It has been held by Navarrete, Irving, and other writers of the older school that Columbus first arrived in Portugal in 1470; and his coming has commonly been connected with a naval battle near Lisbon, in which he escaped from a burning ship by swimming to land with the aid of an oar. It is easily proved, however, that notarial entries in Italy show him to have been in that country on August 7, 1473. We may, indeed, by some stretch of inference, allow the old date to be sustained, by supposing that he really was domiciled in Lisbon as early as 1470, but made occasional visits to his motherland for the next three or four years.
Supposed naval battle.
The naval battle, in its details, is borrowed by the Historie of 1571 from the Rerum Venitiarum ab Urbe Condita of Sabellicus. This author makes Christopher Columbus a son of the younger corsair Colombo, who commanded in the fight, which could not have happened either in 1470, the year usually given, or in 1473-74, the time better determined for Columbus's arrival in Portugal, since this particular action is known to have taken place on August 22, 1485. Those who defend the Historie, like D'Avezac, claim that its account simply confounds the battle of 1485 with an earlier one, and that the story of the oar must be accepted as an incident of this supposable anterior fight. The action in 1485 took place when the French corsair, Casaneuve or Colombo, intercepted some richly laden Venetian galleys between Lisbon and Cape St. Vincent. History makes no mention of any earlier action of similar import which could have been the occasion of the escape by swimming; and to sustain the Historie by supposing such is a simple, perhaps allowable, hypothesis.
Probable arrival in 1473-1474.
Rawdon Brown, in the introduction to his volumes of the Calendar of State Papers in the Archives of Venice, has connected Columbus with this naval combat, but, as he later acknowledged to Harrisse, solely on the authority of the Historie. Irving has rejected the story. There seems no occasion to doubt its inconsistencies and anachronisms, and, once discarded, we are thrown back upon the notarial evidence in Italy, by which we may venture to accept the date of 1473-74 as that of the entrance of Columbus into Portugal. Irving, though he discards the associated incidents, accepts the earlier date. Nevertheless, the date of 1473-74 is not taken without some hazard. As it has been of late ascertained that when Columbus left Portugal it was not for good, as was supposed, so it may yet be discovered that it was from some earlier adventure that the buoyancy of an oar took him to the land.
Italians as maritime discoverers.
This coming of an Italian to Portugal to throw in his lot with a foreign people leads the considerate observer to reflect on the strange vicissitudes which caused Italy to furnish to the western nations so many conspicuous leaders in the great explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, without profiting in the slightest degree through territorial return. Cadamosto and Cabot, the Venetians, Columbus, the Genoese, Vespucius and Verrazano, the Florentines, are, on the whole, the most important of the great captains of discovery in this virgin age of maritime exploration through the dark waters of the Atlantic; and yet Spain and Portugal, France and England, were those who profited by their genius and labors.
It is a singular fact that, during the years which Columbus spent in Portugal, there is not a single act of his life that can be credited with an exact date, and few can be placed beyond cavil by undisputed documentary evidence.
Occupation in Portugal.