Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 8

It is, however, not to be forgotten that Columbus himself testifies to the tender age at which he began his sea-service, when, in 1501, he recalled some of his early experiences; but, unfortunately, Columbus was chronically given to looseness of statement, and the testimony of his contemporaries is often the better authority. In 1501, his mind, moreover, was verging on irresponsibility. He had a talent for deceit, and sometimes boasted of it, or at least counted it a merit.

Much investigation has wonderfully confirmed the accuracy of that earliest sketch of his career contained in the Giustiniani Psalter in 1516; and it is learned from that narrative that Columbus had attained an adult age when he first went to sea,--and this was one of the statements which the _Historie_ of 1571 sought to discredit. If the notarial records of Savona are correct in calling Columbus a wool-comber in 1472, and he was of the Savona family, and born in 1446, he was then twenty-six years old, and of the adult age that is claimed by the Psalter and by other early writers, who either knew or mentioned him, when he began his seafaring life. In that case he could have had no part in the Anjou-Rene expedition, whose whole story, even with the expositions of Harrisse and Max Budinger, is shrouded in uncertainties of time and place. That after 1473 he disappears from every notarial record that can be found in Genoa shows, in Harrisse's opinion, that it was not till then that he took to the sea as a profession.

We cannot say that the information which we have of this early seafaring life of Columbus, whenever beginning, is deserving of much credit, and it is difficult to place whatever it includes in chronological order.

We may infer from one of his statements that he had, at some time, been at Scio observing the making of mastic. Certain reports which most likely concern his namesakes, the French corsairs, are sometimes a.s.sociated with him as leading an attack on Spanish galleys somewhere in the service of Louis XI., or as cruising near Cyprus.

So everything is misty about these early days; but the imagination of some of his biographers gives us abundant precision for the daily life of the school-boy, apprentice, cabin boy, mariner, and corsair, even to the receiving of a wound which we know troubled him in his later years.

Such a story of details is the filling up of a scant outline with the colors of an unfaithful limner.

CHAPTER V.

THE ALLUREMENTS OF PORTUGAL.

[Sidenote: 1473.]

[Sidenote: Maritime enterprise in Portugal.]

Columbus, disappearing from Italy in 1473, is next found in Portugal, and it is a natural inquiry why an active, adventurous spirit, having tested the exhilaration of the sea, should have made his way to that outpost of maritime ambition, bordering on the great waters, that had for many ages attracted and puzzled the discoverer and cosmographer. It is hardly to be doubted that the fame of the Portuguese voyaging out upon the vasty deep, or following the western coast of Africa, had for some time been a not unusual topic of talk among the seamen of the Mediterranean. It may be only less probable that an intercourse of seafaring Mediterranean people with the Arabs of the Levant had brought rumors of voyages in the ocean that washed the eastern sh.o.r.es of Africa.

These stories from the Orient might well have induced some to speculate that such voyages were but the complements of those of the Portuguese in their efforts to solve the problem of the circ.u.mnavigation of the great African continent. It is not, then, surprising that a doughty mariner like Columbus, in life's prime, should have desired to be in the thick of such discussions, and to no other European region could he have turned as a wanderer with the same satisfaction as to Portugal.

Let us see how the great maritime questions stood in Portugal in 1473, and from what antecedents they had arisen.

[Sidenote: Portuguese seamans.h.i.+p.]

[Sidenote: Explorations on the Sea of Darkness.]

[Sidenote: Marino Sanuto, 1306.]

The Portuguese, at this time, had the reputation of being the most expert seamen in Europe, or at least they divided it with the Catalans and Majorcans. Their fame lasted, and at a later day was repeated by Acosta. These hardy mariners had pushed boldly out, as early as we have any records, into the enticing and yet forbidding Sea of Darkness, not often perhaps willingly out of sight of land; but storms not infrequently gave them the experience of sea and sky, and nothing else.

The great ocean was an untried waste for cartography. A few straggling beliefs in islands lying westward had come down from the ancients, and the fantastic notions of floating islands and steady lands, upon which the imagination of the Middle Ages thrived, were still rife, when we find in the map of Marino Sanuto, in 1306, what may well be considered the beginning of Atlantic cartography.

[Sidenote: The Canaries.]

There is no occasion to make it evident that the Islands of the West found by the Phoenicians, the Fortunate Islands of Sertorius, and the Hesperides of Pliny were the Canaries of later times, brought to light after thirteen centuries of oblivion; but these islands stand in the planisphere of Sanuto at the beginning of the fourteenth century, to be casually visited by the Spaniards and others for a hundred years and more before the Norman, Jean de Bethencourt, in the beginning of the fifteenth century (1402), settled himself on one of them. Here his kinspeople ruled, till finally the rival claims of sovereignty by Spain and Portugal ended in the rights of Spain being established, with compensating exclusive rights to Portugal on the African coast.

[Sidenote: The Genoese in Portugal.]

But it was by Genoese in the service of Portugal, the fame of whose exploits may not have been unknown to Columbus, that the most important discoveries of ocean islands had been made.

[Sidenote: Madeira.]

It was in the early part of the fourteenth century that the Madeira group had been discovered. In the Laurentian portolano of 1351, preserved at Florence, it is unmistakably laid down and properly named, and that atlas has been considered, for several reasons, the work of Genoese, and as probably recording the voyage by the Genoese Pezagno for the Portuguese king,--at least Major holds that to be demonstrable. The real right of the Portuguese to these islands, rests, however, on their rediscovery by Prince Henry's captains at a still later period, in 1418-20, when Madeira, seen as a cloud in the horizon from Porto Santo, was approached in a boat from the smaller island.

[Sidenote: Azores.]

[Sidenote: Maps.]

It is also from the Laurentian portolano of 1351 that we know how, at some anterior time, the greater group of the Azores had been found by Portuguese vessels under Genoese commanders. We find these islands also in the Catalan map of 1373, and in that of Pizigani of the same period (1367, 1373).

[Ill.u.s.tration: PART OF THE LAURENTIAN PORTOLANO.

[From Major's _Prince Henry_.]]

[Sidenote: Robert Machin.]

It was in the reign of Edward III. of England that one Robert Machin, flying from England to avoid pursuit for stealing a wife, accidentally reached the island of Madeira. Here disaster overtook Machin's company, but some of his crew reached Africa in a boat and were made captives by the Moors. In 1416, the Spaniards sent an expedition to redeem Christian captives held by these same Moors, and, while bringing them away, the Spanish s.h.i.+p was overcome by a Portuguese navigator, Zarco, and among his prisoners was one Morales, who had heard, as was reported, of the experiences of Machin.

[Sidenote: Porto Santo and Madeira rediscovered.]

Zarco, a little later, being sent by Prince Henry of Portugal to the coast of Guinea, was driven out to sea, and discovered the island of Porto Santo; and subsequently, under the prompting of Morales, he rediscovered Madeira, then uninhabited. This was in 1418 or 1419, and though there are some divergences in the different forms of the story, and though romance and anachronism somewhat obscure its truth, the main circ.u.mstances are fairly discernible.

[Sidenote: The Perestrello family.]

This discovery was the beginning of the revelations which the navigators of Prince Henry were to make. A few years later (1425) he dispatched colonists to occupy the two islands, and among them was a gentleman of the household, Bartolomeo Perestrello, whose name, in a descendant, we shall again encounter when, near the close of the century, we follow Columbus himself to this same island of Porto Santo.

[Sidenote: Maps.]

It is conjectured that the position of the Azores was laid down on a map which, brought to Portugal from Venice in 1428, instigated Prince Henry to order his seamen to rediscover those islands. That they are laid down on Valsequa's Catalan map of 1439 is held to indicate the accomplishment of the prince's purpose, probably in 1432, though it took twenty years to bring the entire group within the knowledge of the Portuguese.

[Sidenote: Bianco's map, 1436.]

[Sidenote: Other maps.]

The well-known map of Andrea Bianco in 1436, preserved in the Biblioteca Marciana at Venice, records also the extent of supposition at that date respecting the island-studded waste of the Atlantic. Between this date and the period of the arrival of Columbus in Portugal, the best known names of the map makers of the Atlantic are those of Valsequa (1439), Leardo (1448, 1452, 1458), Pareto (1455), and Fra Mauro (1459). This last there will be occasion to mention later.

[Sidenote: Flores.]

In 1452, Pedro de Valasco, in sailing about Fayal westerly, seeing and following a flight of birds, had discovered the island of Flores. From what Columbus says in the journal of his first voyage, forty years later, this tracking of the flight of birds was not an unusual way, in these early exploring days, of finding new islands.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MAP OF ANDREA BIANCO.

[From _Allgem. Geog. Ephemeriden_, Weimar, 1807.]]

Thus it was that down to a period a very little later than the middle of the fifteenth century the Portuguese had been accustoming themselves to these hazards of the open ocean. Without knowing it they had, in the discovery of Flores, actually reached the farthest land westerly, which could in the better knowledge of later years be looked upon as the remotest outpost of the Old World.

[Sidenote: The African route to India.]

There was, as they thought, a much larger cosmographical problem lying to the south,--a route to India by a supposable African cape.

For centuries the Orient had been the dream of the philosopher and the goal of the merchant. Everything in the East was thought to be on a larger scale than in Europe,--metals were more abundant, pearls were rarer, spices were richer, plants were n.o.bler, animals were statelier.