Christopher Columbus | Page 9

merchants, without mentioning why. That he tried to add to the small profits of map-making by trading with sea captains is not surprising. We can only be sorry that he did not make a handsome profit out of his ventures, enough for himself and for those who lent him capital.
We have mentioned that all the men who had a scientific interest in navigation tried to get to Lisbon. Among those whom Columbus may have met there, was the great German cosmographer from Nuremburg, Martin Behaim. Martin helped to improve the old-fashioned astrolabe, an instrument for taking the altitude of the sun; more important still, toward the end of 1492 he made the first globe, and indicated on it how one might sail west and reach Asiatic India. This is the first record of that idea which was later attributed to Columbus, but which Columbus himself, until his return from his first voyage of discovery, never even mentioned. Whether he and Martin Behaim talked together about the route to India we shall never know. Probably they did not; for when Christopher importuned later for ships, it was only for the purpose of discovering "lands in the west" and not for finding a short route to India. Columbus, though he knew how to draw maps and design spheres, really possessed but little scientific knowledge. Intuition, plus tenacity, always did more for him than science; and so it is likely that he talked more with sailors than with scientists. While he may have known the learned Behaim, certain it is that, from his earliest days in Lisbon, he sought the society of men who had been out to the Azores or to Madeira; men who told him the legends, plentiful enough on these islands, of lands still farther out toward the setting sun, that no one had yet ventured to visit.
CHAPTER IV
THE SOJOURN IN MADEIRA
Columbus had not been very long in Lisbon when he met, at church, a girl named Felipa Monez Perestrello. Felipa was of noble birth; Christopher was not; but he was handsome--tall, fair-haired, dignified,--and full of earnestness in his views of life. Felipa consented to marry him.
Felipa must have been a most interesting companion for a man who loved voyaging, for she had been born in the Madeiras. Her father, now dead, had been appointed governor, by Prince Henry, of a little island called Porto Santo, and Felipa and her mother (with whom the young couple went to live) had many a tale to tell about that far outpost of the Atlantic. This is probably what set Christopher yearning for the sea; and so, about 1479, he and his wife and her mother, Senora Perestrello, all sailed off for Porto Santo. The Senora must have liked her new son-in- law's enthusiasm for the sea, for she gave him the charts and instruments that had belonged to her husband; but as Governor Perestrello had never been a navigator, these could not have been either very numerous or very helpful.
From Porto Santo, Columbus made a voyage to Guinea and back; and after that he and his family went to live on the larger island of Madeira. There, according to many men who knew Columbus well, the following event happened.
One day a storm-tossed little caravel, holding four sick, battered, Portuguese sailors and a Spanish pilot, all of them little more than living skeletons, was blown on the Madeira shore near where Christopher dwelt. Their tale was a harrowing one. They had started, they said, months before from the Canaries for the Madeiras, but had been blown far, far, far, to the west; and then, when the wind quieted down so that they could try to get back, their ship became disabled and their food gave out. Starvation and exposure had nearly finished them; four, in fact, died within a day or two; but the Spanish pilot, the one who had kept his strength long enough to steer toward Madeira, lived longer. The kind-hearted Christopher, who was devoured with curiosity, had had the poor fellow carried to his own home. He and Felipa did all they could for him, but their nursing could not restore him. The pilot, seeing that he would never be able to make another voyage, added a last detail to the story he first told; namely, that his ship had actually visited a new land hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic Ocean! A proof of Christopher's own suspicions! Can you not see him, the evening after his talk with the pilot, standing at sunset on some high point of Madeira, and looking wistfully out over the western water, saying, "I must sail out there and find those lands. I know I can do it!" So he went back to Lisbon to try.
Certain it is that Columbus's absorbing interest in