Those hardy sailors were the best possible professors for a boy who intended to follow the sea. They were, doubtless, practical men who never talked much about the sea-monsters and other nonsense that many landsmen believed in; nor did they talk of the world being flat, with a jumping-off place where the sun set. That belief was probably cherished by men of book-learning only, who lived in convents and who never risked their lives on the waves. Good men these monks were, and we are grateful to them for keeping alive a little spark of learning during those long, rude Middle Ages; but their ideas about the universe were not to be compared in accuracy with the ideas of the practical mariners to whom young Cristoforo talked on the gay, lively wharves of Genova la Superba.
Many years after Columbus's death, his son Fernando wrote that his father had studied geography (which was then called cosmogony) at the University of Pavia. Columbus himself never referred to Pavia nor to any other school; nor was it likely that poor parents could afford to send the eldest of five children to spend a year at a far-off university. Certain it is that he never went there after his seafaring life began, for from then on his doings are quite clearly known; so we must admit that while he may have had some teaching in childhood, what little knowledge he possessed of geography and science were self-taught in later years. The belief in a sphere-world was already very ancient, but people who accepted it were generally pronounced either mad or wicked. Long before, in the Greek and Roman days, certain teachers had believed it without being called mad or wicked. As far back as the fourth century B.C. a philosopher named Pythagoras had written that the world was round. Later Plato, and next Aristotle, two very learned Greeks, did the same; and still later, the Romans taught it. But Greece and Rome fell; and during the Dark Ages, when the Greek and Roman ideas were lost sight of, most people took it for granted that the world was flat. After many centuries the "sphere" idea was resurrected and talked about by a few landsmen, and believed in by many practical seamen; and it is quite possible that the young Cristoforo had learned of the theory of a sphere-world from Genoese navigators even before he went to sea. Wherever the idea originated is insignificant compared with the fact that, of all the men who held the same belief, Columbus alone had the superb courage to sail forth and prove it true.
Columbus, writing bits of autobiography later, says that he took to the sea at fourteen. If true, he did not remain a seafarer constantly, for in 1472-73 he was again helping his father in the weaving or wool- combing business in Genoa. Until he started on his famous voyage, Columbus never kept a journal, and in his journal we find very little about those early days in Genoa. While mentioning in this journal a trip made when he was fourteen, Columbus neglects to state that he did not definitely give up his father's trade to become a sailor until 1475. Meanwhile he had worked as clerk in a Genoese bookshop. We know he must have turned this last opportunity to good account. Printing was still a very young art, but a few books had already found their way to Genoa, and the young clerk must have pored over them eagerly and tried to decipher the Latin in which they were printed.
At any rate, it is certain that in 1474 or 1475 Cristoforo hired out as an ordinary sailor on a Mediterranean ship going to Chios, an island east of Greece. In 1476 we find him among the sailors on some galleys bound for England and attacked by pirates off the Portuguese Cape St. Vincent.
About Columbus's connection with these pirates much romance has been written,—so much, indeed, that the simple truth appears tame by comparison. One of these two pirates was named Colombo, a name common enough in Italy and France. Both pirates were of noble birth, but very desperate characters, who terrorized the whole Mediterranean, and even preyed on ships along the Atlantic coast. Columbus's son, Fernando, in writing about his father, foolishly pretended that the discoverer and the noble-born corsairs were of the same family; but the truth is, one of the corsairs was French and the other Greek; they were not Italians at all. Fernando further says that his father was sailing under them when the battle off Cape St. Vincent was fought; that when the vessels caught fire, his father clung to a piece of wreckage and was washed ashore. Thus does Fernando explain the advent of Columbus into Portugal. But all this took place years before Fernando was born.
What really appears to have happened is that Columbus was in much more respectable, though less aristocratic, company. It was not on the side of the pirates that he was fighting, but on the side of the shipowner under whom he had hired, and whose merchandise he was bound to protect, for the Genoese galleys were bound for England for trading purposes. Some of the galleys were destroyed by the lawless Colombo, but our Colombo appears to have been on one that escaped and put back into Cadiz, in southern Spain, from which it later proceeded to England, stopping first at Lisbon. This is a less picturesque version, perhaps, than Fernando's, but certainly it shows Columbus in a more favorable light. Late the next year, 1477, or early in 1478, Cristoforo went back to Lisbon with a view to making it his home.
Besides this battle with corsairs, Columbus had many and varied experiences during his sea trips, not gentle experiences either. Even on the huge, palatial steamships of to-day the details of the common seaman's life are harsh and rough; and we may be sure that on the tiny, rudely furnished, poorly equipped sailboats of the fifteenth century it was a thousand times harsher and rougher. Then, too, the work to be done in and around the Mediterranean was no occupation for children; it quickly turned lads into men. Carrying cargo was the least of a shipowner's business; he was more often hiring out vessels and crews to warring kings, to Portuguese who carried on a slave trade, or to fight pirates, the dread of the Mediterranean. Slaves rowed the Mediterranean galleys, and in the bow stood a man with a long lash to whip the slaves into subjection. With all these matters did Christopher Columbus become acquainted in the course of time, for they were everyday matters in the maritime life of the fifteenth century; but stern though such experiences were, they must have developed great personal courage in Christopher, a quality he could have none too much of if he was to lead unwilling, frightened sailors across the wide unknown sea.
CHAPTER III
"LANDS IN THE WEST"
By moving from Genoa to Lisbon, Columbus found himself in a much better atmosphere for developing into a discoverer. The genius of a discoverer lies in the fact that he yearns for the unknown; and Portugal faced the Atlantic Ocean, that immense unexplored "Sea of Darkness" as it was then called. Italy, as we know, was the greater country, but it faced the Mediterranean, and every nook and corner of the Mediterranean were known and explored.