Christopher Columbus | Page 5

time in "combing" wool; that is, in making the tangled raw

wool ready for weaving. Perhaps he was sent to school, the school
supported by the "Weavers' Guild." But between working at home and
going to school, he evidently made many little trips down to the busy
wharves.
Was there ever any spot more fascinating than the wharves in olden
days --in that far-off time when there were no books to read, and when
a boy's only chance of hearing about other countries was to go and talk
to the crew of each vessel that came into port? The men to whom our
lad talked had sailed the whole length and breadth of the biggest body
of explored water, the Mediterranean. Some had gone farther east, into
the Black Sea; and still others--bravest of all--had passed beyond the
Straits of Gibraltar and out on to the great unknown ocean. It was to
these last, we may be sure, that the adventurous boy listened most
eagerly.
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