Brief biographies from American history, for the fifth and sixth grades

by Edna Henry Lee Turpin

Seilan, or Ceylon, was another place visited by Polo. He described the pearl fisheries there, much as they are to-day.

Christopher Columbus
The Great Admiral

With the name and deeds of Christopher Columbus you are already familiar. You will be interested in a brief sketch of the main facts of his life; some day, it is hoped, you will read the story as told at length by our great American author, Washington Irving.

Careful research has not been able to ascertain the exact year of Christopher Columbus’s birth. It was sometime about the middle of the fifteenth century, probably 1445 or 1446. His father was a wool-comber who lived in a village near the great Italian city of Genoa. Genoa was a rich commercial city,—the rival of Venice, as you learned in the story of Marco Polo.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

Probably Columbus often visited Genoa in boyhood; he early showed his inclination for a seafaring life and became a sailor when he was about fifteen. Seafaring then was very different from what it is now. People knew little of the world beyond Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa. Sailors were beginning to use the mariner’s compass, but old habits were still strong, and they did not often venture far from land. This was not only because they feared that they would lose their way and be unable to return home. They thought that around the known land and sea circled the Sea of Darkness, full of raging monsters and dangerous whirlpools. For centuries some geographers had reasoned that the world was round, but they never went to see if this were true. The majority of people believed that the earth was flat like a floor. Probably that was what Columbus believed in his youth.

We have little record of his early years. “Wherever ship has sailed,” he wrote later, “there have I journeyed.”

When he was about twenty-five years old, he married and settled in Lisbon. There he supported himself and his family by making the maps and charts, so necessary to sailors. He seems to have spent his leisure reading books of geography and travels, studying old papers and charts, and talking with seamen. One of his favorite books was the story of the old Venetian traveler, Polo; as Columbus read about the vast and wealthy country of Cathay and the island of Cipango with its houses roofed with gold, he longed to visit them.

As he pondered the matter, he became convinced that these eastern lands could be reached by sailing west. Old geographers described the earth as a sphere. Columbus was convinced that this was true. It never occurred to him that any land unknown to him lay between Europe and Asia. He thought that the earth was much smaller than it really is and that Asia was much larger. He believed that the sea which Marco Polo described as east of Asia extended eastward to the shores of western Europe. He thought it was about twenty-five hundred or three thousand miles from Spain to China. This was a great mistake. But Columbus was much nearer the truth than most men of the day—who thought the world flat with an edge over which there was danger of falling. And, unlike the old geographers, Columbus resolved to sail westward to prove the truth of his theory.