IN PORTUGAL
There is no reason to believe that before his twenty-fifth year Columbus
was anything more than a merchant or mariner, sailing before the mast,
and joining one ship after another as opportunities for good voyages
offered themselves. A change took place later, probably after his
marriage, when he began to adapt himself rapidly to a new set of
surroundings, and to show his intrinsic qualities; but all the attempts
that have been made to glorify him socially--attempts, it must be
remembered, in which he himself and his sons were in after years the
leaders--are entirely mistaken. That strange instinct for consistency
which makes people desire to see the outward man correspond, in terms of
momentary and arbitrary credit, with the inner and hidden man of the
heart, has in truth led to more biographical injustice than is fully
realised. If Columbus had been the man some of his biographers would
like to make him out--the nephew or descendant of a famous French
Admiral, educated at the University of Pavia, belonging to a family of
noble birth and high social esteem in Genoa, chosen by King Rene to be
the commander of naval expeditions, learned in scientific lore, in the
classics, in astronomy and in cosmography, the friend and correspondent
of Toscanelli and other learned scientists--we should find it hard indeed
to forgive him the shifts and deceits that he practised. It is far more
interesting to think of him as a common craftsman, of a lowly condition
and poor circumstances, who had to earn his living during the formative
period of his life by the simplest and hardest labour of the hand. The
qualities that made him what he was were of a very simple kind, and his
character owed its strength, not to any complexity or subtlety of
training and education, but rather to that very bareness and simplicity
of circumstance that made him a man of single rather than manifold ideas.
He was not capable of seeing both sides of a question; he saw only one
side. But he came of a great race; and it was the qualities of his race,
combined with this simplicity and even perhaps vacancy of mind, that gave
to his idea, when once the seed of it had lodged in his mind, so much
vigour in growth and room for expansion. Think of him, then, at the age
of twenty-five as a typical plebeian Genoese, bearing all the
characteristic traits of his century and people--the spirit of adventure,
the love of gold and of power, a spirit of mysticism, and more than a
touch of crafty and elaborate dissimulation, when that should be
necessary.
He had been at sea for ten or eleven years, making voyages to and from
Genoa, with an occasional spell ashore and plunge into the paternal
affairs, when in the year 1476 he found himself on board a Genoese vessel
which formed one of a convoy going, to Lisbon. This convoy was attacked
off Cape St. Vincent by Colombo, or Colomb, the famous French corsair, of
whom Christopher himself has quite falsely been called a relative. Only
two of the Genoese vessels escaped, and one of these two was the ship
which carried Columbus. It arrived at Lisbon, where Columbus went ashore
and took up his abode.
This, so far as can be ascertained, is the truth about the arrival of
Columbus in Portugal. The early years of an obscure man who leaps into
fame late in life are nearly always difficult to gather knowledge about,
because not only are the annals of the poor short and simple and in most
cases altogether unrecorded, but there is always that instinct, to which
I have already referred, to make out that the circumstances of a man who
late in life becomes great and remarkable were always, at every point in
his career, remarkable also. We love to trace the hand of destiny
guiding her chosen people, protecting them from dangers, and preserving
them for their great moment. It is a pleasant study, and one to which
the facts often lend themselves, but it leads to a vicious method of
biography which obscures the truth with legends and pretences that have
afterwards laboriously to be cleared away. It was so in the case of
Columbus. Before his departure on his first voyage of discovery there is
absolutely no temporary record of him except a few dates in notarial
registers. The circumstances of his life and his previous conditions
were supplied afterwards by himself and his contemporaries; and both he
and they saw the past in the light of the present, and did their best to
make it fit a present so wonderful and miraculous. The whole trend of
recent research on the subject of Columbus has been unfortunately in the
direction of proving the complete insincerity of his own speech and
writings about his early life, and the inaccuracy of Las Casas writings
his contemporary biographer, and the first historian of the West Indies.
Those of my readers, then, who are inclined to be impatient with the
meagreness of the facts with which I am presenting them, and the
disproportionate amount of theory to fact with regard to these early
years of Columbus, must remember three things. First, that the only
record of the early years of Columbus was written long after those years
had passed away, and in circumstances which did not harmonise with them;
second, that there is evidence, both substantive and presumptive, that
much of those records, even though it came from the hands of Columbus and
his friends, is false and must be discarded; and third, that the only way
in which anything like the truth can be arrived at is by circumstantial
and presumptive evidence with regard to dates, names, places, and events
upon which the obscure life of Columbus impinged. Columbus is known to
have written much about himself, but very little of it exists or remains
in his own handwriting. It remains in the form of quotation by others,
all of whom had their reasons for not representing quite accurately what
was, it must be feared, not even itself a candid and accurate record.
The evidence for these very serious statements is the subject of
numberless volumes and monographs, which cannot be quoted here; for it is
my privilege to reap the results, and not to reproduce the material, of
the immense research and investigation to which in the last fifty years
the life of Columbus has been subjected.
We shall come to facts enough presently; in the meantime we have but the
vaguest knowledge of what Columbus did in Lisbon. The one technical
possession which he obviously had was knowledge of the sea; he had also a
head on his shoulders, and plenty of judgment and common sense; he had
likely picked up some knowledge of cartography in his years at Genoa,
since (having abandoned wool-weaving) he probably wished to make progress
in the profession of the sea; and it is, therefore, believed that he
picked up a living in Lisbon by drawing charts and maps. Such a living
would only be intermittent; a fact that is indicated by his periodic
excursions to sea again, presumably when funds were exhausted. There
were other Genoese in Lisbon, and his own brother Bartholomew was with
him there for a time. He may actually have been there when Columbus
arrived, but it was more probable that Columbus, the pioneer of the
family, seeing a better field for his brother’s talent in Lisbon than in
Genoa, sent for him when he himself was established there. This
Bartholomew, of whom we shall see a good deal in the future, is merely an
outline at this stage of the story; an outline that will later be filled
up with human features and fitted with a human character; at present he
is but a brother of Christopher, with a rather bookish taste, a better
knowledge of cartography than Christopher possessed, and some little
experience of the book-selling trade. He too made charts in Lisbon, and
sold books also, and no doubt between them the efforts of the brothers,
supplemented by the occasional voyages of Christopher, obtained them a
sufficient livelihood. The social change, in the one case from the
society of Genoese wool-weavers, and in the other from the company of
merchant sailors, must have been very great; for there is evidence that
they began to make friends and acquaintances among a rather different
class than had been formerly accessible to them. The change to a new
country also and to a new language makes a deep impression at the age of
twenty-five; and although Columbus in his sea-farings had been in many
ports, and had probably picked up a knowledge both of Portuguese and of
Spanish, his establishment in the Portuguese capital could not fail to
enlarge his outlook upon life.
There is absolutely no record of his circumstances in the first year of
his life at Lisbon, so we may look once more into the glass of
imagination and try to find a picture there. It is very dim, very
minute, very, very far away. There is the little shop in a steep Lisbon
street, somewhere near the harbour we may be sure, with the shadows of
the houses lying sharp on the white sunlight of the street; the cool
darkness of the shop, with its odour of vellum and parchment, its rolls
of maps and charts; and somewhere near by the sounds and commotion of the
wharves and the shipping. Often, when there was a purchaser in the shop,
there would be talk of the sea, of the best course from this place to
that, of the entrance to this harbour and the other; talk of the western
islands too, of the western ocean, of the new astrolabe which the German
Muller of Konigsberg, or Regiomontanus, as they called him in Portugal,
had modified and improved. And if there was sometimes an evening walk,
it would surely be towards the coast or on a hill above the harbour, with
a view of the sun being quenched in the sea and travelling down into the
unknown, uncharted West.