Christopher Columbus | Page 6

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.
For any man thirsting to learn more about geography and exploration,
there was no more vital spot in Europe than Lisbon in the fifteenth
century. Why it was so is such an interesting story that it must be told.
We have read how zealously the Spaniards had been striving for
centuries to drive out the Moors, whom they considered the arch
enemies of Christian Europe. Portugal, being equally near to Africa,
was also overrun by Moors, and for ages the Portuguese had been at
war with them, finally vanquishing them early in Columbus's century.
A wise Portuguese prince then decided on a scheme for breaking their
power utterly; and that was to wrest from them their enormous trade
with Arabia and India; for their trade made their wealth and their
wealth was their power.
This trade was known as the Indian trade, and was carried on by

overland caravans up through Asia and Northern Africa to the
Mediterranean coasts. The goods brought into Europe by this
means--gold, pearls, spices, rare woods--naturally set Europe to
thinking that the lands producing them must be the most favored part of
the world, and "the Indies"