YOUNG CHRISTOPHER
Christopher was fourteen years old when he first went to sea. That
is his own statement, and it is one of the few of his autobiographical
utterances that we need not doubt. From it, and from a knowledge of
certain other dates, we are able to construct some vague picture of his
doings before he left Italy and settled in Portugal. Already in his
young heart he was feeling the influence that was to direct and shape
his destiny; already, towards his home in Genoa, long ripples from the
commotion of maritime adventure in the West were beginning to spread.
At the age of ten he was apprenticed to his father, who undertook,
according to the indentures, to provide him with board and lodging, a
blue gabardine and a pair of good shoes, and various other matters in
return for his service. But there is no reason to suppose that he ever
occupied himself very much with wool-weaving. He had a vocation quite
other than that, and if he ever did make any cloth there must have been
some strange thoughts and imaginings woven into it, as he plied the
shuttle. Most of his biographers, relying upon a doubtful statement in
the life of him written by his son Ferdinand, would have us send him at
the age of twelve to the distant University of Pavia, there, poor mite,
to sit at the feet of learned professors studying Latin, mathematics, and
cosmography; but fortunately it is not necessary to believe so improbable
a statement. What is much more likely about his education--for education
he had, although not of the superior kind with which he has been
credited--is that in the blank, sunny time of his childhood he was sent
to one of the excellent schools established by the weavers in their own
quarter, and that there or afterwards he came under some influence, both
religious and learned, which stamped him the practical visionary that he
remained throughout his life. Thereafter, between his sea voyagings and
expeditions about the Mediterranean coasts, he no doubt acquired
knowledge in the only really practical way that it can be acquired; that
is to say, he received it as and when he needed it. What we know is that
he had in later life some knowledge of the works of Aristotle, Julius
Caesar, Seneca, Pliny, and Ptolemy; of Ahmet-Ben-Kothair the Arabic
astronomer, Rochid the Arabian, and the Rabbi Samuel the Jew; of Isadore
the Spaniard, and Bede and Scotus the Britons; of Strabo the German,
Gerson the Frenchman, and Nicolaus de Lira the Italian. These names
cover a wide range, but they do not imply university education. Some of
them merely suggest acquaintance with the ‘Imago Mundi’; others imply
that selective faculty, the power of choosing what can help a man’s
purpose and of rejecting what is useless to it, that is one of the marks
of genius, and an outward sign of the inner light.
We must think of him, then, at school in Genoa, grinding out the tasks
that are the common heritage of all small boys; working a little at the
weaving, interestedly enough at first, no doubt, while the importance of
having a loom appealed to him, but also no doubt rapidly cooling off in
his enthusiasm as the pastime became a task, and the restriction of
indoor life began to be felt. For if ever there was a little boy who
loved to idle about the wharves and docks, here was that little boy.
It was here, while he wandered about the crowded quays and listened to
the medley of talk among the foreign sailors, and looked beyond the masts
of the ships into the blue distance of the sea, that the desire to wander
and go abroad upon the face of the waters must first have stirred in his
heart. The wharves of Genoa in those days combined in themselves all the
richness of romance and adventure, buccaneering, trading, and
treasure-snatching, that has ever crowded the pages of romance. There
were galleys and caravels, barques and feluccas, pinnaces and caraccas.
There were slaves in the galleys, and bowmen to keep the slaves in
subjection. There were dark-bearded Spaniards, fair-haired Englishmen;
there were Greeks, and Indians, and Portuguese. The bales of goods on
the harbour-side were eloquent of distant lands, and furnished object
lessons in the only geography that young Christopher was likely to be
learning. There was cotton from Egypt, and tin and lead from
Southampton. There were butts of Malmsey from Candia; aloes and cassia
and spices from Socotra; rhubarb from Persia; silk from India; wool from
Damascus, raw wool also from Calais and Norwich. No wonder if the
little house in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello became too narrow for the
boy; and no wonder that at the age of fourteen he was able to have his
way, and go to sea. One can imagine him gradually acquiring an
influence over his father, Domenico, as his will grew stronger and
firmer--he with one grand object in life, Domenico with none; he with a
single clear purpose, and Domenico with innumerable cloudy ones. And
so, on some day in the distant past, there were farewells and anxious
hearts in the weaver’s house, and Christopher, member of the crew of
some trading caravel or felucca, a diminishing object to the wet eyes
of his mother, sailed away, and faded into the blue distance.
They had lost him, although perhaps they did not realise it; from the
moment of his first voyage the sea claimed him as her own. Widening
horizons, slatting of cords and sails in the wind, storms and stars and
strange landfalls and long idle calms, thunder of surges, tingle of
spray, and eternal labouring and threshing and cleaving of infinite
waters--these were to be his portion and true home hereafter.
Attendances at Court, conferences with learned monks and bishops,
sojourns on lonely islands, love under stars in the gay, sun-smitten
Spanish towns, governings and parleyings in distant, undreamed-of lands
--these were to be but incidents in his true life, which was to be
fulfilled in the solitude of sea watches.
When he left his home on this first voyage, he took with him one other
thing besides the restless longing to escape beyond the line of sea and
sky. Let us mark well this possession of his, for it was his companion
and guiding-star throughout a long and difficult life, his chart and
compass, astrolabe and anchor, in one. Religion has in our days fallen
into decay among men of intellect and achievement. The world has thrown
it, like a worn garment or an old skin, from off its body, the thing
itself being no longer real and alive, and in harmony with the life of
an age that struggles towards a different kind of truth. It is hard,
therefore, for us to understand exactly how the religion of Columbus
entered so deeply into his life and brooded so widely over his thoughts.
Hardest of all is it for people whose only experience of religion is of
Puritan inheritance to comprehend how, in the fifteenth century, the
strong intellect was strengthened, and the stout heart fortified, by the
thought of hosts of saints and angels hovering above a man’s incomings
and outgoings to guide and protect him. Yet in an age that really had
the gift of faith, in which religion was real and vital, and part of the
business of every man’s daily life; in which it stood honoured in the
world, loaded with riches, crowned with learning, wielding government
both temporal and spiritual, it was a very brave panoply for the soul of
man. The little boy in Genoa, with the fair hair and blue eyes and grave
freckled face that made him remarkable among his dark companions, had no
doubt early received and accepted the vast mysteries of the Christian
faith; and as that other mystery began to grow in his mind, and that idea
of worlds that might lie beyond the sea-line began to take shape in his
thoughts, he found in the holy wisdom of the prophets, and the inspired
writings of the fathers, a continual confirmation of his faith. The full
conviction of these things belongs to a later period of his life; but
probably, during his first voyagings in the Mediterranean, there hung in
his mind echoes of psalms and prophecies that had to do with things
beyond the world of his vision and experience. The sun, whose going
forth is to the end of heaven, his circuit back to the end of it, and
from whose heat there is nothing hid; the truth, holy and prevailing,
that knows no speech nor language where its voice is not heard; the great
and wide sea, with its creeping things innumerable, and beasts small and
great--no wonder if these things impressed him, and if gradually, as his
way fell clearer before him, and the inner light began to shine more
steadily, he came to believe that he had a special mission to carry the
torch of the faith across the Sea of Darkness, and be himself the bearer
of a truth that was to go through all the earth, and of words that were
to travel to the world’s end.
In this faith, then, and with this equipment, and about the year 1465,
Christopher Columbus began his sea travels. His voyages would be
doubtless at first much along the coasts, and across to Alexandria and
the Islands. There would be returnings to Genoa, and glad welcomings by
the little household in the narrow street; in 1472 and 1473 he was with
his father at Savona, helping with the wool-weaving and tavern-keeping;
possibly also there were interviews with Benincasa, who was at that time
living in Genoa, and making his famous sea-charts. Perhaps it was in his
studio that Christopher first saw a chart, and first fell in love with
the magic that can transfer the shapes of oceans and continents to a
piece of paper. Then he would be off again in another ship, to the
Golden Horn perhaps, or the Black Sea, for the Genoese had a great
Crimean trade. This is all conjecture, but very reasonable conjecture;
what we know for a fact is that he saw the white gum drawn from the
lentiscus shrubs in Chio at the time of their flowering; that fragrant
memory is preserved long afterwards in his own writings, evoked by some
incident in the newly-discovered islands of the West. There are vague
rumours and stories of his having been engaged in various expeditions
--among them one fitted out in Genoa by John of Anjou to recover the
kingdom of Naples for King Rene of Provence; but there is no reason to
believe these rumours: good reason to disbelieve them, rather.
The lives that the sea absorbs are passed in a great variety of adventure
and experience, but so far as the world is concerned they are passed in a
profound obscurity; and we need not wonder that of all the mariners who
used those seas, and passed up and down, and held their course by the
stars, and reefed their sails before the sudden squalls that came down
from the mountains, and shook them out again in the calm sunshine that
followed, there is no record of the one among their number who was
afterwards to reef and steer and hold his course to such mighty purpose.
For this period, then, we must leave him to the sea, and to the vast
anonymity of sea life.