Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 10

The captains of Prince Henry now began, season by season, to make a steady advance. The Pope had granted to the Portuguese monarchy the exclusive right to discovered lands on this unexplored route to India, and had enjoined all others not to interfere.

[Sidenote: Cape Blanco pa.s.sed, 1441.]

In 1441 the Prince's s.h.i.+ps pa.s.sed beyond Cape Blanco, and in succeeding years they still pushed on little by little, bringing home in 1442 some negroes for slaves, the first which were seen in Europe, as Helps supposes, though this is a matter of some doubt.

[Sidenote: Cape Verde reached, 1445.]

Cape Verde had been reached by Diniz Dyaz (Fernandez) in 1445, and the discovery that the coast beyond had a general easterly trend did much to encourage the Portuguese, with the illusory hope that the way to India was at last opened. They had by this time pa.s.sed beyond the countries of the Moors, and were coasting along a country inhabited by negroes.

[Sidenote: Cadamosto, 1445.]

[Sidenote: Cape Verde Islands.]

In 1455, the Venetian Cadamosto, a man who proved that he could write intelligently of what he saw, was induced by Prince Henry to conduct a new expedition, which was led to the Gambia; so that Europeans saw for the first time the constellation of the Southern Cross. In the following year, still patronized by Prince Henry, who fitted out one of his vessels, Cadamosto discovered the Cape Verde Islands, or at least his narrative would indicate that he did. By comparison of doc.u.ments, however, Major has made it pretty clear that Cadamosto arrogated to himself a glory which belonged to another, and that the true discoverer of the Cape Verde Islands was Diogo Gomez, in 1460. It was on this second voyage that Cadamosto pa.s.sed Cape Roxo, and reached the Rio Grande.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FRA MAURO'S WORLD, 1439.]

[Sidenote: Fra Mauro's maps, 1457.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: TOMB OF PRINCE HENRY AT BATALHA.

[From Major's _Prince Henry_.]]

[Sidenote: Prince Henry dies, 1460.]

In 1457, Prince Henry sent, by order of his nephew and sovereign, Alfonso V., the maps of his captains to Venice, to have them combined in a large mappemonde; and Fra Mauro was entrusted with the making of it, in which he was a.s.sisted by Andrea Bianco, a famous cartographer of the time. This great map came to Portugal the year before the Prince died, and it stands as his final record, left behind him at his death, November 13, 1460, to attest his constancy and leaders.h.i.+p. The pecuniary sacrifices which he had so greatly incurred in his enterprises had fatally embarra.s.sed his estate. His death was not as Columbus's was, an obscuration that no one noted; his life was prolonged in the school of seamans.h.i.+p which he had created.

[Ill.u.s.tration: STATUE OF PRINCE HENRY AT BELEM.

[From Major's _Prince Henry_.]]

The Prince's enthusiasm in his belief that there was a great southern point of Africa had been imparted to all his followers. Fra Mauro gave it credence in his map by an indication that an Indian junk from the East had rounded the cape with the sun in 1420. In this Mauro map the easterly trend of the coast beyond Cape Verde is adequately shown, but it is made only as the northern sh.o.r.e of a deep gulf indenting the continent. The more southern parts are simply forced into a shape to suit and fill out the circular dimensions of the map.

[Sidenote: Sierra Leone, Gold Coast.]

[Sidenote: La Mina.]

Within a few years after Henry's death--though some place it earlier--the explorations had been pushed to Sierra Leone and beyond Cape Mezurada. When the revenues of the Gold Coast were farmed out in 1469, it was agreed that discovery should be pushed a hundred leagues farther south annually; and by 1474, when the contract expired, Fernam Gomez, who had taken it, had already found the gold dust region of La Mina, which Columbus, in 1492, was counseled by Spain to avoid while searching for his western lands.

This, then, was the condition of Portuguese seamans.h.i.+p and of its exploits when Columbus, some time, probably, in 1473, reached Portugal.

He found that country so content with the rich product of the Guinea coast that it was some years later before the Portuguese began to push still farther to the south. The desire to extend the Christian faith to heathen, often on the lips of the discoverers of the fifteenth century, was never so powerful but that gold and pearls made them forget it.

CHAPTER VI.

COLUMBUS IN PORTUGAL.

[Sidenote: Date of his arrival.]

[Sidenote: 1470.]

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 s.h.i.+p 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 a.s.sociated 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.

[Sidenote: 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 doc.u.mentary evidence.

[Sidenote: Occupation in Portugal.]

It is the usual story, given by his earliest Italian biographers, Gallo and his copiers, that Columbus had found his brother Bartholomew already domiciled in Portugal, and earning a living by making charts and selling books, and that Christopher naturally fell, for a while, into similar occupations. He was not, we are also told, unmindful of his father's distresses in Italy, when he disposed of his small earnings. We likewise know the names of a few of his fellow Genoese settled in Lisbon in traffic, because he speaks of their kindnesses to him, and the help which they had given him (1482) in what would appear to have been commercial ventures.

It seems not unlikely that he had not been long in the country when the incident occurred at Lisbon which led to his marriage, which is thus recorded in the _Historie_.

[Sidenote: His marriage.]

During his customary attendance upon divine wors.h.i.+p in the Convent of All Saints, his devotion was observed by one of the pensioners of the monastery, who sought him with such expressions of affection that he easily yielded to her charms. This woman, Felipa Moniz by name, is said to have been a daughter, by his wife Caterina Visconti, of Bartolomeo Perestrello, a gentleman of Italian origin, who is a.s.sociated with the colonization of Madeira and Porto Santo. From anything which Columbus himself says and is preserved to us, we know nothing more than that he desired in his will that ma.s.ses should be said for the repose of her soul; for she was then long dead, and, as Diego tells us, was buried in Lisbon. We learn her name for the first time from Diego's will, in 1509, and this is absolutely all the doc.u.mentary evidence which we have concerning her. Oviedo and the writers who wrote before the publication of the _Historie_ had only said that Columbus had married in Portugal, without further particulars.

[Sidenote: The Perestrellos.]

But the _Historie_, with Las Casas following it, does not wholly satisfy our curiosity, neither does Oviedo, later, nor Gomara and Benzoni, who copy from Oviedo. There arises a question of the ident.i.ty of this Bartolomeo Perestrello, among three of the name of three succeeding generations. Somewhere about 1420, or later, the eldest of this line was made the first governor of Porto Santo, after the island had been discovered by one of the expeditions which had been down the African coast. It is of him the story goes that, taking some rabbits thither, their progeny so quickly possessed the island that its settlers deserted it! Such genealogical information as can be acquired of this earliest Perestrello is against the supposition of his being the father of Felipa Moniz, but rather indicates that by a second wife, Isabel Moniz by name, he had the second Bartolomeo, who in turn became the father of our Felipa Moniz. The testimony of Las Casas seems to favor this view. If this is the Bartolomeo who, having attained his majority, was a.s.signed to the captaincy of Porto Santo in 1473, it could hardly be that a daughter would have been old enough to marry in 1474-75.

The first Bartolomeo, if he was the father-in-law of Columbus, seems to have died in 1457, and was succeeded in 1458, in command of the island of Porto Santo, by another son-in-law, Pedro Correa da Cunha, who married a daughter of his first marriage,--or at least that is one version of this genealogical complication,--and who was later succeeded in 1473 by the second Bartolomeo.

The Count Bernardo Pallastrelli, a modern member of the family, has of late years, in his _Il Suocero e la Moglie di Cristoforo Colombo_ (2d ed., Piacenza, 1876), attempted to identify the kindred of the wife of Columbus. He has examined the views of Harrisse, who is on the whole inclined to believe that the wife of Columbus was a daughter of one Vasco Gill Moniz, whose sister had married the Perestrello of the _Historie_ story. The successive wills of Diego Columbus, it may be observed, call her in one (1509) Philippa Moniz, and in the other (1523) Philippa Muniz, without the addition of Perestrello. The genealogical table of the count's monograph, on the other hand, makes Felipa to be the child of Isabella Moniz, who was the second wife of Bartolomeo Pallastrelli, the son of Felipo, who came to Portugal some time after 1371, from Plaisance, in Italy. Bartolomeo had been one of the household of Prince Henry, and had been charged by him with founding a colony at Porto Santo, in 1425, over which island he was long afterward (1446) made governor. We must leave it as a question involved in much doubt.

[Sidenote: Columbus's son Diego born.]

The issue of this marriage was one son, Diego, but there is no distinct evidence as to the date of his birth. Sundry incidents go to show that it was somewhere between 1475 and 1479. Columbus's marriage to Dona Felipa had probably taken place at Lisbon, and not before 1474 at the earliest, a date not difficult to reconcile with the year (1473-74) now held to be that of his arrival in Portugal. It is supposed that it was while Columbus was living at Porto Santo, where his wife had some property, that Diego was born, though Harrisse doubts if any evidence can be adduced to support such a statement beyond a sort of conjecture on Las Casas's part, derived from something he thought he remembered Diego to have told him.

[Sidenote: Perestrello's MSS.]

The story of Columbus's marriage, as given in the _Historie_ and followed by Oviedo, couples with it the belief that it was among the papers of his dead father-in-law, Perestrello, that Columbus found doc.u.ments and maps which prompted him to the conception of a western pa.s.sage to Asia. In that case, this may perhaps have been the motive which induced him to draw from Paolo Toscanelli that famous letter, which is usually held to have had an important influence on the mind of Columbus.