The son of a Genoese wool-carder, the history of his youth and early manhood is obscured by numberless conflicting statements and traditions, a confusion only increased by the information volunteered by Columbus himself. From the suburb of a busy commercial city, unknown and poor, he passed to the seats of the mighty, and, in the light of his fame, recalled half-effaced memories of the days he had put so far behind him, an autobiography sometimes more in accordance with imagination than with truth. Admirers added their embellishments, detractors their quota of sneering comments, till the information so combined is almost more baffling than complete silence.
IMAGINARY PORTRAIT
THE AUTHENTIC PORTRAIT OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
Even as to the date of his birth there is a divergence of opinion amongst historians varying as widely as some twenty-six years; while tradition has connected him with noble families of Italy and France, has sent him to the University of Pavia, has made him one of an expedition to place the House of Anjou on the throne of Naples, and has driven him on his journeyings as far north as Iceland. Here, some say, he heard of the voyages to Greenland and the Canadian coast of old Norse heroes of the tenth and eleventh centuries; and that, when in the island of Porto Santo many years later, the whispered tale of a shipwrecked mariner on his death-bed gave him the data, on which he based his belief that land existed beyond the Atlantic.
Of actual fact this much emerges, that, still a boy, probably about the age of fourteen, he gave up his father’s trade to which he had been apprenticed and turned to the sea for a livelihood. His voyages were not confined to the Mediterranean but took him as far north as England and to the south along the Guinea coast of Africa, till about the year 1476 they landed him either by chance or mischance on the shores of Portugal. In Lisbon he found a wife and home, living in the house of his mother-in-law, and earning a small income, it is supposed, by drawing the maps and charts demanded by the most seafaring nation of the day. It was a task that with such a temperament would be certain to draw dormant theories of nautical enterprise from the realm of dreams to that of possibilities; and from this time Columbus’s ambitions and hopes began to take definite shape.
Amongst men of science, and indeed amongst the cultured people of Europe generally, the idea that the earth was a sphere composed of land and water had been long accepted; though theologians were still found who declared that such a theory conflicted with the Gospels and statements of the early Fathers of the Church and must therefore be false. If an Antipodes existed, how could all the nations of the world see Christ at His coming?
Another popular argument had been based on the assumption that the ever-increasing warmth of the atmosphere, experienced by travellers as they journeyed southwards, culminated in a zone of unendurable heat. The ship that ventured too far in southern waters might find itself driven forward by sudden winds or unknown currents into a belt of perpetual flame and there perish miserably. That fear at least had been dispelled by the enterprise of the very nation with whom Columbus had cast in his fortunes.
Always, from the wide extent of their coast, interested in the sea and its wonders, the Portuguese had received a special stimulus in the field of discovery during the fifteenth century from the brother of their King, the famous “Prince Henry the Navigator.” Under his orders, as he sat in his castle at Sagres overlooking the great Atlantic, studying charts and records of exploration by day, the course of the stars by night, his captains had pursued their way, league by league, along the West African coast. Ever as they went, new lands, rich in possibilities of trade, were exposed, and old doubts and fears receded. Madeira and the Canary Islands were added to the dominions of Portugal; Cape Bojador, once believed the gateway to unknown horrors, was doubled; the Cape Verde Islands and the Guinea coast explored.
Prince Henry the Navigator died; and in time his great-nephew, King John II., son of Alfonso V., “El Africano,” sat on the throne of Portugal, but the tide of maritime energy never slackened, and the west coast of Africa began to assume in maps something of its real shape. Bartholomew Columbus, brother of Christopher, was one of those who served in the famous expedition of Bartholomew Diaz in 1487, which, tempest-tossed and wholly at the mercy of the elements, unexpectedly doubled the “stormy cape,” later to be called with symbolic appropriateness the “Cape of Good Hope.”
This, while Christopher drew maps and charts in Lisbon, was yet of the future; nor had ever-widening views on African discovery cast any light across the broad Atlantic, the “sea of darkness” as mariners named it, when, hugging the Portuguese and French shores, they journeyed northwards to England and the Baltic. According to a certain Arabian writer of mediæval times