He died, May 20, 1506
His name in Spanish is Cristobal Colon.
THE SEA OF DARKNESS
Before America was ever heard of, over four hundred years ago, a boy lived in Genoa the Proud City.
He was just one of hundreds of boys in that beautiful Italian town, whose palaces, marble villas, and churches climbed her picturesque hillsides. The boy’s name was Christopher Columbus.
Whenever he could leave his father’s workshop, where he was learning to comb wool, for his father was a weaver, how eagerly the boy must have run down to the wharfs and sat there watching the ships come and go.
They came from all those parts of the world which people knew about then, from Iceland and England, from European and Asiatic ports, and from North Africa. Caravels, galleys, and galleons, and sailing craft of all kinds, came laden with the wealth that made Genoa one of the richest cities of her time.
The sailors, who lounged on the wharfs, spun wonderful yarns. They told how beyond the Pillars of Hercules which guarded the straits of Gibraltar, there rolled a vast, unknown sea, called the Atlantic Ocean or the Sea of Darkness.
No one, they said, had ever crossed it. No one knew what lay beyond it. All was mystery. And any mariners, the sailors said, who had ventured far out on its black waters had never returned.