched a vague and impossible
+ocean of terror and darkness, of which the Arabian writer Xerif al
+Edrisi, whose countrymen were the sea-kings of the Middle Ages, wrote as
+follows:
+
+     "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 imagination
+had hitherto gone by steps and not by flights, that geographical
+knowledge reached the islands of the Atlantic (none of which were at a
+very great distance from the coast of Europe or from each other) at a
+comparatively early date, and stopped there until in Columbus there was
+found a man with faith strong enough to make the long flight beyond them
+to the unknown West.  And yet the philosophers, and later the
+cartographers, true to their instinct for this pedestrian kind of
+imagination, put mythical lands and islands to the westward of the known
+islands as though they were really trying to make a way, to sink stepping
+stones into the deep sea that would lead their thoughts across the
+unknown space.  In the Catalan map of the world, which was the standard
+example of cosmography in the early days of Columbus, most of these
+mythical islands are marked.  There was the island of Antilia, which was
+placed in 25 deg. 35' W., and was said to have been discovered by Don
+Roderick, the last of the Gothic kings of Spain, who fled there after
+his defeat by the Moors.  There was the island of the Seven Cities,
+which is sometimes identified with this Antilia, and was the object of a
+persistent belief or superstition on the part of the inhabitants of the
+Canary Islands.  They saw, or thought they saw, about ninety leagues to
+the westward, an island with high peaks and deep valleys.  The vision was
+intermittent; it was only seen in very clear weather, on some of those
+pure, serene days of the tropics when in the clear atmosphere distant
+objects appear to be close at hand.  In cloudy, and often in clear
+weather also, it was not to be seen at all; but the inhabitants of the
+Canaries, who always saw it in the same place, were so convinced of its
+reality that they petitioned the King of Portugal to allow them to go and
+take possession of it; and several expeditions were in fact despatched,
+but none ever came up with that fairy land.  It was called the island of
+the Seven Cities from a legend of seven bishops who had fled from Spain
+at the time of the Moorish conquest, and, landing upon this island, had
+founded there seven splendid cities.  There was the island of St.
+Brandan, called after the Saint who set out from Ireland in the sixth
+century in search of an island which always receded before his ships;
+this island was placed several hundred miles to the west of the Canaries
+on maps and charts through out the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
+There was the island of Brazil, to the west of Cape St. Vincent; the
+islands of Royllo, San Giorgio, and Isola di Mam; but they were all
+islands of dreams, seen by the eyes of many mariners in that imaginative
+time, but never trodden by any foot of man.  To Columbus, however, and
+the mariners of his day, they were all real places, which a man might
+reach by special good fortune or heroism, but which, all things
+considered, it was not quite worth the while of any man to attempt to
+reach.  They have all disappeared from our charts, like the Atlantis of
+Plato, 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 in
+the minds of men unless they have had some ghostly foundation; so it is
+possible that these fabled islands of the West were lands that had
+actually been seen by living eyes, although their position could never be
+properly laid down nor their identity assured.  Of all the wandering
+seamen who talked in the wayside taverns of Atlantic seaports, some must
+have had strange tales to tell; tales which sometimes may have been true,
+but were never believed.  Vague rumours hung about those shores, like
+spray and mist about a headland, of lands seen and lost again in the
+unknown and uncharted ocean.  Doubtless the lamp of faith, the inner
+light, burned in some of these storm-tossed men; but all they had was a
+glimpse here and there, seen for a moment and lost again; not the clear
+sight of faith by which Columbus steered his westward course.
+
+
+The actual outposts of western occupation, then, were the Azores, which
+were discovered by Genoese sailors in the pay of Portugal early in the
+fourteenth century; the Canaries, which had been continuously discovered
+and rediscovered since the Phoenicians occupied them and Pliny chose them
+for his Hesperides; and Madeira, which is believed to have been
+discovered by an Englishman under the following very romantic and moving
+circumstances.
+
+In the reign of Edward the Third a young man named Robert Machin fell in
+love with a beautiful girl, his superior in rank, Anne Dorset or d'Urfey
+by name.  She loved him also, but her relations did not love him; and
+therefore they had Machin imprisoned upon some pretext or other, and
+forcibly married the young lady to a nobleman who had a castle on the
+shores of the Bristol Channel.
+
+The marriage being accomplished, and the girl carried away by her
+bridegroom to his seat in the West, it was thought safe to release
+Machin.  Whereupon he collected several friends, and they followed the
+newly-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 the
+unhappy bride, and found her love unchanged, and if possible increased by
+the present misery she was in.  An escape was planned; and one day, when
+the girl and her groom were riding in the park, they set spurs to their
+horses, and galloped off to a place on the shores of the Bristol Channel
+where young Robert had a boat on the beach and a ship in the offing.
+They set sail immediately, intending to make for France, where the
+reunited lovers hoped to live happily; but it came on to blow when they
+were off the Lizard, and a southerly gale, which lasted for thirteen
+days, drove them far out of their course.
+
+The bride, from her joy and relief, fell into a state of the gloomiest
+despondency, believing that the hand of God was turned against her,
+and that their love would never be enjoyed.  The tempest fell on the
+fourteenth day, and at the break of morning the sea-worn company saw
+trees and land ahead of them.  In the sunrise they landed upon an island
+full of noble trees, about which flights of singing birds were hovering,
+and in which the sweetest fruits, the most lovely flowers, and the purest
+and most limpid waters abounded.  Machin and his bride and their friends
+made an encampment on a flowery meadow in a sheltered valley, where for
+three days they enjoyed the sweetness and rest of the shore and the
+companionship of all kinds of birds and beasts, which showed no signs of
+fear at their presence.  On the third day a storm arose, and raged for a
+night over the island; and in the morning the adventurers found that
+their ship was nowhere to be seen.  The despair of the little company was
+extreme, and was increased by the condition of poor Anne, upon whom
+terror and remorse again fell, and so preyed upon her mind that in three
+days she was dead.  Her lover, who had braved so much and won her so
+gallantly, was turned to stone by this misfortune.  Remorse and aching
+desolation oppressed him; from the moment of her death he scarcely ate
+nor 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 a
+wooden cross there, with a prayer that any Christians who might come to
+the island would build a chapel to Jesus the Saviour.  The rest of the
+party then repaired their little boat and put to sea; were cast upon the
+coast of Morocco, captured by the Moors, and thrown into prison.  With
+them in prison was a Spanish pilot named Juan de Morales, who listened
+attentively to all they could tell him about the situation and condition
+of the island, and who after his release communicated what he knew to
+Prince Henry of Portugal.  The island of Madeira was thus rediscovered in
+1418, and in 1425 was colonised by Prince Henry, who appointed as
+Governor Bartolomeo de Perestrello, whose daughter was afterwards to
+become the wife of Columbus.
+
+So much for the outposts of the Old World.  Of the New World, about the
+possibility of which Columbus is beginning to dream as he sails the
+Mediterranean, there was no knowledge and hardly any thought.  Though new
+in the thoughts of Columbus, it was very old in itself; generations of
+men had lived and walked and spoken and toiled there, ever since men came
+upon the earth; sun and shower, the thrill of the seasons, birth and life
+and death, had been visiting it for centuries and centuries.  And it is
+quite possible that, long before even the civilisation that produced
+Columbus was in its dawn, men from the Old World had journeyed there.
+There are two very old fragments of knowledge which indicate at least the
+possibility of a Western World of which the ancients had knowledge.
+There is a fragment, preserved from the fourth century before Christ, of
+a conversation between Silenus and Midas, King of Phrygia, in which
+Silenus correctly describes the Old World--Europe, Asia, and Africa--as
+being surrounded by the sea, but also describes, far to the west of it, a
+huge island, which had its own civilisation and its own laws, where the
+animals and the men were of twice our stature, and lived for twice our
+years.  There is also the story told by Plato of the island of Atlantis,
+which was larger than Africa and Asia together, and which in an
+earthquake disappeared beneath the waves, producing such a slime upon the
+surface that no ship was able to navigate the sea in that place.  This is
+the story which the priests of Sais told to Solon, and which was embodied
+in the sacred inscriptions in their temples.  It is strange that any one
+should think of this theory of the slime who had not seen or heard of the
+Sargasso Sea--that great bank of floating seaweed that the ocean currents
+collect 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 the
+colonisation of America; but the only race from the Old World which had
+almost certainly been there were the Scandinavians.  In the year 983 the
+coast of Greenland was visited by Eric the Red, the son of a Norwegian
+noble, who was banished for the crime of murder.  Some fifteen years
+later Eric's son Lief made an expedition with thirty-five men and a ship
+in the direction of the new land.  They came to a coast where there were
+nothing but ice mountains having the appearance of slate; this country
+they named Helluland--that is, Land of Slate.  This country is our
+Newfoundland.  Standing out to sea again, they reached a level wooded
+country with white sandy cliffs, which they called Markland, or Land of
+Wood, which is our Nova Scotia.  Next they reached an island east of
+Markland, where they passed the winter, and as one of their number who
+had wandered some distance inland had found vines and grapes, Lief named
+the country Vinland or Vine Land, which is the country we call New
+England.  The Scandinavians continued to make voyages to the West and
+South; and finally Thorfinn Karlsefne, an Icelander, made a great
+expedition in the spring of 1007 with ships and material for
+colonisation.  He made much progress to the southwards, and the Icelandic
+accounts of the climate and soil and characteristics of the country leave
+no doubt that Greenland and Nova Scotia were discovered and colonised at
+this time.
+
+It must be remembered, however, that then and in the lifetime of Columbus
+Greenland was supposed to--be a promontory of the coast of Europe, and
+was not connected in men's minds with a western continent.  Its early
+discovery has no bearing on the significance of Columbus's achievement,
+the greatness of which depends not on his having been the first man from
+the Old World to set foot upon the shores of the New, but on the fact
+that by pure faith and belief in his own purpose he did set out for and
+arrive in a world where no man of his era or civilisation had ever before
+set foot, or from which no wanderer who may have been blown there ever
+returned.  It is enough to claim for him the merit of discovery in the
+true sense of the word.  The New World was covered from the Old by a veil
+of distance, of time and space, of absence, invisibility, virtual
+non-existence; and he discovered it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+IN PORTUGAL
+
+There is no reason to believe that before his twenty-fifth year Columbus
+was anything more than a merchant or mariner, sailing before the mast,
+and joining one ship after another as opportunities for good voyages
+offered themselves.  A change took place later, probably after his
+marriage, when he began to adapt himself rapidly to a new set of
+surroundings, and to show his intrinsic qualities; but all the attempts
+that have been made to glorify him socially--attempts, it must be
+remembered, in which he himself and his sons were in after years the
+leaders--are entirely mistaken.  That strange instinct for consistency
+which makes people desire to see the outward man correspond, in terms of
+momentary and arbitrary credit, with the inner and hidden man of the
+heart, has in truth led to more biographical injustice than is fully
+realised.  If Columbus had been the man some of his biographers would
+like to make him out--the nephew or descendant of a famous French
+Admiral, educated at the University of Pavia, belonging to a family of
+noble birth and high social esteem in Genoa, chosen by King Rene to be
+the commander of naval expeditions, learned in scientific lore, in the
+classics, in astronomy and in cosmography, the friend and correspondent
+of Toscanelli and other learned scientists--we should find it hard indeed
+to forgive him the shifts and deceits that he practised.  It is far more
+interesting to think of him as a common craftsman, of a lowly condition
+and poor circumstances, who had to earn his living during the formative
+period of his life by the simplest and hardest labour of the hand.  The
+qualities that made him what he was were of a very simple kind, and his
+character owed its strength, not to any complexity or subtlety of
+training and education, but rather to that very bareness and simplicity
+of 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 one
+side.  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 gave
+to his idea, when once the seed of it had lodged in his mind, so much
+vigour in growth and room for expansion.  Think of him, then, at the age
+of twenty-five as a typical plebeian Genoese, bearing all the
+characteristic traits of his century and people--the spirit of adventure,
+the love of gold and of power, a spirit of mysticism, and more than a
+touch of crafty and elaborate dissimulation, when that should be
+necessary.
+
+He had been at sea for ten or eleven years, making voyages to and from
+Genoa, with an occasional spell ashore and plunge into the paternal
+affairs, when in the year 1476 he found himself on board a Genoese vessel
+which formed one of a convoy going, to Lisbon.  This convoy was attacked
+off Cape St. Vincent by Colombo, or Colomb, the famous French corsair, of
+whom Christopher himself has quite falsely been called a relative.  Only
+two of the Genoese vessels escaped, and one of these two was the ship
+which carried Columbus.  It arrived at Lisbon, where Columbus went ashore
+and took up his abode.
+
+This, so far as can be ascertained, is the truth about the arrival of
+Columbus in Portugal.  The early years of an obscure man who leaps into
+fame 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 most
+cases altogether unrecorded, but there is always that instinct, to which
+I have already referred, to make out that the circumstances of a man who
+late in life becomes great and remarkable were always, at every point in
+his career, remarkable also.  We love to trace the hand of destiny
+guiding her chosen people, protecting them from dangers, and preserving
+them for their great moment.  It is a pleasant study, and one to which
+the facts often lend themselves, but it leads to a vicious method of
+biography which obscures the truth with legends and pretences that have
+afterwards laboriously to be cleared away.  It was so in the case of
+Columbus.  Before his departure on his first voyage of discovery there is
+absolutely no temporary record of him except a few dates in notarial
+registers.  The circumstances of his life and his previous conditions
+were supplied afterwards by himself and his contemporaries; and both he
+and they saw the past in the light of the present, and did their best to
+make it fit a present so wonderful and miraculous.  The whole trend of
+recent research on the subject of Columbus has been unfortunately in the
+direction of proving the complete insincerity of his own speech and
+writings about his early life, and the inaccuracy of Las Casas writings
+his contemporary biographer, and the first historian of the West Indies.
+Those of my readers, then, who are inclined to be impatient with the
+meagreness of the facts with which I am presenting them, and the
+disproportionate amount of theory to fact with regard to these early
+years of Columbus, must remember three things.  First, that the only
+record of the early years of Columbus was written long after those years
+had passed away, and in circumstances which did not harmonise with them;
+second, that there is evidence, both substantive and presumptive, that
+much of those records, even though it came from the hands of Columbus and
+his friends, is false and must be discarded; and third, that the only way
+in which anything like the truth can be arrived at is by circumstantial
+and presumptive evidence with regard to dates, names, places, and events
+upon which the obscure life of Columbus impinged.  Columbus is known to
+have written much about himself, but very little of it exists or remains
+in his own handwriting.  It remains in the form of quotation by others,
+all of whom had their reasons for not representing quite accurately what
+was, it must be feared, not even itself a candid and accurate record.
+The evidence for these very serious statements is the subject of
+numberless volumes and monographs, which cannot be quoted here; for it is
+my privilege to reap the results, and not to reproduce the material, of
+the immense research and investigation to which in the last fifty years
+the life of Columbus has been subjected.
+
+
+We shall come to facts enough presently; in the meantime we have but the
+vaguest knowledge of what Columbus did in Lisbon.  The one technical
+possession which he obviously had was knowledge of the sea; he had also a
+head on his shoulders, and plenty of judgment and common sense; he had
+likely picked up some knowledge of cartography in his years at Genoa,
+since (having abandoned wool-weaving) he probably wished to make progress
+in the profession of the sea; and it is, therefore, believed that he
+picked up a living in Lisbon by drawing charts and maps.  Such a living
+would only be intermittent; a fact that is indicated by his periodic
+excursions to sea again, presumably when funds were exhausted.  There
+were other Genoese in Lisbon, and his own brother Bartholomew was with
+him there for a time.  He may actually have been there when Columbus
+arrived, but it was more probable that Columbus, the pioneer of the
+family, seeing a better field for his brother's talent in Lisbon than in
+Genoa, sent for him when he himself was established there.  This
+Bartholomew, of whom we shall see a good deal in the future, is merely an
+outline at this stage of the story; an outline that will later be filled
+up with human features and fitted with a human character; at present he
+is but a brother of Christopher, with a rather bookish taste, a better
+knowledge of cartography than Christopher possessed, and some little
+experience of the book-selling trade.  He too made charts in Lisbon, and
+sold books also, and no doubt between them the efforts of the brothers,
+supplemented by the occasional voyages of Christopher, obtained them a
+sufficient livelihood.  The social change, in the one case from the
+society of Genoese wool-weavers, and in the other from the company of
+merchant sailors, must have been very great; for there is evidence that
+they began to make friends and acquaintances among a rather different
+class than had been formerly accessible to them.  The change to a new
+country also and to a new language makes a deep impression at the age of
+twenty-five; and although Columbus in his sea-farings had been in many
+ports, and had probably picked up a knowledge both of Portuguese and of
+Spanish, his establishment in the Portuguese capital could not fail to
+enlarge his outlook upon life.
+
+There is absolutely no record of his circumstances in the first year of
+his life at Lisbon, so we may look once more into the glass of
+imagination and try to find a picture there.  It is very dim, very
+minute, very, very far away.  There is the little shop in a steep Lisbon
+street, somewhere near the harbour we may be sure, with the shadows of
+the houses lying sharp on the white sunlight of the street; the cool
+darkness of the shop, with its odour of vellum and parchment, its rolls
+of maps and charts; and somewhere near by the sounds and commotion of the
+wharves 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 to
+that, of the entrance to this harbour and the other; talk of the western
+islands too, of the western ocean, of the new astrolabe which the German
+Muller 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, with
+a view of the sun being quenched in the sea and travelling down into the
+unknown, 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.  Our
+knowledge of it depends on his own words as reported by Las Casas, and,
+like so much other knowledge similarly recorded, is not to be received
+with absolute certainty; but on the whole the balance of probability is
+in favour of its truth.  The words in which this voyage is recorded are
+given as a quotation from a letter of Columbus, and, stripped of certain
+obvious 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 to
+Columbus'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 been
+accepted by most of his biographers who have denied the truth of this
+statement is that, in the year 1492, when Columbus was addressing the
+King and Queen of Spain on his qualifications as a navigator, and when he
+wished to set forth his experience in a formidable light, he said nothing
+about this voyage, but merely described his explorations as having
+extended from Guinea on the south to England on the north.  A shrewd
+estimate of Columbus's character makes it indeed seem incredible that,
+if he had really been in Iceland, he should not have mentioned the fact
+on this occasion; and yet there is just one reason, also quite
+characteristic 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 and
+Newfoundland; and that, although by other navigators these lands were
+regarded as a part of the continent of Europe, he may have had some
+glimmerings of an idea that they were part of land and islands in the
+West; and he was much too jealous of his own reputation as the great and
+only originator of the project for voyaging to the West, to give away any
+hints 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 choice
+between regarding the story in the first place as a lie, or accepting it
+as truth, and putting down Columbus's silence about it on a later
+occasion to a rare instinct of judicious suppression.  There are other
+facts in his life, to which, we shall come later, that are in accordance
+with this theory.  There is no doubt, moreover, that Columbus had a very
+great experience of the sea, and was one of the greatest practical
+seamen, if not the greatest, that has ever lived; and it would be foolish
+to deny, except for the greatest reasons, that he made a voyage to the
+far North, which was neither unusual at the time nor a very great
+achievement for a seaman of his experience.
+
+Christopher returned from these voyages, of which we know nothing except
+the facts that he has given us, towards the end of 1477; and it was
+probably in the next year that an event very important in his life and
+career took place.  Hitherto there has been no whisper of love in that
+arduous career of wool-weaving, sailoring, and map-making; and it is not
+unlikely that his marriage represents the first inspiration of love in
+his 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 at
+Lisbon, where he began to find himself with some footing and place in the
+world, and where the prospect of at least a livelihood began to open out
+before him, his thoughts took that turn towards domesticity and family
+life which marks a moment in the development of almost every man.  And
+now, since he has at last to emerge from the misty environment of
+sea-spray that has veiled him so long from our intimate sight, we may
+take a close look at him as he was in this year 1478.
+
+Unlike the southern Italians, he was fair in colouring; a man rather
+above the middle height, large limbed, of a shapely breadth and
+proportion, and of a grave and dignified demeanour.  His face was ruddy,
+and inclined to be freckled under the exposure to the sun, his hair at
+this age still fair and reddish, although in a few years later it turned
+grey, and became white while he was still a young man.  His nose was
+slightly aquiline, his face long and rather full; his eyes of a clear
+blue, with sharply defined eyebrows--seamen's eyes, which get an
+unmistakable light in them from long staring into the sea distances.
+Altogether a handsome and distinguished-looking young man, noticeable
+anywhere, and especially among a crowd of swarthy Portuguese.  He was not
+a lively young man; on the contrary, his manner was rather heavy, and
+even at times inclined to be pompous; he had a very good opinion of
+himself, had the clear calculating head and tidy intellectual methods of
+the able mariner; was shrewd and cautious--in a word, took himself and
+the world very seriously.  A strictly conventional man, as the
+conventions of his time and race went; probably some of his gayer and
+lighter-hearted contemporaries thought him a dull enough dog, who would
+not join in a carouse or a gallant adventure, but would probably get the
+better of you if he could in any commercial deal.  He was a great
+stickler for the observances of religion; and never a Sunday or feast-day
+passed, when he was ashore, without finding him, like the dutiful son of
+the Church that he was, hearing Mass and attending at Benediction.  Not,
+indeed, a very attractive or inspiring figure of a man; not the man whose
+company one would likely have sought very much, or whose conversation one
+would have found very interesting.  A man rather whose character was cast
+in a large and plain mould, without those many facets which add so much
+to the brightness of human intercourse, and which attract and reflect the
+light 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 harbour
+at Lisbon towards the convent of Saints; walking gravely and firmly, with
+a dignified demeanour, with his best clothes on, and glad, for the
+moment, to be free of his sea acquaintances, and to be walking in the
+direction of that upper-class world after which he has a secret hankering
+in his heart.  There are a great many churches in Lisbon nearer his house
+where he might hear Mass on Sundays; but he prefers to walk up to the
+rich and fashionable convent of Saints, where everybody is well dressed,
+and where those kindling eyes of his may indulge a cool taste for
+feminine beauty.
+
+
+While the chapel bell is ringing other people are hurrying through the
+sunny Lisbon streets to Mass at the convent.  Among the fashionable
+throng are two ladies, one young, one middle-aged; they separate at the
+church door, and the younger one leaves her mother and takes her place in
+the convent choir.  This is Philippa Moniz, who lives alone with her
+mother in Lisbon, and amuses herself with her privileges as a cavaliera,
+or dame, in one of the knightly orders attached to the rich convent of
+Saints.  Perhaps she has noticed the tall figure of the young Genoese in
+the strangers' part of the convent, perhaps not; but his roving blue eye
+has noticed her, and much is to come of it.  The young Genoese continues
+his regular and exemplary attendance at the divine Office, the young lady
+is zealous in observing her duties in the choir; some kind friend
+introduces them; the audacious young man makes his proposals, and,
+in spite of the melancholy protests of the young lady's exceedingly
+respectable and highly-connected relatives, the young people are
+betrothed and actually married before the elders have time to recover
+breath from their first shock at the absurdity of the suggestion.
+
+There is a very curious fact in connection with his marriage that is
+worthy of our consideration.  In all his voluminous writings, letters,
+memoirs, and journals, Columbus never once mentions his wife.  His sole
+reference 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 repose
+of the souls of his father, his mother, and his wife.  He who wrote so
+much, 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 silence
+on his part about everything connected with his marriage and his wife.
+I like to think that it was because this marriage, which incidentally
+furnished him with one of the great impulses of his career, was in itself
+placid and uneventful, and belongs to that mass of happy days that do not
+make history.  Columbus was not a passionate man.  I think that love had
+a very small place in his life, and that the fever of passion was with
+him brief and soon finished with; but I am sure he was affectionate, and
+grateful for any affection and tenderness that were bestowed upon him.
+He was much away too, at first on his voyages to Guinea and afterwards on
+the business of his petitions to the Portuguese and Spanish Courts; and
+one need not be a cynic to believe that these absences did nothing to
+lessen the affection between him and his wife.  Finally, their married
+life was a short one; she died within ten years, and I am sure did not
+outlive his affections; so that there may be something solemn, some
+secret memories of the aching joy and sorrow that her coming into his
+life and passing out of it brought him, in this silence of Columbus
+concerning his wife.
+
+
+This marriage was, in the vulgar idiom of to-day, a great thing for
+Columbus.  It not only brought him a wife; it brought him a home,
+society, recognition, and a connection with maritime knowledge and
+adventure that was of the greatest importance to him.  Philippa Moniz
+Perestrello was the daughter of Bartolomeo Perestrello, who had been
+appointed hereditary governor of the island of Porto Santo on its
+colonisation by Prince Henry in 1425 and who had died there in 1457.
+Her grandfather was Gil Ayres Moniz, who was secretary to the famous
+Constable Pereira in the reign of John I, and is chiefly interesting to
+us because he founded the chapel of the "Piedad" in the Carmelite
+Monastery at Lisbon, in which the Moniz family had the right of interment
+for ever, and in which the body of Philippa, after her brief pilgrimage
+in this world was over, duly rested; and whence her son ordered its
+disinterment and re-burial in the church of Santa Clara in San Domingo.
+Philippa's mother, Isabel Moniz, was the second or third wife of
+Perestrello; and after her husband's death she had come to live in
+Lisbon.  She had another daughter, Violante by name, who had married one
+Mulier, or Muliartes, in Huelva; and a son named Bartolomeo, who was the
+heir to the governorship of Porto Santo; but as he was only a little boy
+at the time of his father's death his mother ceded the governorship to
+Pedro Correa da Cunha, who had married Iseult, the daughter of old
+Bartolomeo by his first wife.  The governorship was thus kept in the
+family during the minority of Bartolomeo, who resumed it later when he
+came of age.
+
+This Isabel, mother of Philippa, was a very important acquaintance indeed
+for Columbus.  It must be noted that he left the shop and poor
+Bartholomew to take care of themselves or each other, and went to live in
+the house of his mother-in-law.  This was a great social step for the
+wool-weaver of Genoa; and it was probably the result of a kind of
+compromise with his wife's horrified relatives at the time of her
+marriage.  It was doubtless thought impossible for her to go and live
+over the chart-maker's shop; and as you can make charts in one house as
+well as another, it was decided that Columbus should live with his
+mother-in-law, and follow his trade under her roof.  Columbus, in fact,
+seems to have been fortunate in securing the favour of his female
+relatives-in-law, and it was probably owing to the championship of
+Philippa's mother that a marriage so much to his advantage ever took
+place at all.  His wife had many distinguished relatives in the
+neighbourhood of Lisbon; her cousin was archbishop at this very time;
+but I can neither find that their marriage was celebrated with the
+archiepiscopal blessing or that he ever got much help or countenance from
+the male members of the Moniz family.  Archbishops even today do not much
+like their pretty cousins marrying a man of Columbus's position, whether
+you call him a woolweaver, a sailor, a map-maker, or a bookseller.
+"Adventurer" is perhaps the truest description of him; and the word was
+as much distrusted in the best circles in Lisbon in the fifteenth century
+as it is to-day.
+
+Those of his new relatives, however, who did get to know him soon began
+to see that Philippa had not made such a bad bargain after all.  With the
+confidence and added belief in himself that the recognition and
+encouragement of those kind women brought him, Columbus's mind and
+imagination expanded; and I think it was probably now that he began to
+wonder if all his knowledge and seamanship, his quite useful smattering
+of cartography and cosmography, his real love of adventure, and all his
+dreams and speculations concerning the unknown and uncharted seas, could
+not be turned to some practical account.  His wife's step-sister Iseult
+and her husband had, moreover, only lately returned to Lisbon from their
+long residence in Porto Santo; young Bartolomeo Perestrello, her brother,
+was reigning there in their stead, and no doubt sending home interesting
+accounts of ships and navigators that put in at Madeira; and all the
+circumstances would tend to fan the spark of Columbus's desire to have
+some adventure and glory of his own on the high seas.  He would wish
+to show all these grandees, with whom his marriage had brought
+him acquainted, that you did not need to be born a Perestrello
+--or Pallastrelli, as the name was in its original Italian form--to make
+a name in the world.  Donna Isabel, moreover, was never tired of talking
+about Porto Santo and her dead husband, and of all the voyages and sea
+adventures that had filled his life.  She was obviously a good teller of
+tales, and had all the old history and traditions of Madeira at her
+fingers' ends; the story of Robert Machin and Anne Dorset; the story of
+the isle of Seven Cities; and the black cloud on the horizon that turned
+out in the end to be Madeira.  She told Christopher how her husband, when
+he 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 eaten
+up 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 and
+ambition.  The great thing in those days was to discover something, if it
+was only a cape down the African coast or a rock in the Atlantic.  The
+key to fame, which later took the form of mechanical invention, and later
+still of discovery in the region of science, took the form then of actual
+discovery of parts of the earth's surface.  The thing was in the air;
+news was coming in every day of something new seen, something new
+charted.  If others had done so much, and the field was still half
+unexplored, could not he do something also?  It was not an unlikely
+thought 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, which
+probably took place very soon after his marriage--that is to say, in the
+year 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 and
+skill as a navigator must by this time have raised him above the rank of
+an ordinary seaman; and in that case nothing would be more natural than
+that he should take his young wife with him to visit her brother
+Bartolomeo, and to see the family property.  It is one of the charms of
+the seaman's profession that he travels free all over the world; and if
+he has no house or other fixed possessions that need to be looked after
+he 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 the
+Atlantic coast, would provide Columbus with an excellent base from which
+to make other voyages; so it was probably with a heart full of eager
+anticipation for the future, and sense of quiet happiness in the present,
+that in the year 1479 Signor Cristoforo Colombo (for he did not yet call
+himself Senor Cristoval Colon) set out for Porto Santo--a lonely rock
+some miles north of Madeira.  Its southern shore is a long sweeping bay
+of white sand, with a huddle of sand-hills beyond, and cliffs and peaks
+of basalt streaked with lava fringing the other shores.  When Columbus
+and 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 worked
+in the mills and sugar-fields; the mills themselves, with the cultivated
+sugar-fields behind them; and the vineyards, with the dwarf Malmsey vines
+pegged down to the ground, which Prince Henry had imported from Candia
+fifty years before.  The forest of dragon-trees that had once covered the
+island was nearly all gone.  The wood had all been used either for
+building, making boats, or for fuel; and on the fruit of the few trees
+that were left a herd of pigs was fattened.  There was frequent
+communication by boat with Madeira, which was the chief of all the
+Atlantic islands, and the headquarters of the sugar trade; and Porto
+Santo itself was a favourite place of call for passing ships.  So that it
+was by no means lonely for Christopher Columbus and his wife, even if
+they 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 of
+this time at least he must have been at sea.  I think it not unlikely
+that it was the happiest time of his life.  He was removed from the
+uncomfortable environment of people who looked down upon him because of
+his obscure birth; he was in an exquisite climate; and living by the
+sea-shore, as a sailor loves to do; he got on well with Bartolomeo, who
+was no doubt glad enough of the company of this grave sailor who had
+seen so much and had visited so many countries; above all he had his
+wife there, his beautiful, dear, proud Philippa, all to himself, and out
+of reach of those abominable Portuguese noblemen who paid so much
+attention to her and so little to him, and made him so jealous; and
+there was a whispered promise of some one who was coming to make him
+happier 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 the
+white shores of the great sweeping bay, with the glorious purple
+Atlantic sparkling and thundering on the sands, as it sparkles and
+thunders to-day.  A place empty and vivid, swept by the mellow winds;
+silent, but for the continuous roar of the sea; still, but for the
+scuttling of the rabbits among the sand-hills and the occasional passage
+of a figure from the mills up to the sugar-fields; but brilliant with
+sunshine and colour and the bright environment of the sea.  It was upon
+such scenes that he looked during this happy pause in his life; they
+were the setting of Philippa's dreams and anxieties as the time of
+motherhood drew near; and it was upon them that their little son first
+opened his eyes, and with the boom of the Atlantic breakers that he
+first mingled his small. voice.
+
+It is but a moment of rest and happiness; for Christopher the scene is
+soon changed, and he must set forth upon a voyage again, while Philippa
+is left, with a new light in her eyes, to watch over the atom that wakes
+and weeps and twists and struggles and mews, and sleeps again, in her
+charge.  Sleep well, little son!  Yet a little while, and you too shall
+make voyages and conquests; new worlds lie waiting for you, who are so
+greatly astonished at this Old World; far journeys by land and sea, and
+the company of courtiers and kings; and much honour from the name and
+deeds of him who looked into your eyes with a laugh and, a sob, and was
+so very large and overshadowing!  But with her who quietly sings to you,
+whose hands soothe and caress you, in whose eyes shines that wonderful
+light of mother's love--only a little while longer.
+
+
+While Diego, as this son was christened, was yet only a baby in his
+cradle, Columbus made an important voyage to the, coast of Guinea as all
+the western part of the African continent was then called.  His solid and
+practical qualities were by this time beginning to be recognised even by
+Philippa's haughty family, and it was possibly through the interest of
+her uncle, Pedro Noronhas, a distinguished minister of the King of
+Portugal, that he got the command of a caravel in the expedition which
+set 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 ruined
+remains of a fort; and it is this fort, the fortress of St. George, that
+the expedition was sent out to erect.  On the 11th of December the little
+fleet set sail for [from?  D.W.] Lisbon--ten caravels, and two barges or
+lighters laden with the necessary masonry and timber-work for the fort.
+Columbus was in command of one of the caravels, and the whole fleet was
+commanded by the Portuguese Admiral Azumbaga.  They would certainly see
+Porto Santo and Madeira on their way south, although they did not call
+there; and Philippa was no doubt looking out for them, and watching from
+the sand-hills the fleet of twelve ships going by in the offing.  They
+called at Cape Verde, where the Admiral was commissioned to present one
+of the negro kings with some horses and hawks, and incidentally to obtain
+his assent to a treaty.  On the 19th of January 1482, having made a very
+good voyage, they, landed just beyond the Cape of the Three Points, and
+immediately set about the business of the expedition.
+
+There was a state reception, with Admiral Azumbaga walking in front in
+scarlet and brocade, followed by his captains, Columbus among them,
+dressed in gorgeous tunics and cloaks with golden collars and, well
+hidden beneath their finery, good serviceable cuirasses.  The banner of
+Portugal was ceremoniously unfurled and dis played from the top of a tall
+tree.  An altar was erected and consecrated by the chaplain to the
+expedition, and a mass was sung for the repose of the soul of Prince
+Henry.  The Portugal contingent were then met by Caramansa, the king of
+the country, who came, surrounded by a great guard of blacks armed with
+assegais, their bodies scantily decorated with monkey fur and palm
+leaves.  The black monarch must have presented a handsome appearance,
+for his arms and legs were decked with gold bracelets and rings, he had
+a kind of dog-collar fitted with bells round his neck, and some pieces of
+gold 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 the
+wine of Oporto, the treaty was soon concluded, and a very shrewd stroke
+of business accomplished for the King of Portugal; for it gave him the
+sole right of exchanging gaudy rubbish from Portugal for the precious
+gold of Ethiopia.  When the contents of the two freight-ships had been
+unloaded they were beached and broken up by the orders of King John, who
+wished it to be thought that they had been destroyed in the whirlpools of
+that dangerous sea, and that the navigation of those rough waters was
+only safe for the caravels of the Navy.  The fort was built in twenty
+days, and the expedition returned, laden with gold and ivory; Admiral
+Azumbaga remained behind in command of the garrison.
+
+This voyage, which was a bold and adventurous one for the time, may be
+regarded as the first recognition of Columbus as a man of importance,
+for the expedition was manned and commanded by picked men; so it was for
+all reasons a very fortunate one for him, although the possession of the
+dangerous secret as to the whereabouts of this valuable territory might
+have 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 been
+sailing 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 a
+difficult piece of navigation such as he loved; and on the long dreamy
+days of the voyage home, the caravels furrowing the blue Atlantic before
+the steady trade-wind, he determined that he would find some way of
+putting his knowledge to use, and of earning distinction for himself.
+Living, as he had been lately, in Atlantic seaports overlooking the
+western ocean it is certain that the idea of discovering something in
+that direction occupied him more and more.  What it was that he was to
+discover was probably very vague in his mind, and was likely not
+designated by any name more exact than "lands."  In after years he tried
+to show that it was a logical and scientific deduction which led him to
+go 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 such
+thing.  He had no exact scientific knowledge at this date.  His map
+making 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; and
+there gradually grew in his mind the intuition or conviction--I refuse to
+call it an opinion--that, over that blue verge of the West, there was
+land to be found.  How this seed of conviction first lodged in his mind
+it would be impossible to say; in any one of the steps through which we
+have followed him, it might have taken its root; but there it was,
+beginning to occupy his mind very seriously indeed; and he began to look
+out, as all men do who wish to act upon faith or conviction which they
+cannot demonstrate to another person, for some proofs that his conviction
+was a sound one.
+
+And now, just at the moment when he needs it most, comes an incident
+that, to a man of his religious and superstitious habit, seems like the
+pointing finger of Providence.  The story of the shipwrecked pilot has
+been discredited by nearly all the modern biographers of Columbus,
+chiefly because it does not fit in with their theory of his scientific
+studies and the alleged bearing of these on his great discovery; but it
+is given by Las Casas, who says that it was commonly believed by
+Columbus's entourage at Hispaniola.  Moreover, amid all the tangles of
+theory and argument in which the achievement of Columbus has been
+involved, this original story of shipwrecked mariners stands out with a
+strength and simplicity that cannot be entirely disregarded by the
+historian who permits himself some light of imagination by which to work.
+It is more true to life and to nature that Columbus should have received
+his last impulse, the little push that was to set his accumulated energy
+and determination in motion, from a thing of pure chance, than that he
+should have built his achievement up in a logical superstructure resting
+on a basis of profound and elaborate theory.
+
+In the year following Columbus's return from Guinea, then, he, and
+probably his family, had gone over to Madeira from Porto Santo, and were
+staying 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 five
+sick mariners.  Columbus, who was probably never far from the shore at
+Funchal when a ship came into the harbour, happened to see them.  Struck
+by their appearance, and finding them in a quite destitute and grievously
+invalid condition, he entertained them in his house until some other
+provision could be made for them.  But they were quite worn out.  One by
+one they succumbed to weakness and illness, until one only, a pilot from
+Huelva, was left.  He also was sinking, and when it was obvious that his
+end was near at hand, he beckoned his good host to his bedside, and, in
+gratitude for all his kindness, imparted to him some singular knowledge
+which he had acquired, and with which, if he had lived, he had hoped to
+win distinction for himself.
+
+The pilot's story, in so far as it has been preserved, and taking the
+mean of four contemporary accounts of it, was as follows.  This man,
+whose name is doubtful, but is given as Alonso Sanchez, was sailing on a
+voyage from one of the Spanish ports to England or Flanders.  He had a
+crew of seventeen men.  When they had got well out to sea a severe
+easterly gale sprung up, which drove the vessel before it to the
+westward.  Day after day and week after week, for twenty-eight days, this
+gale continued.  The islands were all left far behind, and the ship was
+carried into a region far beyond the limits of the ocean marked on the
+charts.  At last they sighted some islands, upon one of which they landed
+and 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 of
+which that has remained being that the natives went naked; and, the wind
+having changed, set forth on his homeward voyage.  This voyage was long
+and painful.  The wind did not hold steady from the west; the pilot and
+his crew had a very hazy notion of where they were; their dead reckoning
+was confused; their provisions fell short; and one by one the crew
+sickened 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 ship
+short-handed and in their enfeebled condition, at last made the island of
+Madeira, and cast anchor in the beautiful bay of Funchal, only to die
+there.  All these things we may imagine the dying man relating in
+snatches to his absorbed listener; who felt himself to be receiving a
+pearl of knowledge to be guarded and used, now that its finder must
+depart upon the last and longest voyage of human discovery.  Such
+observations as he had made--probably a few figures giving the bearings
+of stars, an account of dead reckoning, and a quite useless and
+inaccurate chart or map--the pilot gave to his host; then, having
+delivered his soul of its secret, he died.  This is the story; not an
+impossible or improbable one in its main outlines.  Whether the pilot
+really landed on one of the Antilles is extremely doubtful, although it
+is possible.  Superstitious and storm-tossed sailors in those days were
+only too ready to believe that they saw some of the fabled islands of the
+Atlantic; and it is quite possible that the pilot simply announced that
+he had seen land, and that the details as to his having actually set foot
+upon it were added later.  That does not seem to me important in so far
+as it concerns Columbus.  Whether it were true or not, the man obviously
+believed it; and to the mind of Columbus, possessed with an idea and a
+blind faith in something which could not be seen, the whole incident
+would appear in the light of a supernatural sign.  The bit of paper or
+parchment with the rude drawing on it, even although it were the drawing
+of a thing imagined and not of a thing seen, would still have for him a
+kind of authority that he would find it hard to ignore.  It seems
+unnecessary to disbelieve this story.  It is obviously absurd to regard
+it as the sole origin of Columbus's great idea; it probably belongs to
+that order of accidents, small and unimportant in themselves, which are
+so often associated with the beginnings of mighty events.  Walking on the
+shore at Madeira or Porto Santo, his mind brooding on the great and
+growing idea, Columbus would remember one or two other instances which,
+in the light of his growing conviction and know ledge, began to take on a
+significant 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 of
+the island.  He had seen a piece of wood of a very dark colour curiously
+carved, but not with any tool of metal; and some great canes had also
+come ashore, so big that, every joint would hold a gallon of wine.  These
+canes, which were utterly unlike any thing known in Europe or the islands
+of the Atlantic, had been looked upon as such curiosities that they had
+been sent to the King at Lisbon, where they remained, and where Columbus
+himself afterwards saw them.  Two other stories, which he heard also at
+this time, went to strengthen his convictions.  One was the tale of
+Martin Vincenti, a pilot in the Portuguese Navy, who had found in the
+sea, four hundred and twenty leagues to the west of Cape St. Vincent,
+another piece of wood, curiously carved, that had evidently not been
+laboured with an iron instrument.  Columbus also remembered that the
+inhabitants of the Azores had more than once found upon their coasts the
+trunks of huge pine-trees, and strangely shaped canoes carved out of
+single logs; and, most significant of all, the people of Flares had taken
+from the water the bodies of two dead men, whose faces were of a strange
+broad shape, and whose features differed from those of any known race of
+mankind.  All these objects, it was supposed, were brought by westerly
+winds to the shores of Europe; it was not till long afterwards, when the
+currents of the Atlantic came to be studied, that the presence of such
+flotsam came to be attributed to the ocean currents, deflected by the
+Cape of Good Hope and gathered in the Gulf of Mexico, which are sprayed
+out across the Atlantic.
+
+The idea once fixed in his mind that there was land at a not impossible
+distance to the west, and perhaps a sea-road to the shores of Asia
+itself, the next thing to be done, was to go and discover it.  Rather a
+formidable task for a man without money, a foreigner in a strange
+land, 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 of
+the art and craft of seamanship, a fearless spirit of adventure, and an
+inner light!  Some one else would have to be convinced before anything
+could be done; somebody who would provide ships and men and money and
+provisions.  Altogether rather a large order; for it was not an unusual
+thing in those days for master mariners, tired of the shore, to suggest
+to some grandee or other the desirability of fitting out a ship or two to
+go in search of the isle of St. Brandon, or to look up Antilia, or the
+island of the Seven Cities.  It was very hard to get an audience even for
+such a reasonable scheme as that; but to suggest taking a flotilla
+straight out to the west and into the Sea of Darkness, down that curving
+hill of the sea which it might be easy enough to slide down, but up which
+it was known that no ship could ever climb again, was a thing that hardly
+any serious or well-informed person would listen to.  A young man from
+Genoa, without a knowledge either of the classics or of the Fathers, and
+with no other argument except his own fixed belief and some vague talk
+about bits of wood and shipwrecked mariners, was not the person to
+inspire the capitalists of Portugal.  Yet the thing had to be done.
+Obviously it could not be done at Porto Santo, where there were no ships
+and no money.  Influence must be used; and Columbus knew that his
+proposals, if they were to have even a chance of being listened to, must
+be presented in some high-flown and elaborate form, giving reasons and
+offering inducements and quoting authorities.  He would have to get some
+one to help him in that; he would have to get up some scientific facts;
+his brother Bartholomew could help him, and some of those disagreeable
+relatives-in-law must also be pressed into the service of the Idea.
+Obviously the first thing was to go back to Lisbon; which accordingly
+Columbus did, about the year 1483.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Christopher Columbus, Volume 1, by Filson Young
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+
+                         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 New
+World I have thought of you and your difficult work in Ireland; and I
+have said to myself, "What a time he would have had if be had been
+Viceroy of the Indies in 1493!"  There, if ever, was the chance for a
+Department such as yours; and there, if anywhere, was the place for the
+Economic Man.  Alas!  there war only one of him; William Ires or Eyre, by
+name, from the county Galway; and though he fertilised the soil he did it
+with his blood and bones.  A wonderful chance; and yet you see what came
+of it all.  It would perhaps be stretching truth too far to say that you
+are trying to undo some of Columbus's work, and to stop up the hole he
+made in Ireland when be found a channel into which so much of what was
+best in the Old Country war destined to flow; for you and be have each
+your places in the great circle of Time and Compensation, and though you
+may seem to oppose one another across the centuries you are really
+answering the same call and working in the same vineyard.  For we all set
+out to discover new worlds; and they are wise who realise early that
+human nature has roots that spread beneath the ocean bed, that neither
+latitude nor longitude nor time itself can change it to anything richer
+or stranger than what it is, and that furrows ploughed in it are furrows
+ploughed in the sea sand.  Columbus tried to pour the wine of
+civilisation into very old bottles; you, more wisely, are trying to pour
+the old wine of our country into new bottles.  Yet there is no great
+unlikeness between the two tasks: it is all a matter of bottling; the
+vintage is the same, infinite, inexhaustible, and as punctual as the sun
+and the seasons.  It was Columbus's weakness as an administrator that he
+thought the bottle was everything; it is your strength that you care for
+the 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, to
+which public credit is awarded too often in an inverse proportion to the
+labours expended.  One group of historians, labouring in the obscurest
+depths, dig and prepare the ground, searching and sifting the documentary
+soil with infinite labour and over an area immensely wide.  They are
+followed by those scholars and specialists in history who give their
+lives to the study of a single period, and who sow literature in the
+furrows of research prepared by those who have preceded them.  Last of
+all comes the essayist, or writer pure and simple, who reaps the harvest
+so laboriously prepared.  The material lies all before him; the documents
+have been arranged, the immense contemporary fields of record and
+knowledge examined and searched for stray seeds of significance that may
+have blown over into them; the perspective is cleared for him, the
+relation of his facts to time and space and the march of human
+civilisation duly established; he has nothing to do but reap the field of
+harvest where it suits him, grind it in the wheels of whatever machinery
+his art is equipped with, and come before the public with the finished
+product.  And invariably in this unequal partnership he reaps most richly
+who reaps latest.
+
+I am far from putting this narrative forward as the fine and ultimate
+product of all the immense labour and research of the historians of
+Columbus; but I am anxious to excuse myself for my apparent presumption
+in venturing into a field which might more properly be occupied by the
+expert historian.  It would appear that the double work of acquiring the
+facts of a piece of human history and of presenting them through the
+medium of literature can hardly ever be performed by one and the same
+man.  A lifetime must be devoted to the one, a year or two may suffice
+for the other; and an entirely different set of qualities must be
+employed in the two tasks.  I cannot make it too clear that I make no
+claim to have added one iota of information or one fragment of original
+research to the expert knowledge regarding the life of Christopher
+Columbus; and when I add that the chief collection of facts and documents
+relating to the subject, the 'Raccolta Columbiana,'--[Raccolta di
+Documenti e Studi Publicati dalla R. Commissione Colombiana, &c.  Auspice
+il Ministero della Publica Istruzione.  Rome, 1892-4.]--is a work
+consisting of more than thirty folio volumes, the general reader will be
+the more indulgent to me.  But when a purely human interest led me some
+time ago to look into the literature of Columbus, I was amazed to find
+what seemed to me a striking disproportion between the extent of the
+modern historians' work on that subject and the knowledge or interest in
+it displayed by what we call the general reading public.  I am surprised
+to find how many well-informed people there are whose knowledge of
+Columbus is comprised within two beliefs, one of them erroneous and the
+other doubtful: that he discovered America, and performed a trick with
+an egg.  Americans, I think, are a little better informed on the subject
+than the English; perhaps because the greater part of modern critical
+research on the subject of Columbus has been the work of Americans.
+It is to bridge the immense gap existing between the labours of the
+historians and the indifference of the modern reader, between the
+Raccolta Columbiana, in fact, and the story of the egg, that I have
+written my narrative.
+
+It is customary and proper to preface a work which is based entirely on
+the labours of other people with an acknowledgment of the sources whence
+it is drawn; and yet in the case of Columbus I do not know where to
+begin.  In one way I am indebted to every serious writer who has even
+remotely concerned himself with the subject, from Columbus himself and
+Las Casas down to the editors of the Raccolta.  The chain of historians
+has been so unbroken, the apostolic succession, so to speak, has passed
+with its heritage so intact from generation to generation, that the
+latest historian enshrines in his work the labours of all the rest.
+Yet there are necessarily some men whose work stands out as being more
+immediately seizable than that of others; in the period of whose care the
+lamp of inspiration has seemed to burn more brightly.  In a matter of
+this kind I cannot pretend to be a judge, but only to state my own
+experience and indebtedness; and in my work I have been chiefly helped by
+Las 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 by
+the writings of modern workers.  To have myself gone back to original
+sources, even if I had been competent to do so, would have been in the
+case of Columbian research but a waste of time and a doing over again
+what has been done already with patience, diligence, and knowledge.  The
+historians have been committed to the austere task of finding out and
+examining every fact and document in connection with their subject; and
+many of these facts and documents are entirely without human interest
+except in so far as they help to establish a date, a name, or a sum of
+money.  It has been my agreeable and lighter task to test and assay the
+masses of bed-rock fact thus excavated by the historians for traces of
+the particular ore which I have been seeking.  In fact I have tried to
+discover, from a reverent examination of all these monographs, essays,
+histories, memoirs, and controversies concerning what Christopher
+Columbus did, what Christopher Columbus was; believing as I do that any
+labour by which he can be made to live again, and from the dust of more
+than four hundred years be brought visibly to the mind's eye, will not be
+entirely without use and interest.  Whether I have succeeded in doing so
+or not I cannot be the judge; I can only say that the labour of
+resuscitating a man so long buried beneath mountains of untruth and
+controversy has some times been so formidable as to have seemed hopeless.
+And yet one is always tempted back by the knowledge that Christopher
+Columbus is not only a name, but that the human being whom we so describe
+did actually once live and walk in the world; did actually sail and look
+upon seas where we may also sail and look; did stir with his feet the
+indestructible dust of this old Earth, and centre in himself, as we all
+do, the whole interest and meaning of the Universe.  Truly the most
+commonplace fact, yet none the less amazing; and often when in the dust
+of documents he has seemed most dead and unreal to me I have found
+courage from the entertainment of some deep or absurd reflection; such as
+that he did once undoubtedly, like other mortals, blink and cough and
+blow his nose.  And if my readers could realise that fact throughout
+every 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 modern
+writer on Columbus--and modern research on the history of Columbus is
+only thirty years old--I owe to the labours of Mr. Henry Harrisse, the
+chief of modern Columbian historians, the indebtedness of the gold-miner
+to the gold-mine.  In the matters of the Toscanelli correspondence and
+the early years of Columbus I have followed more closely Mr. Henry
+Vignaud, whose work may be regarded as a continuation and reexamination--
+in some cases destructive--of that of Mr. Harrisse.  Mr. Vignaud's work
+is happily not yet completed; we all look forward eagerly to the
+completion of that part of his 'Etudes Critiques' dealing with the second
+half of the Admiral's life; and Mr. Vignaud seems to me to stand higher
+than all modern workers in this field in the patient and fearless
+discovery of the truth regarding certain very controversial matters,
+and also in ability to give a sound and reasonable interpretation to
+those obscurer facts or deductions in Columbus's life that seem doomed
+never to be settled by the aid of documents alone.  It may be unseemly in
+me not to acknowledge indebtedness to Washington Irving,  but I cannot
+conscientiously do so.  If I had been writing ten or fifteen years ago I
+might have taken his work seriously; but it is impossible that anything
+so one-sided, so inaccurate, so untrue to life, and so profoundly dull
+could continue to exist save in the absence of any critical knowledge or
+light on the subject.  All that can be said for him is that he kept the
+lamp of interest in Columbus alive for English readers during the period
+that preceded the advent of modern critical research.  Mr. Major's
+edition' of Columbus's letters has been freely consulted by me, as it
+must be by any one interested in the subject.  Professor Justin Winsor's
+work has provided an invaluable store of ripe scholarship in matters of
+cosmography and geographical detail; Sir Clements Markham's book, by far
+the most trustworthy of modern English works on the subject, and a
+valuable record of the established facts in Columbus's life, has proved a
+sound guide in nautical matters; while the monograph of Mr. Elton, which
+apparently did not promise much at first, since the author has followed
+some untrustworthy leaders as regards his facts, proved to be full of a
+fragrant charm produced by the writer's knowledge of and interest in sub-
+tropical vegetation; and it is delightfully filled with the names of gums
+and spices.  To Mr. Vignaud I owe special thanks, not only for the
+benefits of his research and of his admirable works on Columbus, but also
+for personal help and encouragement.  Equally cordial thanks are due to
+Mr. John Boyd Thacher,  whose work, giving as it does so large a
+selection of the Columbus documents both in facsimile, transliteration,
+and translation, is of the greatest service to every English writer on
+the subject of Columbus.  It is the more to be regretted, since the
+documentary part of Mr. Thacher's work is so excellent, that in his
+critical studies he should have seemed to ignore some of the more
+important results of modern research.  I am further particularly indebted
+to Mr. Thacher and to his publishers, Messrs.  Putnam's Sons, for
+permission to reproduce certain illustrations in his work, and to avail
+myself also of his copies and translations of original Spanish and
+Italian documents.  I have to thank Commendatore Guido Biagi, the keeper
+of the Laurentian Library in Florence, for his very kind help and letters
+of introduction to Italian librarians; Mr. Raymond Beazley, of Merton
+College, Oxford, for his most helpful correspondence; and Lord Dunraven
+for so kindly bringing, in the interests of my readers, his practical
+knowledge of navigation and seamanship to bear on the first voyage of
+Columbus.  Finally my work has been helped and made possible by many
+intimate and personal kindnesses which, although they are not specified,
+are not the less deeply acknowledged.
+
+September 1906.
+
+
+
+                                 CONTENTS
+
+
+THE INNER LIGHT
+
+BOOK I
+
+
+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
+
+
+
+BOOK 2.
+
+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
+
+BOOK 3.
+
+I         THE ENCHANTED ISLANDS
+
+II        THE EARTHLY PARADISE
+
+III       THE VOYAGE HOME
+
+
+
+BOOK 4.
+
+IV        THE HOUR OF TRIUMPH
+
+V         GREAT EXPECTATIONS
+
+VI        THE SECOND VOYAGE
+
+VII       THE EARTHLY PARADISE REVISITED
+
+
+
+DESPERATE REMEDIES
+
+BOOK 5.
+
+I         THE VOYAGE TO CUBA
+
+II        THE CONQUEST OF ESPANOLA
+
+III       UPS AND DOWNS
+
+IV        IN SPAIN AGAIN
+
+
+
+BOOK 6.
+
+V         THE THIRD VOYAGE
+
+VI        AN INTERLUDE
+
+VII       THE THIRD VOYAGE (continued)
+
+
+
+TOWARDS THE SUNSET
+
+BOOK 7.
+
+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
+
+
+
+BOOK 8.
+
+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 a
+symbol of wonder as the mind can conceive.  Beneath his feet are the
+stones and grasses of an element that is his own, natural to him, in some
+degree belonging to him, at any rate accepted by him.  He has place and
+condition there.  Above him arches a world of immense void, fleecy
+sailing clouds, infinite clear blueness, shapes that change and dissolve;
+his day comes out of it, his source of light and warmth marches across
+it, night falls from it; showers and dews also, and the quiet influence
+of stars.  Strange that impalpable element must be, and for ever
+unattainable by him; yet with its gifts of sun and shower, its furniture
+of winged life that inhabits also on the friendly soil, it has links and
+partnerships with life as he knows it and is a complement of earthly
+conditions.  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 is
+fluent 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 entity
+of its own, and was engaged upon some mysterious business.  Unlike the
+silent earth and the dreaming clouds it has a voice that fills his world
+and, now low, now loud, echoes throughout his waking and sleeping life.
+Earth with her sprouting fruits behind and beneath him; sky, and larks
+singing, above him; before him, an eternal alien, the sea: he stands
+there upon the shore, arrested, wondering.  He lives,--this man of our
+figure; he proceeds, as all must proceed, with the task and burden of
+life.  One by one its miracles are unfolded to him; miracles of fire and
+cold, and pain and pleasure; the seizure of love, the terrible magic of
+reproduction, the sad miracle of death.  He fights and lusts and endures;
+and, no more troubled by any wonder, sleeps at last.  But throughout the
+days of his life, in the very act of his rude existence, this great
+tumultuous presence of the sea troubles and overbears him.  Sometimes in
+its bellowing rage it terrifies him, sometimes in its tranquillity it
+allures him; but whatever he is doing, grubbing for roots, chipping
+experimentally with bones and stones, he has an eye upon it; and in his
+passage by the shore he pauses, looks, and wonders.  His eye is led from
+the 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 stirs
+the 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 of
+the infinite, by the mortal of the immortal; answer to it there is none
+save in the unending preoccupation of life and labour.  And if this old
+question was in truth first asked upon the sea-shore, it was asked most
+often and with the most painful wonder upon western shores, whence the
+journeying sun was seen to go down and quench himself in the sea.  The
+generations that followed our primitive man grew fast in knowledge, and
+perhaps for a time wondered the less as they knew the more; but we may be
+sure they never ceased to wonder at what might lie beyond the sea.  How
+much 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 where
+they could not follow?  All pain aspires to oblivion, all toil to rest,
+all troubled discontent with what is present to what is unfamiliar and
+far away; and no power of knowledge and scientific fact will ever prevent
+human unhappiness from reaching out towards some land of dreams of which
+the burning brightness of a sea sunset is an image.  Is it very hard to
+believe, then, that in that yearning towards the miracle of a sun
+quenched in sea distance, felt and felt again in human hearts through
+countless generations, the westward stream of human activity on this
+planet had its rise?  Is it unreasonable to picture, on an earth spinning
+eastward, a treadmill rush of feet to follow the sinking light?  The
+history of man's life in this world does not, at any rate, contradict us.
+Wisdom, discovery, art, commerce, science, civilisation have all moved
+west across our world; have all in their cycles followed the sun; have
+all, 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 of
+ages.  It has always set from shore to sea in countless currents of
+adventure and speculation; but it has set most strongly from East to
+West.  On its broad bosom the seeds of life and knowledge have been
+carried throughout the world.  It brought the people of Tyre and Carthage
+to the coasts and oceans of distant worlds; it carried the English from
+Jutland across cold and stormy waters to the islands of their conquest;
+it carried the Romans across half the world; it bore the civilisation of
+the far East to new life and virgin western soils; it carried the new
+West to the old East, and is in our day bringing back again the new East
+to the old West.  Religions, arts, tradings, philosophies, vices and laws
+have been borne, a strange flotsam, upon its unchanging flood.  It has
+had its springs and neaps, its trembling high-water marks, its hour of
+affluence, when the world has been flooded with golden humanity; its ebb
+and effluence also, when it has seemed to shrink and desert the kingdoms
+set upon its shores.  The fifteenth century in Western Europe found it at
+a pause in its movements: it had brought the trade and the learning of
+the East to the verge of the Old World, filling the harbours of the
+Mediterranean with ships and the monasteries of Italy and Spain with
+wisdom; and in the subsequent and punctual decadence that followed this
+flood, there gathered in the returning tide a greater energy and volume
+which was to carry the Old World bodily across the ocean.  And yet, for
+all their wisdom and power, the Spanish and Portuguese were still in the
+attitude of our primitive man, standing on the sea-shore and looking out
+in wonder across the sea.
+
+The flood of the life-stream began to set again, and little by little to
+rise and inundate Western Europe, floating off the galleys and caravels
+of King Alphonso of Portugal, and sending them to feel their way along
+the coasts of Africa; a little later drawing the mind of Prince Henry the
+Navigator to devote his life to the conquest and possession of the
+unknown.  In his great castle on the promontory of Sagres, with the voice
+of the Atlantic thundering in his ears, and its mists and sprays bounding
+his vision, he felt the full force of the stream, and stretched his arms
+to the mysterious West.  But the inner light was not yet so brightly
+kindled that he dared to follow his heart; his ships went south and south
+again, to brave on each voyage the dangers and terrors that lay along the
+unknown African coast, until at length his captains saw the Cape of Good
+Hope.  South and West and East were in those days confusing terms; for it
+was the East that men were thinking of when they set their faces to the
+setting sun, and it was a new road to the East that they sought when they
+felt their way southward along the edge of the world.  But the rising
+tide of discovery was working in that moment, engaging the brains of
+innumerable sages, stirring the wonder of innumerable mariners; reaching
+also, little by little, to quarters less immediately concerned with the
+business of discovery.  Ships carried the strange tidings of new coasts
+and new islands from port to port throughout the Mediterranean; Venetians
+on the lagoons, Ligurians on the busy trading wharves of Genoa, were
+discussing the great subject; and as the tide rose and spread, it floated
+one ship of life after another that was destined for the great business
+of adventure.  Some it inspired to dream and speculate, and to do no more
+than that; many a heart also to brave efforts and determinations that
+were doomed to come to nothing and to end only in failure.  And among
+others who felt the force and was swayed and lifted by the prevailing
+influence, there lived, some four and a half centuries ago, a little boy
+playing about the wharves of Genoa, well known to his companions as
+Christoforo, son of Domenico the wool-weaver, who lived in the Vico
+Dritto di Ponticello.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE HOME IN GENOA
+
+It is often hard to know how far back we should go in the ancestry of a
+man whose life and character we are trying to reconstruct.  The life that
+is in him is not his own, but is mysteriously transmitted through the
+life of his parents; to the common stock of his family, flesh of their
+flesh, bone of their bone, character of their character, he has but added
+his own personality.  However far back we go in his ancestry, there is
+something of him to be traced, could we but trace it; and although it
+soon becomes so widely scattered that no separate fraction of it seems to
+be recognisable, we know that, generations back, we may come upon some
+sympathetic fact, some reservoir of the essence that was him, in which we
+can find the source of many of his actions, and the clue, perhaps, to his
+character.
+
+In the case of Columbus we are spared this dilemma.  The past is reticent
+enough about the man himself; and about his ancestors it is almost
+silent.  We know that he had a father and grandfather, as all grandsons
+of 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; and
+in the vale of Fontanabuona, that runs up into the hills behind Genoa,
+the two streams of family from which he sprang were united.  His father
+from one hamlet, his mother from another; the towering hills behind, the
+Mediterranean shining in front; love and marriage in the valley; and a
+little boy to come of it whose doings were to shake the world.
+
+His family tree begins for us with his grandfather, Giovanni Colombo of
+Terra-Rossa, one of the hamlets in the valley--concerning whom many human
+facts may be inferred, but only three are certainly known; that he lived,
+begot children, and died.  Lived, first at Terra Rossa, and afterwards
+upon 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 he
+was not alive, being referred to in a legal document as quondam, or, as
+we should say, "the late."  Of his wife, Christopher's grandmother, since
+she never bought or sold or witnessed anything requiring the record of
+legal document, history speaks no word; although doubtless some pleasant
+and picturesque old lady, or lady other than pleasant and picturesque,
+had place in the experience or imagination of young Christopher.  Of the
+pair, old Quondam Giovanni alone survives the obliterating drift of
+generations, which the shores and brown slopes of Quinto al Mare, where
+he sat in the sun and looked about him, have also survived.  Doubtless
+old Quondam could have told us many things about Domenico, and his over-
+sanguine buyings and sellings; have perhaps told us something about
+Christopher's environment, and cleared up our doubts concerning his first
+home; but he does not.  He will sit in the sun there at Quinto, and sip
+his wine, and say his Hail Marys, and watch the sails of the feluccas
+leaning 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 to
+have survived, and triumphantly twinkles his two dates at us across the
+night of time.  1440, alive; 1444, not alive any longer: and so hail and
+farewell, Grandfather John.
+
+
+Of Antonio and Battestina, the uncle and aunt of Columbus, we know next
+to nothing.  Uncle Antonio inherited the estate of Terra-Rossa, Aunt
+Battestina was married in the valley; and so no more of either of them;
+except that Antonio, who also married, had sons, cousins of Columbus, who
+in after years, when he became famous, made themselves unpleasant, as
+poor relations will, by recalling themselves to his remembrance and
+suggesting that something might be done for them.  I have a belief,
+supported by no historical fact or document, that between the families of
+Domenico and Antonio there was a mild cousinly feud.  I believe they did
+not like each other.  Domenico, as we shall see presently, was sanguine
+and venturesome, a great buyer and seller, a maker of bargains in which
+he generally came off second best.  Antonio, who settled in Terra-Rossa,
+the paternal property, doubtless looked askance at these enterprises from
+his vantage-ground of a settled income; doubtless also, on the occasion
+of visits exchanged between the two families, he would comment upon the
+unfortunate enterprises of his brother; and as the children of both
+brothers grew up, they would inherit and exaggerate, as children will,
+this settled difference between their respective parents.  This, of
+course, may be entirely untrue, but I think it possible, and even likely;
+for Columbus in after life displayed a very tender regard for members of
+his family, but never to our knowledge makes any reference to these
+cousins 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 may
+reckon this uncle and aunt and their children--dim ghosts to us, but to
+him real people, who walked and spoke, and blinked their eyes and moved
+their limbs, like the men and women of our own time.  Less of a ghost to
+us, 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 warm
+interest, as the one who actually begat and reared the man of our story.
+We shall see him later, and chiefly in difficulties; executing deeds and
+leases, and striking a great variety of legal attitudes, to the
+witnessing of which various members of his family were called in.  Little
+enough good did they to him at the time, poor Domenico; but he was a
+benefactor to posterity without knowing it, and in these grave notarial
+documents preserved almost the only evidence that we have as to the early
+days 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 and
+strikes legal attitudes in every age desires and has.  He was a wool-
+carder by trade, but that was not enough for him; he must buy little bits
+of estates here and there; must even keep a tavern, where he and his wife
+could entertain the foreign sailors and hear the news of the world; where
+also, although perhaps they did not guess it, a sharp pair of ears were
+also listening, and a pair of round eyes gazing, and an inquisitive face
+set in astonishment at the strange tales that went about.
+
+There is one fragment of fact about this Domenico that greatly enlarges
+our knowledge of him.  He was a wool-weaver, as we know; he also kept a
+tavern, and no doubt justified the adventure on the plea that it would
+bring him customers for his woollen cloth; for your buyer and seller
+never lacks a reason either for his selling or buying.  Presently he is
+buying again; this time, still with striking of legal attitudes, calling
+together of relations, and accompaniments of crabbed Latin notarial
+documents, a piece of ground in the suburbs of Genoa, consisting of scrub
+and undergrowth, which cannot have been of any earthly use to him.  But
+also, according to the documents, there went some old wine-vats with the
+land.  Domenico, taking a walk after Mass on some feast-day, sees the
+land and the wine-vats; thinks dimly but hopefully how old wine-vats, if
+of no use to any other human creature, should at least be of use to a
+tavern-keeper; hurries back, overpowers the perfunctory objections of his
+complaisant wife, and on the morrow of the feast is off to the notary's
+office.  We may be sure the wine-vats lay and rotted there, and furnished
+no monetary profit to the wool-weaving tavern-keeper; but doubtless they
+furnished him a rich profit of another kind when he walked about his
+newly-acquired property, and explained what he was going to do with the
+wine-vats.
+
+And besides the weaving of wool and pouring of wine and buying and
+selling of land, there were more human occupations, which Domenico was
+not the man to neglect.  He had married, about the year 1450, one
+Susanna, a daughter of Giacomo of Fontana-Rossa, a silk weaver who lived
+in the hamlet near to Terra-Rossa.  Domenico's father was of the more
+consequence of the two, for he had, as well as his home in the valley, a
+house at Quinto, where he probably kept a felucca for purposes of trade
+with Alexandria and the Islands.  Perhaps the young people were married
+at Quinto, but if so they did not live there long, moving soon into
+Genoa, where Domenico could more conveniently work at his trade.  The
+wool-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 by
+the park and public gardens.  Here they had their dwellings and
+workshops, their schools and institutions, receiving every protection and
+encouragement from the Signoria, who recognised the importance of the
+wool trade and its allied industries to Genoa.  Cloth-weavers, blanket-
+makers, silk-weavers, and velvet-makers all lived in this quarter, and
+held their houses under the neighbouring abbey of San Stefano.  There are
+two houses mentioned in documents which seem to have been in the
+possession of Domenico at different times.  One was in the suburbs
+outside the Olive Gate; the other was farther in, by St. Andrew's Gate,
+and quite near to the sea.  The house outside the Olive Gate has
+disappeared; and it was probably here that our Christopher first saw the
+light, and pleased Domenico's heart with his little cries and struggles.
+Neither the day nor even the year is certainly known, but there is most
+reason to believe that it was in the year 1451.  They must have moved
+soon afterwards to the house in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello, No. 37,
+in which most of Christopher's childhood was certainly passed.  This is a
+house close to St. Andrew's Gate, which gate still stands in a beautiful
+and ruinous condition.
+
+From the new part of Genoa, and from the Via XX Settembre, you turn into
+the 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 virtually
+the same as the place in which Christopher and his little brothers and
+sisters made the first steps of their pilgrimage through this world.  If
+the Italian, sun has been shining fiercely upon you, in the great modern
+thoroughfare, you will turn into this quarter of narrow streets and high
+houses with grateful relief.  The past seems to meet you there; and from
+the Piazza, gay with its little provision-shops and fruit stalls, you
+walk up the slope of the Vico Dritto di Ponticello, leaving the sunlight
+behind you, and entering the narrow street like a traveller entering a
+mountain gorge.
+
+It is a very curious street this; I suppose there is no street in the
+world that has more character.  Genoa invented sky-scrapers long before
+Columbus had discovered America, or America had invented steel frames for
+high building; but although many of the houses in the Vico Dritto di
+Ponticello are seven and eight storeys high, the width of the street from
+house-wall to house-wall does not average more than nine feet.  The
+street is not straight, moreover; it winds a little in its ascent to the
+old city wall and St. Andrew's Gate, so that you do not even see the sky
+much as you look forward and upwards.  The jutting cornices of the roofs,
+often beautifully decorated, come together in a medley of angles and
+corners that practically roof the street over; and only here and there do
+you see a triangle or a parallelogram of the vivid brilliant blue that is
+the sky.  Besides being seven or eight storeys high, the houses are the
+narrowest in the world; I should think that their average width on the
+street front is ten feet.  So as you walk up this street where young
+Christopher lived you must think of it in these three dimensions towering
+slices of houses, ten or twelve feet in width: a street often not more
+than eight and seldom more than fifteen feet in width; and the walls of
+the houses themselves, painted in every colour, green and pink and grey
+and white, and trellised with the inevitable green window-shutters of the
+South, standing like cliffs on each side of you seven or eight rooms
+high.  There being so little horizontal space for the people to live
+there, what little there is is most economically used; and all across the
+tops of the houses, high above your head, the cliffs are joined by wires
+and clothes-lines from which thousands of brightly-dyed garments are
+always hanging and fluttering; higher still, where the top storeys of the
+houses become merged in roof, there are little patches of garden and
+greenery, where geraniums and delicious tangling creepers uphold thus
+high above the ground the fertile tradition of earth.  You walk slowly up
+the paved street.  One of its characteristics, which it shares with the
+old streets of most Italian towns, is that it is only used by foot-
+passengers, being of course too narrow for wheels; and it is paved across
+with flagstones from door to door, so that the feet and the voices echo
+pleasantly in it, and make a music of their own.  Without exception the
+ground floor of every house is a shop--the gayest, busiest most
+industrious little shops in the world.  There are shops for provisions,
+where the delightful macaroni lies in its various bins, and all kinds of
+frugal and nourishing foods are offered for sale.  There are shops for
+clothes and dyed finery; there are shops for boots, where boots hang in
+festoons like onions outside the window--I have never seen so many boot-
+shops at once in my life as I saw in the streets surrounding the house of
+Columbus.  And every shop that is not a provision-shop or a clothes-shop
+or a boot-shop, is a wine-shop--or at least you would think so, until you
+remember, after you have walked through the street, what a lot of other
+kinds of shops you have seen on your way.  There are shops for newspapers
+and tobacco, for cheap jewellery, for brushes, for chairs and tables and
+articles of wood; there are shops with great stacks and piles of
+crockery; there are shops for cheese and butter and milk--indeed from
+this one little street in Genoa you could supply every necessary and
+every luxury of a humble life.
+
+As you still go up, the street takes a slight bend; and immediately
+before 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 you
+see it you are at Columbus's house.  The number is thirty-seven; it is
+like any of the other houses, tall and narrow; and there is a slab built
+into the wall above the first storey, on which is written this
+inscription:--
+
+                      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 a
+difference between it and all the other houses.  They are all alert,
+busy, noisy, crowded with life in every storey, oozing vitality from
+every window; but of all the narrow vertical strips that make up the
+houses of the street, this strip numbered thirty-seven is empty, silent,
+and dead.  The shutters veil its windows; within it is dark, empty of
+furniture, and inhabited only by a memory and a spirit.  It is a strange
+place in which to stand and to think of all that has happened since the
+man 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 little
+freshet of life that flows there flows loud and incessant; and yet into
+what oceans of death and silence has it not poured since it carried forth
+Christopher on its stream!  One thinks of the continent of that New World
+that he discovered, and all the teeming millions of human lives that have
+sprung up and died down, and sprung up again, and spread and increased
+there; all the ploughs that have driven into its soil, the harvests that
+have ripened, the waving acres and miles of grain that have answered the
+call of Spring and Autumn since first the bow of his boat grated on the
+shore of Guanahani.  And yet of the two scenes this narrow shuttered
+house in a bye-street of Genoa is at once the more wonderful and more
+credible; for it contains the elements of the other.  Walls and floors
+and a roof, a place to eat and sleep in, a place to work and found a
+family, and give tangible environment to a human soul--there is all human
+enterprise and discovery, effort, adventure, and life in that.
+
+
+If Christopher wanted to go down to the sea he would have to pass under
+the Gate of St. Andrew, with the old prison, now pulled down to make room
+for the modern buildings, on his right, and go down the Salita del
+Prione, which is a continuation of the Vico Dritto di Ponticello.  It
+slopes downwards from the Gate as the first street sloped upwards to it;
+and it contains the same assortment of shops and of houses, the same
+mixture of handicrafts and industries, as were seen in the Vico Dritto di
+Ponticello.  Presently he would come to the Piazza dell' Erbe, where
+there 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 shops
+of instrument-makers, where to-day there are compasses and sextants and
+chronometers.  Out of the Piazza you come down the Via di San Donato and
+into the Piazza of that name, where for over nine centuries the church of
+San Donato has faced the sun and the weather.  From there Christopher's
+young feet would follow the winding Via di San Bernato, a street also
+inhabited by craftsmen and workers in wood and metal; and at the last
+turn of it, a gash of blue between the two cliffwalls of houses, you see
+the Mediterranean.
+
+Here, then, between the narrow little house by the Gate and the clamour
+and business of the sea-front, our Christopher's feet carried him daily
+during some part of his childish life.  What else he did, what he thought
+and felt, what little reflections he had, are but matters of conjecture.
+Genoa will tell you nothing more.  You may walk over the very spot where
+he was born; you may unconsciously tread in the track of his vanished
+feet; you may wander about the wharves of the city, and see the ships
+loading and unloading--different ships, but still trafficking in
+commodities not greatly different from those of his day; you may climb
+the heights behind Genoa, and look out upon the great curving Gulf from
+Porto 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 his
+many habitations, where he kept the tavern, and whither Christopher's
+young feet must also have walked; and you may come back and search again
+in the harbour, from the old Mole and the Bank of St. George to where the
+port 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 the
+little voice that shrilled in the narrow street sounds in the Vico
+Dritto; the houses stand gaunt and straight, with a brilliant strip of
+blue sky between their roofs and the cool street beneath; but they give
+you nothing of what you seek.  If you see a little figure running towards
+you in a blue smock, the head fair-haired, the face blue-eyed and a
+little freckled with the strong sunshine, it is not a real figure; it is
+a child of your dreams and a ghost of the past.  You may chase him while
+he runs about the wharves and stumbles over the ropes, but you will never
+catch him.  He runs before you, zigzagging over the cobbles, up the sunny
+street, into the narrow house; out again, running now towards the Duomo,
+hiding in the porch of San Stefano, where the weavers held their
+meetings; back again along the wharves; surely he is hiding behind that
+mooring-post!  But you look, and he is not there--nothing but the old
+harbour dust that the wind stirs into a little eddy while you look.  For
+he belongs not to you or me, this child; he is not yet enslaved to the
+great purpose, not yet caught up into the machinery of life.  His eye has
+not yet caught the fire of the sun setting on a western sea; he is still
+free and happy, and belongs only to those who love him.  Father and
+mother, brothers Bartolomeo and Giacomo, sister Biancinetta, aunts,
+uncles, and cousins possibly, and possibly for a little while an old
+grandmother 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.  That
+is his own statement, and it is one of the few of his autobiographical
+utterances that we need not doubt.  From it, and from a knowledge of
+certain other dates, we are able to construct some vague picture of his
+doings before he left Italy and settled in Portugal.  Already in his
+young heart he was feeling the influence that was to direct and shape
+his destiny; already, towards his home in Genoa, long ripples from the
+commotion 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, a
+blue gabardine and a pair of good shoes, and various other matters in
+return for his service.  But there is no reason to suppose that he ever
+occupied himself very much with wool-weaving.  He had a vocation quite
+other than that, and if he ever did make any cloth there must have been
+some strange thoughts and imaginings woven into it, as he plied the
+shuttle.  Most of his biographers, relying upon a doubtful statement in
+the life of him written by his son Ferdinand, would have us send him at
+the age of twelve to the distant University of Pavia, there, poor mite,
+to sit at the feet of learned professors studying Latin, mathematics, and
+cosmography; but fortunately it is not necessary to believe so improbable
+a statement.  What is much more likely about his education--for education
+he had, although not of the superior kind with which he has been
+credited--is that in the blank, sunny time of his childhood he was sent
+to one of the excellent schools established by the weavers in their own
+quarter, and that there or afterwards he came under some influence, both
+religious and learned, which stamped him the practical visionary that he
+remained throughout his life.  Thereafter, between his sea voyagings and
+expeditions about the Mediterranean coasts, he no doubt acquired
+knowledge in the only really practical way that it can be acquired; that
+is to say, he received it as and when he needed it.  What we know is that
+he had in later life some knowledge of the works of Aristotle, Julius
+Caesar, Seneca, Pliny, and Ptolemy; of Ahmet-Ben-Kothair the Arabic
+astronomer, Rochid the Arabian, and the Rabbi Samuel the Jew; of Isadore
+the Spaniard, and Bede and Scotus the Britons; of Strabo the German,
+Gerson the Frenchman, and Nicolaus de Lira the Italian.  These names
+cover a wide range, but they do not imply university education.  Some of
+them merely suggest acquaintance with the 'Imago Mundi'; others imply
+that selective faculty, the power of choosing what can help a man's
+purpose and of rejecting what is useless to it, that is one of the marks
+of genius, and an outward sign of the inner light.
+
+We must think of him, then, at school in Genoa, grinding out the tasks
+that are the common heritage of all small boys; working a little at the
+weaving, interestedly enough at first, no doubt, while the importance of
+having a loom appealed to him, but also no doubt rapidly cooling off in
+his enthusiasm as the pastime became a task, and the restriction of
+indoor life began to be felt.  For if ever there was a little boy who
+loved to idle about the wharves and docks, here was that little boy.
+It was here, while he wandered about the crowded quays and listened to
+the medley of talk among the foreign sailors, and looked beyond the masts
+of the ships into the blue distance of the sea, that the desire to wander
+and go abroad upon the face of the waters must first have stirred in his
+heart.  The wharves of Genoa in those days combined in themselves all the
+richness of romance and adventure, buccaneering, trading, and treasure-
+snatching, that has ever crowded the pages of romance.  There were
+galleys and caravels, barques and feluccas, pinnaces and caraccas.  There
+were slaves in the galleys, and bowmen to keep the slaves in subjection.
+There were dark-bearded Spaniards, fair-haired Englishmen; there were
+Greeks, and Indians, and Portuguese.  The bales of goods on the harbour-
+side were eloquent of distant lands, and furnished object lessons in the
+only geography that young Christopher was likely to be learning.  There
+was cotton from Egypt, and tin and lead from Southampton.  There were
+butts of Malmsey from Candia; aloes and cassia and spices from Socotra;
+rhubarb from Persia; silk from India; wool from Damascus, raw wool also
+from Calais and Norwich.  No wonder if the little house in the Vico
+Dritto di Ponticello became too narrow for the boy; and no wonder that at
+the age of fourteen he was able to have his way, and go to sea.  One can
+imagine him gradually acquiring an influence over his father, Domenico,
+as his will grew stronger and firmer--he with one grand object in life,
+Domenico with none; he with a single clear purpose, and Domenico with
+innumerable cloudy ones.  And so, on some day in the distant past, there
+were farewells and anxious hearts in the weaver's house, and Christopher,
+member of the crew of some trading caravel or felucca, a diminishing
+object to the wet eyes of his mother, sailed away, and faded into the
+blue distance.
+
+They had lost him, although perhaps they did not realise it; from the
+moment of his first voyage the sea claimed him as her own.  Widening
+horizons, slatting of cords and sails in the wind, storms and stars and
+strange landfalls and long idle calms, thunder of surges, tingle of
+spray, and eternal labouring and threshing and cleaving of infinite
+waters--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-smitten
+Spanish towns, governings and parleyings in distant, undreamed-of lands
+--these were to be but incidents in his true life, which was to be
+fulfilled in the solitude of sea watches.
+
+When he left his home on this first voyage, he took with him one other
+thing besides the restless longing to escape beyond the line of sea and
+sky.  Let us mark well this possession of his, for it was his companion
+and guiding-star throughout a long and difficult life, his chart and
+compass, astrolabe and anchor, in one.  Religion has in our days fallen
+into decay among men of intellect and achievement.  The world has thrown
+it, like a worn garment or an old skin, from off its body, the thing
+itself being no longer real and alive, and in harmony with the life of
+an age that struggles towards a different kind of truth.  It is hard,
+therefore, for us to understand exactly how the religion of Columbus
+entered 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 of
+Puritan inheritance to comprehend how, in the fifteenth century, the
+strong intellect was strengthened, and the stout heart fortified, by the
+thought of hosts of saints and angels hovering above a man's incomings
+and outgoings to guide and protect him.  Yet in an age that really had
+the gift of faith, in which religion was real and vital, and part of the
+business of every man's daily life; in which it stood honoured in the
+world, loaded with riches, crowned with learning, wielding government
+both temporal and spiritual, it was a very brave panoply for the soul of
+man.  The little boy in Genoa, with the fair hair and blue eyes and grave
+freckled face that made him remarkable among his dark companions, had no
+doubt early received and accepted the vast mysteries of the Christian
+faith; and as that other mystery began to grow in his mind, and that idea
+of worlds that might lie beyond the sea-line began to take shape in his
+thoughts, he found in the holy wisdom of the prophets, and the inspired
+writings of the fathers, a continual confirmation of his faith.  The full
+conviction of these things belongs to a later period of his life; but
+probably, during his first voyagings in the Mediterranean, there hung in
+his mind echoes of psalms and prophecies that had to do with things
+beyond the world of his vision and experience.  The sun, whose going
+forth is to the end of heaven, his circuit back to the end of it, and
+from whose heat there is nothing hid; the truth, holy and prevailing,
+that knows no speech nor language where its voice is not heard; the great
+and wide sea, with its creeping things innumerable, and beasts small and
+great--no wonder if these things impressed him, and if gradually, as his
+way fell clearer before him, and the inner light began to shine more
+steadily, he came to believe that he had a special mission to carry the
+torch of the faith across the Sea of Darkness, and be himself the bearer
+of a truth that was to go through all the earth, and of words that were
+to 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 be
+doubtless at first much along the coasts, and across to Alexandria and
+the Islands.  There would be returnings to Genoa, and glad welcomings by
+the little household in the narrow street; in 1472 and 1473 he was with
+his father at Savona, helping with the wool-weaving and tavern-keeping;
+possibly also there were interviews with Benincasa, who was at that time
+living in Genoa, and making his famous sea-charts.  Perhaps it was in his
+studio that Christopher first saw a chart, and first fell in love with
+the magic that can transfer the shapes of oceans and continents to a
+piece of paper.  Then he would be off again in another ship, to the
+Golden Horn perhaps, or the Black Sea, for the Genoese had a great
+Crimean trade.  This is all conjecture, but very reasonable conjecture;
+what we know for a fact is that he saw the white gum drawn from the
+lentiscus shrubs in Chio at the time of their flowering; that fragrant
+memory is preserved long afterwards in his own writings, evoked by some
+incident in the newly-discovered islands of the West.  There are vague
+rumours and stories of his having been engaged in various expeditions--
+among them one fitted out in Genoa by John of Anjou to recover the
+kingdom of Naples for King Rene of Provence; but there is no reason to
+believe these rumours: good reason to disbelieve them, rather.
+
+The lives that the sea absorbs are passed in a great variety of adventure
+and experience, but so far as the world is concerned they are passed in a
+profound obscurity; and we need not wonder that of all the mariners who
+used those seas, and passed up and down, and held their course by the
+stars, and reefed their sails before the sudden squalls that came down
+from the mountains, and shook them out again in the calm sunshine that
+followed, there is no record of the one among their number who was
+afterwards 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 vast
+anonymity of sea life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+DOMENICO
+
+Christopher is gone, vanished over that blue horizon; and the tale of
+life in Genoa goes on without him very much as before, except that
+Domenico has one apprentice less, and, a matter becoming of some
+importance in the narrow condition of his finances, one boy less to feed
+and clothe.  For good Domenico, alas! is no economist.  Those hardy
+adventures of his in the buying and selling line do not prosper him; the
+tavern does not pay; perhaps the tavern-keeper is too hospitable; at any
+rate, things are not going well.  And yet Domenico had a good start; as
+his brother Antonio has doubtless often told him, he had the best of old
+Giovanni's inheritance; he had the property at Quinto, and other property
+at Ginestreto, and some ground rents at Pradella; a tavern at Savona, a
+shop there and at Genoa--really, Domenico has no excuse for his
+difficulties.  In 1445 he was selling land at Quinto, presumably with the
+consent 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-shore
+about a mile to the west of Quinto and about five miles to the east of
+Genoa.  It was probably a pure speculation, as he immediately leased the
+house for two years, and never lived in it himself, although it was a
+pleasant place, with an orchard of olives and figs and various other
+trees--'arboratum olivis ficubus et aliis diversis arboribus'.  His next
+recorded transaction is in 1466, when he went security for a friend,
+doubtless with disastrous results.  In 1473 he sold the house at the
+Olive Gate, that suburban dwelling where probably Christopher was born,
+and in 1474 he invested the proceeds of that sale in a piece of land
+which I have referred to before, situated in the suburbs of Savona, with
+which were sold those agreeable and useless wine-vats.  Domenico was
+living at Savona then, and the property which he so fatuously acquired
+consisted of two large pieces of land on the Via Valcalda, containing a
+few vines, a plantation of fruit-trees, and a large area of shrub and
+underwood.  The price, however, was never paid in full, and was the cause
+of a lawsuit which dragged on for forty years, and was finally settled by
+Don Diego Columbus, Christopher's son, who sent a special authority from
+Hispaniola.
+
+Owing, no doubt, to the difficulties that this un fortunate purchase
+plunged 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 to
+Jacob Baverelus, the cheese-monger, his son-in-law.  Susanna, who had
+been the witness of his melancholy transactions for so many years, and
+possibly 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 the
+discovery of the New World, lived on until 1498; when he died also, and
+vanished out of this world.  He had fulfilled a noble destiny in being
+the father of Christopher Columbus.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+SEA THOUGHTS
+
+The long years that Christopher Columbus spent at sea in making voyages
+to and from his home in Genoa, years so blank to us, but to him who lived
+them so full of life and active growth, were most certainly fruitful in
+training and equipping him for that future career of which as yet,
+perhaps, he did not dream.  The long undulating waves of the
+Mediterranean, with land appearing and dissolving away in the morning and
+evening mists, the business of ship life, harsh and rough in detail, but
+not too absorbing to the mind of a common mariner to prevent any thoughts
+he might have finding room to grow and take shape; sea breezes, sea
+storms, sea calms; these were the setting of his knowledge and experience
+as he fared from port to port and from sea to sea.  He is a very elusive
+figure in that environment of misty blue, very hard to hold and identify,
+very shy of our scrutiny, and inaccessible even to our speculation.  If
+we would come up with him, and place ourselves in some kind of sympathy
+with the thoughts that were forming in his brain, it is necessary that we
+should, for the moment, forget much of what we know of the world, and
+assume the imperfect knowledge of the globe that man possessed in those
+years when Columbus was sailing the Mediterranean.
+
+That the earth was a round globe of land and water was a fact that, after
+many contradictions and uncertainties, intelligent men had by this time
+accepted.  A conscious knowledge of the world as a whole had been a part
+of human thought for many hundreds of years; and the sphericity of the
+earth had been a theory in the sixth century before Christ.  In the
+fourth century Aristotle had watched the stars and eclipses; in the third
+century Eratosthenes had measured a degree of latitude, and measured it
+wrong;--[Not so very wrong.  D.W.]-- in the second century the
+philosopher Crates had constructed a rude sort of globe, on which were
+marked the known kingdoms of the earth, and some also unknown.  With the
+coming of the Christian era the theory of the roundness of the earth
+began to be denied; and as knowledge and learning became gathered into
+the hands of the Church they lost something of their clarity and
+singleness, and began to be used arbitrarily as evidence for or against
+other and less material theories.  St. Chrysostom opposed the theory of
+the 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 long
+in a monastery that looked out to sea from a high point, and who wrote
+the words 'Ubi magnitudo, ibi veritas'.  In the sixth century of the
+Christian era Bishop Cosmas gave much thought to this matter of a round
+world, and found a new argument which to his mind (poor Cosmas!) disposed
+of it very clearly; for he argued that, if the world were round, the
+people dwelling at the antipodes could not see Christ at His coming, and
+that therefore the earth was not round.  But Bede, in the eighth century,
+established it finally as a part of human knowledge that the earth and
+all the heavenly bodies were spheres, and after that the fact was not
+again seriously disputed.
+
+What lay beyond the frontier of the known was a speculation inseparable
+from the spirit of exploration.  Children, and people who do not travel,
+are generally content, when their thoughts stray beyond the paths trodden
+by their feet, to believe that the greater world is but a continuation on
+every side of their own environment; indeed, without the help of sight or
+suggestion, it is almost impossible to believe anything else.  If you
+stand on an eminence in a great plain and think of the unseen country
+that lies beyond the horizon, trying to visualise it and imagine that you
+see it, the eye of imagination can only see the continuance or projection
+of what is seen by the bodily sight.  If you think, you can occupy the
+invisible space with a landscape made up from your own memory and
+knowledge: you may think of mountain chains and rivers, although there
+are 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 not
+be able to imagine beyond your horizon a space of sea so wide that the
+farther shore is invisible, and yet imagine the farther shore also.  You
+will see America across the Atlantic and Japan across the Pacific; but
+you cannot see, in one single effort of the imagination, an Atlantic of
+empty blue water stretching to an empty horizon, another beyond that
+equally vast and empty, another beyond that, and so on until you have
+spanned the thousand horizons that lie between England and America.  The
+mind, that is to say, works in steps and spans corresponding to the spans
+of physical sight; it cannot clear itself enough from the body, or rise
+high enough beyond experience, to comprehend spaces so much vaster than
+anything ever seen by the eye of man.  So also with the stretching of the
+horizon which bounded human knowledge of the earth.  It moved step by
+step; if one of Prince Henry's captains, creeping down the west coast of
+Africa, discovered a cape a hundred miles south of the known world, the
+most he could probably do was to imagine that there might lie, still
+another hundred miles farther south, another cape; to sail for it in
+faith and hope, to find it, and to imagine another possibility yet
+another hundred miles away.  So far as experience went back, faith could
+look forward.  It is thus with the common run of mankind; yesterday's
+march is the measure of to-morrow's; as much as they have done once, they
+may do again; they fear it will be not much more; they hope it may be not
+much less.
+
+The history of the exploration of the world up to the day when Columbus
+set sail from Palos is just such a history of steps.  The Phoenicians
+coasting from harbour to harbour through the Mediterranean; the Romans
+marching from camp to camp, from country to country; the Jutes venturing
+in their frail craft into the stormy northern seas, making voyages a
+little longer and more daring every time, until they reached England; the
+captains of Prince Henry of Portugal feeling their way from voyage to
+voyage down the coast of Africa--there are no bold flights into the
+incredible here, but patient and business-like progress from one
+stepping-stone to another.  Dangers and hardships there were, and brave
+followings of the faint will-o'-the-wisp of faith in what lay beyond; but
+there were no great launchings into space.  They but followed a line that
+was the continuance or projection of the line they had hitherto followed;
+what they did was brave and glorious, but it was reasonable.  What
+Columbus did, on the contrary, was, as we shall see later, against all
+reason and knowledge.  It was a leap in the dark towards some star
+invisible to all but him; for he who sets forth across the desert sand or
+sea must have a brighter sun to guide him than that which sets and rises
+on the day of the small man.
+
+
+Our familiarity with maps and atlases makes it difficult for us to think
+of the world in other terms than those of map and diagram; knowledge and
+science have focussed things for us, and our imagination has in
+consequence shrunk.  It is almost impossible, when thinking of the earth
+as a whole, to think about it except as a picture drawn, or as a small
+globe with maps traced upon it.  I am sure that our imagination has a far
+narrower angle--to borrow a term from the science of lenses--than the
+imagination of men who lived in the fifteenth century.  They thought of
+the 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 so
+familiar with them as to have adopted their terms in his thoughts about
+the earth.  He had seen the Mediterranean and sailed upon it before he
+had seen a chart of it; he knew a good deal of the world itself before he
+had seen a map of it.  He had more knowledge of the actual earth and sea
+than he had of pictures or drawings of them; and therefore, if we are to
+keep in sympathetic touch with him, we must not think too closely of
+maps, but of land and sea themselves.
+
+The world that Columbus had heard about as being within the knowledge of
+men extended on the north to Iceland and Scandinavia, on the south to a
+cape one hundred miles south of the Equator, and to the east as far as
+China and Japan.  North and South were not important to the spirit of
+that time; it was East and West that men thought of when they thought of
+the expansion and the discovery of the world.  And although they admitted
+that the earth was a sphere, I think it likely that they imagined
+(although the imagination was contrary to their knowledge) that the line
+of West and East was far longer, and full of vaster possibilities, than
+that of North and South.  North was familiar ground to them--one voyage
+to England, another to Iceland, another to Scandinavia; there was nothing
+impossible about that.  Southward was another matter; but even here there
+was no ambition to discover the limit of the world.  It is an error
+continually made by the biographers of Columbus that the purpose of
+Prince Henry's explorations down the coast of Africa was to find a sea
+road 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 which
+Columbus discovered, and which we now know as the West Indies.  Mr.
+Vignaud contends that the confusion arose from the very loose way in
+which the term India was applied in the Middle Ages.  Several Indias were
+recognised.  There was an India beyond the Ganges; a Middle India between
+the Ganges and the Indus; and a Lesser India, in which were included
+Arabia, Abyssinia, and the countries about the Red Sea.  These divisions
+were, however, quite vague, and varied in different periods.  In the time
+of Columbus the word India meant the kingdom of Prester John, that
+fabulous monarch who had been the subject of persistent legends since the
+twelfth century; and it was this India to which the Portuguese sought a
+sea road.  They had no idea of a barrier cape far to the south, the
+doubling 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 with
+the Orient.  They had no great spice trade, and did not seek more; what
+they did seek was an extension of their ordinary trade with Guinea and
+the African coast.  To the maritime world of the fifteenth century, then,
+the South as a geographical region and as a possible point of discovery
+had no attractions.
+
+To the west stretched what was known as the Sea of Darkness, about which
+even the cool knowledge of the geographers and astronomers could not
+think steadily.  Nothing was known about it, it did not lead anywhere,
+there were no people there, there was no trade in that direction.  The
+tides of history and of life avoided it; only now and then some terrified
+mariner, blown far out of his course, came back with tales of sea
+monsters and enchanted disappearing islands, and shores that receded, and
+coasts upon which no one could make a landfall.  The farthest land known
+to the west was the Azores; beyond that stretched a vague and impossible
+ocean of terror and darkness, of which the Arabian writer Xerif al
+Edrisi, whose countrymen were the sea-kings of the Middle Ages, wrote as
+follows:
+
+     "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 imagination
+had hitherto gone by steps and not by flights, that geographical
+knowledge reached the islands of the Atlantic (none of which were at a
+very great distance from the coast of Europe or from each other) at a
+comparatively early date, and stopped there until in Columbus there was
+found a man with faith strong enough to make the long flight beyond them
+to the unknown West.  And yet the philosophers, and later the
+cartographers, true to their instinct for this pedestrian kind of
+imagination, put mythical lands and islands to the westward of the known
+islands as though they were really trying to make a way, to sink stepping
+stones into the deep sea that would lead their thoughts across the
+unknown space.  In the Catalan map of the world, which was the standard
+example of cosmography in the early days of Columbus, most of these
+mythical islands are marked.  There was the island of Antilia, which was
+placed in 25 deg. 35' W., and was said to have been discovered by Don
+Roderick, the last of the Gothic kings of Spain, who fled there after
+his defeat by the Moors.  There was the island of the Seven Cities,
+which is sometimes identified with this Antilia, and was the object of a
+persistent belief or superstition on the part of the inhabitants of the
+Canary Islands.  They saw, or thought they saw, about ninety leagues to
+the westward, an island with high peaks and deep valleys.  The vision was
+intermittent; it was only seen in very clear weather, on some of those
+pure, serene days of the tropics when in the clear atmosphere distant
+objects appear to be close at hand.  In cloudy, and often in clear
+weather also, it was not to be seen at all; but the inhabitants of the
+Canaries, who always saw it in the same place, were so convinced of its
+reality that they petitioned the King of Portugal to allow them to go and
+take possession of it; and several expeditions were in fact despatched,
+but none ever came up with that fairy land.  It was called the island of
+the Seven Cities from a legend of seven bishops who had fled from Spain
+at the time of the Moorish conquest, and, landing upon this island, had
+founded there seven splendid cities.  There was the island of St.
+Brandan, called after the Saint who set out from Ireland in the sixth
+century in search of an island which always receded before his ships;
+this island was placed several hundred miles to the west of the Canaries
+on maps and charts through out the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
+There was the island of Brazil, to the west of Cape St. Vincent; the
+islands of Royllo, San Giorgio, and Isola di Mam; but they were all
+islands of dreams, seen by the eyes of many mariners in that imaginative
+time, but never trodden by any foot of man.  To Columbus, however, and
+the mariners of his day, they were all real places, which a man might
+reach by special good fortune or heroism, but which, all things
+considered, it was not quite worth the while of any man to attempt to
+reach.  They have all disappeared from our charts, like the Atlantis of
+Plato, 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 in
+the minds of men unless they have had some ghostly foundation; so it is
+possible that these fabled islands of the West were lands that had
+actually been seen by living eyes, although their position could never be
+properly laid down nor their identity assured.  Of all the wandering
+seamen who talked in the wayside taverns of Atlantic seaports, some must
+have had strange tales to tell; tales which sometimes may have been true,
+but were never believed.  Vague rumours hung about those shores, like
+spray and mist about a headland, of lands seen and lost again in the
+unknown and uncharted ocean.  Doubtless the lamp of faith, the inner
+light, burned in some of these storm-tossed men; but all they had was a
+glimpse here and there, seen for a moment and lost again; not the clear
+sight of faith by which Columbus steered his westward course.
+
+
+The actual outposts of western occupation, then, were the Azores, which
+were discovered by Genoese sailors in the pay of Portugal early in the
+fourteenth century; the Canaries, which had been continuously discovered
+and rediscovered since the Phoenicians occupied them and Pliny chose them
+for his Hesperides; and Madeira, which is believed to have been
+discovered by an Englishman under the following very romantic and moving
+circumstances.
+
+In the reign of Edward the Third a young man named Robert Machin fell in
+love with a beautiful girl, his superior in rank, Anne Dorset or d'Urfey
+by name.  She loved him also, but her relations did not love him; and
+therefore they had Machin imprisoned upon some pretext or other, and
+forcibly married the young lady to a nobleman who had a castle on the
+shores of the Bristol Channel.
+
+The marriage being accomplished, and the girl carried away by her
+bridegroom to his seat in the West, it was thought safe to release
+Machin.  Whereupon he collected several friends, and they followed the
+newly-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 the
+unhappy bride, and found her love unchanged, and if possible increased by
+the present misery she was in.  An escape was planned; and one day, when
+the girl and her groom were riding in the park, they set spurs to their
+horses, and galloped off to a place on the shores of the Bristol Channel
+where young Robert had a boat on the beach and a ship in the offing.
+They set sail immediately, intending to make for France, where the
+reunited lovers hoped to live happily; but it came on to blow when they
+were off the Lizard, and a southerly gale, which lasted for thirteen
+days, drove them far out of their course.
+
+The bride, from her joy and relief, fell into a state of the gloomiest
+despondency, believing that the hand of God was turned against her,
+and that their love would never be enjoyed.  The tempest fell on the
+fourteenth day, and at the break of morning the sea-worn company saw
+trees and land ahead of them.  In the sunrise they landed upon an island
+full of noble trees, about which flights of singing birds were hovering,
+and in which the sweetest fruits, the most lovely flowers, and the purest
+and most limpid waters abounded.  Machin and his bride and their friends
+made an encampment on a flowery meadow in a sheltered valley, where for
+three days they enjoyed the sweetness and rest of the shore and the
+companionship of all kinds of birds and beasts, which showed no signs of
+fear at their presence.  On the third day a storm arose, and raged for a
+night over the island; and in the morning the adventurers found that
+their ship was nowhere to be seen.  The despair of the little company was
+extreme, and was increased by the condition of poor Anne, upon whom
+terror and remorse again fell, and so preyed upon her mind that in three
+days she was dead.  Her lover, who had braved so much and won her so
+gallantly, was turned to stone by this misfortune.  Remorse and aching
+desolation oppressed him; from the moment of her death he scarcely ate
+nor 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 a
+wooden cross there, with a prayer that any Christians who might come to
+the island would build a chapel to Jesus the Saviour.  The rest of the
+party then repaired their little boat and put to sea; were cast upon the
+coast of Morocco, captured by the Moors, and thrown into prison.  With
+them in prison was a Spanish pilot named Juan de Morales, who listened
+attentively to all they could tell him about the situation and condition
+of the island, and who after his release communicated what he knew to
+Prince Henry of Portugal.  The island of Madeira was thus rediscovered in
+1418, and in 1425 was colonised by Prince Henry, who appointed as
+Governor Bartolomeo de Perestrello, whose daughter was afterwards to
+become the wife of Columbus.
+
+So much for the outposts of the Old World.  Of the New World, about the
+possibility of which Columbus is beginning to dream as he sails the
+Mediterranean, there was no knowledge and hardly any thought.  Though new
+in the thoughts of Columbus, it was very old in itself; generations of
+men had lived and walked and spoken and toiled there, ever since men came
+upon the earth; sun and shower, the thrill of the seasons, birth and life
+and death, had been visiting it for centuries and centuries.  And it is
+quite possible that, long before even the civilisation that produced
+Columbus was in its dawn, men from the Old World had journeyed there.
+There are two very old fragments of knowledge which indicate at least the
+possibility of a Western World of which the ancients had knowledge.
+There is a fragment, preserved from the fourth century before Christ, of
+a conversation between Silenus and Midas, King of Phrygia, in which
+Silenus correctly describes the Old World--Europe, Asia, and Africa--as
+being surrounded by the sea, but also describes, far to the west of it, a
+huge island, which had its own civilisation and its own laws, where the
+animals and the men were of twice our stature, and lived for twice our
+years.  There is also the story told by Plato of the island of Atlantis,
+which was larger than Africa and Asia together, and which in an
+earthquake disappeared beneath the waves, producing such a slime upon the
+surface that no ship was able to navigate the sea in that place.  This is
+the story which the priests of Sais told to Solon, and which was embodied
+in the sacred inscriptions in their temples.  It is strange that any one
+should think of this theory of the slime who had not seen or heard of the
+Sargasso Sea--that great bank of floating seaweed that the ocean currents
+collect 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 the
+colonisation of America; but the only race from the Old World which had
+almost certainly been there were the Scandinavians.  In the year 983 the
+coast of Greenland was visited by Eric the Red, the son of a Norwegian
+noble, who was banished for the crime of murder.  Some fifteen years
+later Eric's son Lief made an expedition with thirty-five men and a ship
+in the direction of the new land.  They came to a coast where there were
+nothing but ice mountains having the appearance of slate; this country
+they named Helluland--that is, Land of Slate.  This country is our
+Newfoundland.  Standing out to sea again, they reached a level wooded
+country with white sandy cliffs, which they called Markland, or Land of
+Wood, which is our Nova Scotia.  Next they reached an island east of
+Markland, where they passed the winter, and as one of their number who
+had wandered some distance inland had found vines and grapes, Lief named
+the country Vinland or Vine Land, which is the country we call New
+England.  The Scandinavians continued to make voyages to the West and
+South; and finally Thorfinn Karlsefne, an Icelander, made a great
+expedition in the spring of 1007 with ships and material for
+colonisation.  He made much progress to the southwards, and the Icelandic
+accounts of the climate and soil and characteristics of the country leave
+no doubt that Greenland and Nova Scotia were discovered and colonised at
+this time.
+
+It must be remembered, however, that then and in the lifetime of Columbus
+Greenland was supposed to--be a promontory of the coast of Europe, and
+was not connected in men's minds with a western continent.  Its early
+discovery has no bearing on the significance of Columbus's achievement,
+the greatness of which depends not on his having been the first man from
+the Old World to set foot upon the shores of the New, but on the fact
+that by pure faith and belief in his own purpose he did set out for and
+arrive in a world where no man of his era or civilisation had ever before
+set foot, or from which no wanderer who may have been blown there ever
+returned.  It is enough to claim for him the merit of discovery in the
+true sense of the word.  The New World was covered from the Old by a veil
+of distance, of time and space, of absence, invisibility, virtual non-
+existence; and he discovered it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+IN PORTUGAL
+
+There is no reason to believe that before his twenty-fifth year Columbus
+was anything more than a merchant or mariner, sailing before the mast,
+and joining one ship after another as opportunities for good voyages
+offered themselves.  A change took place later, probably after his
+marriage, when he began to adapt himself rapidly to a new set of
+surroundings, and to show his intrinsic qualities; but all the attempts
+that have been made to glorify him socially--attempts, it must be
+remembered, in which he himself and his sons were in after years the
+leaders--are entirely mistaken.  That strange instinct for consistency
+which makes people desire to see the outward man correspond, in terms of
+momentary and arbitrary credit, with the inner and hidden man of the
+heart, has in truth led to more biographical injustice than is fully
+realised.  If Columbus had been the man some of his biographers would
+like to make him out--the nephew or descendant of a famous French
+Admiral, educated at the University of Pavia, belonging to a family of
+noble birth and high social esteem in Genoa, chosen by King Rene to be
+the commander of naval expeditions, learned in scientific lore, in the
+classics, in astronomy and in cosmography, the friend and correspondent
+of Toscanelli and other learned scientists--we should find it hard indeed
+to forgive him the shifts and deceits that he practised.  It is far more
+interesting to think of him as a common craftsman, of a lowly condition
+and poor circumstances, who had to earn his living during the formative
+period of his life by the simplest and hardest labour of the hand.  The
+qualities that made him what he was were of a very simple kind, and his
+character owed its strength, not to any complexity or subtlety of
+training and education, but rather to that very bareness and simplicity
+of 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 one
+side.  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 gave
+to his idea, when once the seed of it had lodged in his mind, so much
+vigour in growth and room for expansion.  Think of him, then, at the age
+of twenty-five as a typical plebeian Genoese, bearing all the
+characteristic traits of his century and people--the spirit of adventure,
+the love of gold and of power, a spirit of mysticism, and more than a
+touch of crafty and elaborate dissimulation, when that should be
+necessary.
+
+He had been at sea for ten or eleven years, making voyages to and from
+Genoa, with an occasional spell ashore and plunge into the paternal
+affairs, when in the year 1476 he found himself on board a Genoese vessel
+which formed one of a convoy going, to Lisbon.  This convoy was attacked
+off Cape St. Vincent by Colombo, or Colomb, the famous French corsair, of
+whom Christopher himself has quite falsely been called a relative.  Only
+two of the Genoese vessels escaped, and one of these two was the ship
+which carried Columbus.  It arrived at Lisbon, where Columbus went ashore
+and took up his abode.
+
+This, so far as can be ascertained, is the truth about the arrival of
+Columbus in Portugal.  The early years of an obscure man who leaps into
+fame 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 most
+cases altogether unrecorded, but there is always that instinct, to which
+I have already referred, to make out that the circumstances of a man who
+late in life becomes great and remarkable were always, at every point in
+his career, remarkable also.  We love to trace the hand of destiny
+guiding her chosen people, protecting them from dangers, and preserving
+them for their great moment.  It is a pleasant study, and one to which
+the facts often lend themselves, but it leads to a vicious method of
+biography which obscures the truth with legends and pretences that have
+afterwards laboriously to be cleared away.  It was so in the case of
+Columbus.  Before his departure on his first voyage of discovery there is
+absolutely no temporary record of him except a few dates in notarial
+registers.  The circumstances of his life and his previous conditions
+were supplied afterwards by himself and his contemporaries; and both he
+and they saw the past in the light of the present, and did their best to
+make it fit a present so wonderful and miraculous.  The whole trend of
+recent research on the subject of Columbus has been unfortunately in the
+direction of proving the complete insincerity of his own speech and
+writings about his early life, and the inaccuracy of Las Casas writings
+his contemporary biographer, and the first historian of the West Indies.
+Those of my readers, then, who are inclined to be impatient with the
+meagreness of the facts with which I am presenting them, and the
+disproportionate amount of theory to fact with regard to these early
+years of Columbus, must remember three things.  First, that the only
+record of the early years of Columbus was written long after those years
+had passed away, and in circumstances which did not harmonise with them;
+second, that there is evidence, both substantive and presumptive, that
+much of those records, even though it came from the hands of Columbus and
+his friends, is false and must be discarded; and third, that the only way
+in which anything like the truth can be arrived at is by circumstantial
+and presumptive evidence with regard to dates, names, places, and events
+upon which the obscure life of Columbus impinged.  Columbus is known to
+have written much about himself, but very little of it exists or remains
+in his own handwriting.  It remains in the form of quotation by others,
+all of whom had their reasons for not representing quite accurately what
+was, it must be feared, not even itself a candid and accurate record.
+The evidence for these very serious statements is the subject of
+numberless volumes and monographs, which cannot be quoted here; for it is
+my privilege to reap the results, and not to reproduce the material, of
+the immense research and investigation to which in the last fifty years
+the life of Columbus has been subjected.
+
+
+We shall come to facts enough presently; in the meantime we have but the
+vaguest knowledge of what Columbus did in Lisbon.  The one technical
+possession which he obviously had was knowledge of the sea; he had also a
+head on his shoulders, and plenty of judgment and common sense; he had
+likely picked up some knowledge of cartography in his years at Genoa,
+since (having abandoned wool-weaving) he probably wished to make progress
+in the profession of the sea; and it is, therefore, believed that he
+picked up a living in Lisbon by drawing charts and maps.  Such a living
+would only be intermittent; a fact that is indicated by his periodic
+excursions to sea again, presumably when funds were exhausted.  There
+were other Genoese in Lisbon, and his own brother Bartholomew was with
+him there for a time.  He may actually have been there when Columbus
+arrived, but it was more probable that Columbus, the pioneer of the
+family, seeing a better field for his brother's talent in Lisbon than in
+Genoa, sent for him when he himself was established there.  This
+Bartholomew, of whom we shall see a good deal in the future, is merely an
+outline at this stage of the story; an outline that will later be filled
+up with human features and fitted with a human character; at present he
+is but a brother of Christopher, with a rather bookish taste, a better
+knowledge of cartography than Christopher possessed, and some little
+experience of the book-selling trade.  He too made charts in Lisbon, and
+sold books also, and no doubt between them the efforts of the brothers,
+supplemented by the occasional voyages of Christopher, obtained them a
+sufficient livelihood.  The social change, in the one case from the
+society of Genoese wool-weavers, and in the other from the company of
+merchant sailors, must have been very great; for there is evidence that
+they began to make friends and acquaintances among a rather different
+class than had been formerly accessible to them.  The change to a new
+country also and to a new language makes a deep impression at the age of
+twenty-five; and although Columbus in his sea-farings had been in many
+ports, and had probably picked up a knowledge both of Portuguese and of
+Spanish, his establishment in the Portuguese capital could not fail to
+enlarge his outlook upon life.
+
+There is absolutely no record of his circumstances in the first year of
+his life at Lisbon, so we may look once more into the glass of
+imagination and try to find a picture there.  It is very dim, very
+minute, very, very far away.  There is the little shop in a steep Lisbon
+street, somewhere near the harbour we may be sure, with the shadows of
+the houses lying sharp on the white sunlight of the street; the cool
+darkness of the shop, with its odour of vellum and parchment, its rolls
+of maps and charts; and somewhere near by the sounds and commotion of the
+wharves 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 to
+that, of the entrance to this harbour and the other; talk of the western
+islands too, of the western ocean, of the new astrolabe which the German
+Muller 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, with
+a view of the sun being quenched in the sea and travelling down into the
+unknown, 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.  Our
+knowledge of it depends on his own words as reported by Las Casas, and,
+like so much other knowledge similarly recorded, is not to be received
+with absolute certainty; but on the whole the balance of probability is
+in favour of its truth.  The words in which this voyage is recorded are
+given as a quotation from a letter of Columbus, and, stripped of certain
+obvious 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 to
+Columbus'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 been
+accepted by most of his biographers who have denied the truth of this
+statement is that, in the year 1492, when Columbus was addressing the
+King and Queen of Spain on his qualifications as a navigator, and when he
+wished to set forth his experience in a formidable light, he said nothing
+about this voyage, but merely described his explorations as having
+extended from Guinea on the south to England on the north.  A shrewd
+estimate of Columbus's character makes it indeed seem incredible that,
+if he had really been in Iceland, he should not have mentioned the fact
+on this occasion; and yet there is just one reason, also quite
+characteristic 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 and
+Newfoundland; and that, although by other navigators these lands were
+regarded as a part of the continent of Europe, he may have had some
+glimmerings of an idea that they were part of land and islands in the
+West; and he was much too jealous of his own reputation as the great and
+only originator of the project for voyaging to the West, to give away any
+hints 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 choice
+between regarding the story in the first place as a lie, or accepting it
+as truth, and putting down Columbus's silence about it on a later
+occasion to a rare instinct of judicious suppression.  There are other
+facts in his life, to which, we shall come later, that are in accordance
+with this theory.  There is no doubt, moreover, that Columbus had a very
+great experience of the sea, and was one of the greatest practical
+seamen, if not the greatest, that has ever lived; and it would be foolish
+to deny, except for the greatest reasons, that he made a voyage to the
+far North, which was neither unusual at the time nor a very great
+achievement for a seaman of his experience.
+
+Christopher returned from these voyages, of which we know nothing except
+the facts that he has given us, towards the end of 1477; and it was
+probably in the next year that an event very important in his life and
+career took place.  Hitherto there has been no whisper of love in that
+arduous career of wool-weaving, sailoring, and map-making; and it is not
+unlikely that his marriage represents the first inspiration of love in
+his 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 at
+Lisbon, where he began to find himself with some footing and place in the
+world, and where the prospect of at least a livelihood began to open out
+before him, his thoughts took that turn towards domesticity and family
+life which marks a moment in the development of almost every man.  And
+now, since he has at last to emerge from the misty environment of sea-
+spray that has veiled him so long from our intimate sight, we may take a
+close look at him as he was in this year 1478.
+
+Unlike the southern Italians, he was fair in colouring; a man rather
+above the middle height, large limbed, of a shapely breadth and
+proportion, and of a grave and dignified demeanour.  His face was ruddy,
+and inclined to be freckled under the exposure to the sun, his hair at
+this age still fair and reddish, although in a few years later it turned
+grey, and became white while he was still a young man.  His nose was
+slightly aquiline, his face long and rather full; his eyes of a clear
+blue, with sharply defined eyebrows--seamen's eyes, which get an
+unmistakable light in them from long staring into the sea distances.
+Altogether a handsome and distinguished-looking young man, noticeable
+anywhere, and especially among a crowd of swarthy Portuguese.  He was not
+a lively young man; on the contrary, his manner was rather heavy, and
+even at times inclined to be pompous; he had a very good opinion of
+himself, had the clear calculating head and tidy intellectual methods of
+the able mariner; was shrewd and cautious--in a word, took himself and
+the world very seriously.  A strictly conventional man, as the
+conventions of his time and race went; probably some of his gayer and
+lighter-hearted contemporaries thought him a dull enough dog, who would
+not join in a carouse or a gallant adventure, but would probably get the
+better of you if he could in any commercial deal.  He was a great
+stickler for the observances of religion; and never a Sunday or feast-day
+passed, when he was ashore, without finding him, like the dutiful son of
+the Church that he was, hearing Mass and attending at Benediction.  Not,
+indeed, a very attractive or inspiring figure of a man; not the man whose
+company one would likely have sought very much, or whose conversation one
+would have found very interesting.  A man rather whose character was cast
+in a large and plain mould, without those many facets which add so much
+to the brightness of human intercourse, and which attract and reflect the
+light 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 harbour
+at Lisbon towards the convent of Saints; walking gravely and firmly, with
+a dignified demeanour, with his best clothes on, and glad, for the
+moment, to be free of his sea acquaintances, and to be walking in the
+direction of that upper-class world after which he has a secret hankering
+in his heart.  There are a great many churches in Lisbon nearer his house
+where he might hear Mass on Sundays; but he prefers to walk up to the
+rich and fashionable convent of Saints, where everybody is well dressed,
+and where those kindling eyes of his may indulge a cool taste for
+feminine beauty.
+
+
+While the chapel bell is ringing other people are hurrying through the
+sunny Lisbon streets to Mass at the convent.  Among the fashionable
+throng are two ladies, one young, one middle-aged; they separate at the
+church door, and the younger one leaves her mother and takes her place in
+the convent choir.  This is Philippa Moniz, who lives alone with her
+mother in Lisbon, and amuses herself with her privileges as a cavaliera,
+or dame, in one of the knightly orders attached to the rich convent of
+Saints.  Perhaps she has noticed the tall figure of the young Genoese in
+the strangers' part of the convent, perhaps not; but his roving blue eye
+has noticed her, and much is to come of it.  The young Genoese continues
+his regular and exemplary attendance at the divine Office, the young lady
+is zealous in observing her duties in the choir; some kind friend
+introduces them; the audacious young man makes his proposals, and,
+in spite of the melancholy protests of the young lady's exceedingly
+respectable and highly-connected relatives, the young people are
+betrothed and actually married before the elders have time to recover
+breath from their first shock at the absurdity of the suggestion.
+
+There is a very curious fact in connection with his marriage that is
+worthy of our consideration.  In all his voluminous writings, letters,
+memoirs, and journals, Columbus never once mentions his wife.  His sole
+reference 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 repose
+of the souls of his father, his mother, and his wife.  He who wrote so
+much, 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 silence
+on his part about everything connected with his marriage and his wife.
+I like to think that it was because this marriage, which incidentally
+furnished him with one of the great impulses of his career, was in itself
+placid and uneventful, and belongs to that mass of happy days that do not
+make history.  Columbus was not a passionate man.  I think that love had
+a very small place in his life, and that the fever of passion was with
+him brief and soon finished with; but I am sure he was affectionate, and
+grateful for any affection and tenderness that were bestowed upon him.
+He was much away too, at first on his voyages to Guinea and afterwards on
+the business of his petitions to the Portuguese and Spanish Courts; and
+one need not be a cynic to believe that these absences did nothing to
+lessen the affection between him and his wife.  Finally, their married
+life was a short one; she died within ten years, and I am sure did not
+outlive his affections; so that there may be something solemn, some
+secret memories of the aching joy and sorrow that her coming into his
+life and passing out of it brought him, in this silence of Columbus
+concerning his wife.
+
+
+This marriage was, in the vulgar idiom of to-day, a great thing for
+Columbus.  It not only brought him a wife; it brought him a home,
+society, recognition, and a connection with maritime knowledge and
+adventure that was of the greatest importance to him.  Philippa Moniz
+Perestrello was the daughter of Bartolomeo Perestrello, who had been
+appointed hereditary governor of the island of Porto Santo on its
+colonisation by Prince Henry in 1425 and who had died there in 1457.
+Her grandfather was Gil Ayres Moniz, who was secretary to the famous
+Constable Pereira in the reign of John I, and is chiefly interesting to
+us because he founded the chapel of the "Piedad" in the Carmelite
+Monastery at Lisbon, in which the Moniz family had the right of interment
+for ever, and in which the body of Philippa, after her brief pilgrimage
+in this world was over, duly rested; and whence her son ordered its
+disinterment and re-burial in the church of Santa Clara in San Domingo.
+Philippa's mother, Isabel Moniz, was the second or third wife of
+Perestrello; and after her husband's death she had come to live in
+Lisbon.  She had another daughter, Violante by name, who had married one
+Mulier, or Muliartes, in Huelva; and a son named Bartolomeo, who was the
+heir to the governorship of Porto Santo; but as he was only a little boy
+at the time of his father's death his mother ceded the governorship to
+Pedro Correa da Cunha, who had married Iseult, the daughter of old
+Bartolomeo by his first wife.  The governorship was thus kept in the
+family during the minority of Bartolomeo, who resumed it later when he
+came of age.
+
+This Isabel, mother of Philippa, was a very important acquaintance indeed
+for Columbus.  It must be noted that he left the shop and poor
+Bartholomew to take care of themselves or each other, and went to live in
+the house of his mother-in-law.  This was a great social step for the
+wool-weaver of Genoa; and it was probably the result of a kind of
+compromise with his wife's horrified relatives at the time of her
+marriage.  It was doubtless thought impossible for her to go and live
+over the chart-maker's shop; and as you can make charts in one house as
+well as another, it was decided that Columbus should live with his
+mother-in-law, and follow his trade under her roof.  Columbus, in fact,
+seems to have been fortunate in securing the favour of his female
+relatives-in-law, and it was probably owing to the championship of
+Philippa's mother that a marriage so much to his advantage ever took
+place at all.  His wife had many distinguished relatives in the
+neighbourhood of Lisbon; her cousin was archbishop at this very time;
+but I can neither find that their marriage was celebrated with the
+archiepiscopal blessing or that he ever got much help or countenance from
+the male members of the Moniz family.  Archbishops even today do not much
+like their pretty cousins marrying a man of Columbus's position, whether
+you call him a woolweaver, a sailor, a map-maker, or a bookseller.
+"Adventurer" is perhaps the truest description of him; and the word was
+as much distrusted in the best circles in Lisbon in the fifteenth century
+as it is to-day.
+
+Those of his new relatives, however, who did get to know him soon began
+to see that Philippa had not made such a bad bargain after all.  With the
+confidence and added belief in himself that the recognition and
+encouragement of those kind women brought him, Columbus's mind and
+imagination expanded; and I think it was probably now that he began to
+wonder if all his knowledge and seamanship, his quite useful smattering
+of cartography and cosmography, his real love of adventure, and all his
+dreams and speculations concerning the unknown and uncharted seas, could
+not be turned to some practical account.  His wife's step-sister Iseult
+and her husband had, moreover, only lately returned to Lisbon from their
+long residence in Porto Santo; young Bartolomeo Perestrello, her brother,
+was reigning there in their stead, and no doubt sending home interesting
+accounts of ships and navigators that put in at Madeira; and all the
+circumstances would tend to fan the spark of Columbus's desire to have
+some adventure and glory of his own on the high seas.  He would wish
+to show all these grandees, with whom his marriage had brought him
+acquainted, that you did not need to be born a Perestrello--
+or Pallastrelli, as the name was in its original Italian form--to make
+a name in the world.  Donna Isabel, moreover, was never tired of talking
+about Porto Santo and her dead husband, and of all the voyages and sea
+adventures that had filled his life.  She was obviously a good teller of
+tales, and had all the old history and traditions of Madeira at her
+fingers' ends; the story of Robert Machin and Anne Dorset; the story of
+the isle of Seven Cities; and the black cloud on the horizon that turned
+out in the end to be Madeira.  She told Christopher how her husband, when
+he 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 eaten
+up 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 and
+ambition.  The great thing in those days was to discover something, if it
+was only a cape down the African coast or a rock in the Atlantic.  The
+key to fame, which later took the form of mechanical invention, and later
+still of discovery in the region of science, took the form then of actual
+discovery of parts of the earth's surface.  The thing was in the air;
+news was coming in every day of something new seen, something new
+charted.  If others had done so much, and the field was still half
+unexplored, could not he do something also?  It was not an unlikely
+thought 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, which
+probably took place very soon after his marriage--that is to say, in the
+year 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 and
+skill as a navigator must by this time have raised him above the rank of
+an ordinary seaman; and in that case nothing would be more natural than
+that he should take his young wife with him to visit her brother
+Bartolomeo, and to see the family property.  It is one of the charms of
+the seaman's profession that he travels free all over the world; and if
+he has no house or other fixed possessions that need to be looked after
+he 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 the
+Atlantic coast, would provide Columbus with an excellent base from which
+to make other voyages; so it was probably with a heart full of eager
+anticipation for the future, and sense of quiet happiness in the present,
+that in the year 1479 Signor Cristoforo Colombo (for he did not yet call
+himself Senor Cristoval Colon) set out for Porto Santo--a lonely rock
+some miles north of Madeira.  Its southern shore is a long sweeping bay
+of white sand, with a huddle of sand-hills beyond, and cliffs and peaks
+of basalt streaked with lava fringing the other shores.  When Columbus
+and 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 worked
+in the mills and sugar-fields; the mills themselves, with the cultivated
+sugar-fields behind them; and the vineyards, with the dwarf Malmsey vines
+pegged down to the ground, which Prince Henry had imported from Candia
+fifty years before.  The forest of dragon-trees that had once covered the
+island was nearly all gone.  The wood had all been used either for
+building, making boats, or for fuel; and on the fruit of the few trees
+that were left a herd of pigs was fattened.  There was frequent
+communication by boat with Madeira, which was the chief of all the
+Atlantic islands, and the headquarters of the sugar trade; and Porto
+Santo itself was a favourite place of call for passing ships.  So that it
+was by no means lonely for Christopher Columbus and his wife, even if
+they 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 of
+this time at least he must have been at sea.  I think it not unlikely
+that it was the happiest time of his life.  He was removed from the
+uncomfortable environment of people who looked down upon him because of
+his obscure birth; he was in an exquisite climate; and living by the sea-
+shore, as a sailor loves to do; he got on well with Bartolomeo, who was
+no doubt glad enough of the company of this grave sailor who had seen so
+much and had visited so many countries; above all he had his wife there,
+his beautiful, dear, proud Philippa, all to himself, and out of reach of
+those abominable Portuguese noblemen who paid so much attention to her
+and so little to him, and made him so jealous; and there was a whispered
+promise of some one who was coming to make him happier 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 the white shores of the
+great sweeping bay, with the glorious purple Atlantic sparkling and
+thundering on the sands, as it sparkles and thunders to-day.  A place
+empty and vivid, swept by the mellow winds; silent, but for the
+continuous roar of the sea; still, but for the scuttling of the rabbits
+among the sand-hills and the occasional passage of a figure from the
+mills up to the sugar-fields; but brilliant with sunshine and colour and
+the bright environment of the sea.  It was upon such scenes that he
+looked during this happy pause in his life; they were the setting of
+Philippa's dreams and anxieties as the time of motherhood drew near;
+and it was upon them that their little son first opened his eyes, and
+with the boom of the Atlantic breakers that he first mingled his small.
+voice.
+
+It is but a moment of rest and happiness; for Christopher the scene is
+soon changed, and he must set forth upon a voyage again, while Philippa
+is left, with a new light in her eyes, to watch over the atom that wakes
+and weeps and twists and struggles and mews, and sleeps again, in her
+charge.  Sleep well, little son!  Yet a little while, and you too shall
+make voyages and conquests; new worlds lie waiting for you, who are so
+greatly astonished at this Old World; far journeys by land and sea, and
+the company of courtiers and kings; and much honour from the name and
+deeds of him who looked into your eyes with a laugh and, a sob, and was
+so very large and overshadowing!  But with her who quietly sings to you,
+whose hands soothe and caress you, in whose eyes shines that wonderful
+light of mother's love--only a little while longer.
+
+
+While Diego, as this son was christened, was yet only a baby in his
+cradle, Columbus made an important voyage to the, coast of Guinea as all
+the western part of the African continent was then called.  His solid and
+practical qualities were by this time beginning to be recognised even by
+Philippa's haughty family, and it was possibly through the interest of
+her uncle, Pedro Noronhas, a distinguished minister of the King of
+Portugal, that he got the command of a caravel in the expedition which
+set 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 ruined
+remains of a fort; and it is this fort, the fortress of St. George, that
+the expedition was sent out to erect.  On the 11th of December the little
+fleet set sail for [from?  D.W.] Lisbon--ten caravels, and two barges or
+lighters laden with the necessary masonry and timber-work for the fort.
+Columbus was in command of one of the caravels, and the whole fleet was
+commanded by the Portuguese Admiral Azumbaga.  They would certainly see
+Porto Santo and Madeira on their way south, although they did not call
+there; and Philippa was no doubt looking out for them, and watching from
+the sand-hills the fleet of twelve ships going by in the offing.  They
+called at Cape Verde, where the Admiral was commissioned to present one
+of the negro kings with some horses and hawks, and incidentally to obtain
+his assent to a treaty.  On the 19th of January 1482, having made a very
+good voyage, they, landed just beyond the Cape of the Three Points, and
+immediately set about the business of the expedition.
+
+There was a state reception, with Admiral Azumbaga walking in front in
+scarlet and brocade, followed by his captains, Columbus among them,
+dressed in gorgeous tunics and cloaks with golden collars and, well
+hidden beneath their finery, good serviceable cuirasses.  The banner of
+Portugal was ceremoniously unfurled and dis played from the top of a tall
+tree.  An altar was erected and consecrated by the chaplain to the
+expedition, and a mass was sung for the repose of the soul of Prince
+Henry.  The Portugal contingent were then met by Caramansa, the king of
+the country, who came, surrounded by a great guard of blacks armed with
+assegais, their bodies scantily decorated with monkey fur and palm
+leaves.  The black monarch must have presented a handsome appearance,
+for his arms and legs were decked with gold bracelets and rings, he had
+a kind of dog-collar fitted with bells round his neck, and some pieces of
+gold 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 the
+wine of Oporto, the treaty was soon concluded, and a very shrewd stroke
+of business accomplished for the King of Portugal; for it gave him the
+sole right of exchanging gaudy rubbish from Portugal for the precious
+gold of Ethiopia.  When the contents of the two freight-ships had been
+unloaded they were beached and broken up by the orders of King John, who
+wished it to be thought that they had been destroyed in the whirlpools of
+that dangerous sea, and that the navigation of those rough waters was
+only safe for the caravels of the Navy.  The fort was built in twenty
+days, and the expedition returned, laden with gold and ivory; Admiral
+Azumbaga remained behind in command of the garrison.
+
+This voyage, which was a bold and adventurous one for the time, may be
+regarded as the first recognition of Columbus as a man of importance,
+for the expedition was manned and commanded by picked men; so it was for
+all reasons a very fortunate one for him, although the possession of the
+dangerous secret as to the whereabouts of this valuable territory might
+have 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 been
+sailing 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 a
+difficult piece of navigation such as he loved; and on the long dreamy
+days of the voyage home, the caravels furrowing the blue Atlantic before
+the steady trade-wind, he determined that he would find some way of
+putting his knowledge to use, and of earning distinction for himself.
+Living, as he had been lately, in Atlantic seaports overlooking the
+western ocean it is certain that the idea of discovering something in
+that direction occupied him more and more.  What it was that he was to
+discover was probably very vague in his mind, and was likely not
+designated by any name more exact than "lands."  In after years he tried
+to show that it was a logical and scientific deduction which led him to
+go 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 such
+thing.  He had no exact scientific knowledge at this date.  His map
+making 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; and
+there gradually grew in his mind the intuition or conviction--I refuse to
+call it an opinion--that, over that blue verge of the West, there was
+land to be found.  How this seed of conviction first lodged in his mind
+it would be impossible to say; in any one of the steps through which we
+have followed him, it might have taken its root; but there it was,
+beginning to occupy his mind very seriously indeed; and he began to look
+out, as all men do who wish to act upon faith or conviction which they
+cannot demonstrate to another person, for some proofs that his conviction
+was a sound one.
+
+And now, just at the moment when he needs it most, comes an incident
+that, to a man of his religious and superstitious habit, seems like the
+pointing finger of Providence.  The story of the shipwrecked pilot has
+been discredited by nearly all the modern biographers of Columbus,
+chiefly because it does not fit in with their theory of his scientific
+studies and the alleged bearing of these on his great discovery; but it
+is given by Las Casas, who says that it was commonly believed by
+Columbus's entourage at Hispaniola.  Moreover, amid all the tangles of
+theory and argument in which the achievement of Columbus has been
+involved, this original story of shipwrecked mariners stands out with a
+strength and simplicity that cannot be entirely disregarded by the
+historian who permits himself some light of imagination by which to work.
+It is more true to life and to nature that Columbus should have received
+his last impulse, the little push that was to set his accumulated energy
+and determination in motion, from a thing of pure chance, than that he
+should have built his achievement up in a logical superstructure resting
+on a basis of profound and elaborate theory.
+
+In the year following Columbus's return from Guinea, then, he, and
+probably his family, had gone over to Madeira from Porto Santo, and were
+staying 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 five
+sick mariners.  Columbus, who was probably never far from the shore at
+Funchal when a ship came into the harbour, happened to see them.  Struck
+by their appearance, and finding them in a quite destitute and grievously
+invalid condition, he entertained them in his house until some other
+provision could be made for them.  But they were quite worn out.  One by
+one they succumbed to weakness and illness, until one only, a pilot from
+Huelva, was left.  He also was sinking, and when it was obvious that his
+end was near at hand, he beckoned his good host to his bedside, and, in
+gratitude for all his kindness, imparted to him some singular knowledge
+which he had acquired, and with which, if he had lived, he had hoped to
+win distinction for himself.
+
+The pilot's story, in so far as it has been preserved, and taking the
+mean of four contemporary accounts of it, was as follows.  This man,
+whose name is doubtful, but is given as Alonso Sanchez, was sailing on a
+voyage from one of the Spanish ports to England or Flanders.  He had a
+crew of seventeen men.  When they had got well out to sea a severe
+easterly gale sprung up, which drove the vessel before it to the
+westward.  Day after day and week after week, for twenty-eight days, this
+gale continued.  The islands were all left far behind, and the ship was
+carried into a region far beyond the limits of the ocean marked on the
+charts.  At last they sighted some islands, upon one of which they landed
+and 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 of
+which that has remained being that the natives went naked; and, the wind
+having changed, set forth on his homeward voyage.  This voyage was long
+and painful.  The wind did not hold steady from the west; the pilot and
+his crew had a very hazy notion of where they were; their dead reckoning
+was confused; their provisions fell short; and one by one the crew
+sickened 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 ship
+short-handed and in their enfeebled condition, at last made the island of
+Madeira, and cast anchor in the beautiful bay of Funchal, only to die
+there.  All these things we may imagine the dying man relating in
+snatches to his absorbed listener; who felt himself to be receiving a
+pearl of knowledge to be guarded and used, now that its finder must
+depart upon the last and longest voyage of human discovery.  Such
+observations as he had made--probably a few figures giving the bearings
+of stars, an account of dead reckoning, and a quite useless and
+inaccurate chart or map--the pilot gave to his host; then, having
+delivered his soul of its secret, he died.  This is the story; not an
+impossible or improbable one in its main outlines.  Whether the pilot
+really landed on one of the Antilles is extremely doubtful, although it
+is possible.  Superstitious and storm-tossed sailors in those days were
+only too ready to believe that they saw some of the fabled islands of the
+Atlantic; and it is quite possible that the pilot simply announced that
+he had seen land, and that the details as to his having actually set foot
+upon it were added later.  That does not seem to me important in so far
+as it concerns Columbus.  Whether it were true or not, the man obviously
+believed it; and to the mind of Columbus, possessed with an idea and a
+blind faith in something which could not be seen, the whole incident
+would appear in the light of a supernatural sign.  The bit of paper or
+parchment with the rude drawing on it, even although it were the drawing
+of a thing imagined and not of a thing seen, would still have for him a
+kind of authority that he would find it hard to ignore.  It seems
+unnecessary to disbelieve this story.  It is obviously absurd to regard
+it as the sole origin of Columbus's great idea; it probably belongs to
+that order of accidents, small and unimportant in themselves, which are
+so often associated with the beginnings of mighty events.  Walking on the
+shore at Madeira or Porto Santo, his mind brooding on the great and
+growing idea, Columbus would remember one or two other instances which,
+in the light of his growing conviction and know ledge, began to take on a
+significant 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 of
+the island.  He had seen a piece of wood of a very dark colour curiously
+carved, but not with any tool of metal; and some great canes had also
+come ashore, so big that, every joint would hold a gallon of wine.  These
+canes, which were utterly unlike any thing known in Europe or the islands
+of the Atlantic, had been looked upon as such curiosities that they had
+been sent to the King at Lisbon, where they remained, and where Columbus
+himself afterwards saw them.  Two other stories, which he heard also at
+this time, went to strengthen his convictions.  One was the tale of
+Martin Vincenti, a pilot in the Portuguese Navy, who had found in the
+sea, four hundred and twenty leagues to the west of Cape St. Vincent,
+another piece of wood, curiously carved, that had evidently not been
+laboured with an iron instrument.  Columbus also remembered that the
+inhabitants of the Azores had more than once found upon their coasts the
+trunks of huge pine-trees, and strangely shaped canoes carved out of
+single logs; and, most significant of all, the people of Flares had taken
+from the water the bodies of two dead men, whose faces were of a strange
+broad shape, and whose features differed from those of any known race of
+mankind.  All these objects, it was supposed, were brought by westerly
+winds to the shores of Europe; it was not till long afterwards, when the
+currents of the Atlantic came to be studied, that the presence of such
+flotsam came to be attributed to the ocean currents, deflected by the
+Cape of Good Hope and gathered in the Gulf of Mexico, which are sprayed
+out across the Atlantic.
+
+The idea once fixed in his mind that there was land at a not impossible
+distance to the west, and perhaps a sea-road to the shores of Asia
+itself, the next thing to be done, was to go and discover it.  Rather a
+formidable task for a man without money, a foreigner in a strange
+land, 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 of
+the art and craft of seamanship, a fearless spirit of adventure, and an
+inner light!  Some one else would have to be convinced before anything
+could be done; somebody who would provide ships and men and money and
+provisions.  Altogether rather a large order; for it was not an unusual
+thing in those days for master mariners, tired of the shore, to suggest
+to some grandee or other the desirability of fitting out a ship or two to
+go in search of the isle of St. Brandon, or to look up Antilia, or the
+island of the Seven Cities.  It was very hard to get an audience even for
+such a reasonable scheme as that; but to suggest taking a flotilla
+straight out to the west and into the Sea of Darkness, down that curving
+hill of the sea which it might be easy enough to slide down, but up which
+it was known that no ship could ever climb again, was a thing that hardly
+any serious or well-informed person would listen to.  A young man from
+Genoa, without a knowledge either of the classics or of the Fathers, and
+with no other argument except his own fixed belief and some vague talk
+about bits of wood and shipwrecked mariners, was not the person to
+inspire the capitalists of Portugal.  Yet the thing had to be done.
+Obviously it could not be done at Porto Santo, where there were no ships
+and no money.  Influence must be used; and Columbus knew that his
+proposals, if they were to have even a chance of being listened to, must
+be presented in some high-flown and elaborate form, giving reasons and
+offering inducements and quoting authorities.  He would have to get some
+one to help him in that; he would have to get up some scientific facts;
+his brother Bartholomew could help him, and some of those disagreeable
+relatives-in-law must also be pressed into the service of the Idea.
+Obviously the first thing was to go back to Lisbon; which accordingly
+Columbus did, about the year 1483.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+A man standing on the sea-shore
+Attempts that have been made to glorify him socially
+Bede, in the eighth century, established it finally (sphericity)
+Biography which obscures the truth with legends and pretences
+Christian era denied the theory of the roundness of the earth
+Columbus never once mentions his wife
+Columbus's habit of being untruthful in regard to his own past
+Cooling off in his enthusiasm as the pastime became a task
+Diminishing object to the wet eyes of his mother, sailed away
+He was a great stickler for the observances of religion
+Inclined to be pompous
+Irving: so inaccurate, so untrue to life, and so profoundly dull
+Lives happily in our dreams, as blank as sunshine
+Loose way in which the term India was applied in the Middle Ages
+Man of single rather than manifold ideas
+More than a touch of crafty and elaborate dissimulation
+No more troubled by any wonder, sleeps at last
+Religion has in our days fallen into decay
+Sea of Darkness
+Shifts and deceits that he practised
+St. Chrysostom opposed the theory of the earth's roundness
+Tasks that are the common heritage of all small boys
+The great thing in those days was to discover something
+There is deception and untruth somewhere
+They saw the past in the light of the present
+Took himself and the world very seriously
+Vague longing and unrest that is the life-force of the world
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Christopher Columbus, v1
+by Filson Young
+
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