Christopher Columbus | Page 6

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" stood for wealth of all kinds. No one knew precisely where "the Indies" lay; no one knew about the Indian Ocean or the shape of Southern Africa; "the Indies" was simply an indefinite term for the rich and mysterious regions from which the caravans came.
The old maps of the fifteenth century show three different countries of this name--Far India, beyond the Ganges River; Middle India, between the Ganges and the Indus; and Lesser India, including both sides of the Red Sea. On the African side of the Red Sea was located the legendary kingdom of a great monarch known as Prester John. Prester is a