COLUMBUS IN PORTUGAL.
[Sidenote: Date of his arrival.]
[Sidenote: 1470.]
It has been held by Navarrete, Irving, and other writers of the older
school that Columbus first arrived in Portugal in 1470; and his coming
has commonly been connected with a naval battle near Lisbon, in which he
escaped from a burning ship by swimming to land with the aid of an oar.
It is easily proved, however, that notarial entries in Italy show him to
have been in that country on August 7, 1473. We may, indeed, by some
stretch of inference, allow the old date to be sustained, by supposing
that he really was domiciled in Lisbon as early as 1470, but made
occasional visits to his motherland for the next three or four years.
[Sidenote: Supposed naval battle.]
The naval battle, in its details, is borrowed by the _Historie_ of 1571
from the _Rerum Venitiarum ab Urbe Condita_ of Sabellicus. This author
makes Christopher Columbus a son of the younger corsair Colombo, who
commanded in the fight, which could not have happened either in 1470,
the year usually given, or in 1473-74, the time better determined for
Columbus's arrival in Portugal, since this particular action is known to
have taken place on August 22, 1485. Those who defend the _Historie_,
like D'Avezac, claim that its account simply confounds the battle of
1485 with an earlier one, and that the story of the oar must be accepted
as an incident of this supposable anterior fight. The action in 1485
took place when the French corsair, Casaneuve or Colombo, intercepted
some richly laden Venetian galleys between Lisbon and Cape St. Vincent.
History makes no mention of any earlier action of similar import which
could have been the occasion of the escape by swimming; and to sustain
the _Historie_ by supposing such is a simple, perhaps allowable,
hypothesis.
[Sidenote: Probable
arrival in 1473-1474.]
Rawdon Brown, in the introduction to his volumes of the _Calendar of
State Papers in the Archives of Venice_, has connected Columbus
with this naval combat, but, as he later acknowledged to Harrisse,
solely on the authority of the _Historie_. Irving has rejected the
story. There seems no occasion to doubt its inconsistencies and
anachronisms, and, once discarded, we are thrown back upon the
notarial evidence in Italy, by which we may venture to accept the date
of 1473-74 as that of the entrance of Columbus into Portugal. Irving,
though he discards the associated incidents, accepts the earlier date.
Nevertheless, the date of 1473-74 is not taken without some hazard. As
it has been of late ascertained that when Columbus left Portugal it was
not for good, as was supposed, so it may yet be discovered that it was
from some earlier adventure that the buoyancy of an oar took him to the
land.
[Sidenote: Italians as maritime discoverers.]
This coming of an Italian to Portugal to throw in his lot with a foreign
people leads the considerate observer to reflect on the strange
vicissitudes which caused Italy to furnish to the western nations so
many conspicuous leaders in the great explorations of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, without profiting in the slightest degree through
territorial return. Cadamosto and Cabot, the Venetians, Columbus, the
Genoese, Vespucius and Verrazano, the Florentines, are, on the whole,
the most important of the great captains of discovery in this virgin age
of maritime exploration through the dark waters of the Atlantic; and yet
Spain and Portugal, France and England, were those who profited by their
genius and labors.
It is a singular fact that, during the years which Columbus spent in
Portugal, there is not a single act of his life that can be credited
with an exact date, and few can be placed beyond cavil by undisputed
documentary evidence.
[Sidenote: Occupation in Portugal.]
It is the usual story, given by his earliest Italian biographers, Gallo
and his copiers, that Columbus had found his brother Bartholomew already
domiciled in Portugal, and earning a living by making charts and selling
books, and that Christopher naturally fell, for a while, into similar
occupations. He was not, we are also told, unmindful of his father's
distresses in Italy, when he disposed of his small earnings. We likewise
know the names of a few of his fellow Genoese settled in Lisbon in
traffic, because he speaks of their kindnesses to him, and the help
which they had given him (1482) in what would appear to have been
commercial ventures.
It seems not unlikely that he had not been long in the country when the
incident occurred at Lisbon which led to his marriage, which is thus
recorded in the _Historie_.
[Sidenote: His marriage.]
During his customary attendance upon divine worship in the Convent of
All Saints, his devotion was observed by one of the pensioners of the
monastery, who sought him with such expressions of affection that he
easily yielded to her charms. This woman, Felipa Moñiz by name, is said
to have been a daughter, by his wife Caterina Visconti, of Bartolomeo
Perestrello, a gentleman of Italian origin, who is associated with the
colonization of Madeira and Porto Santo. From anything which Columbus
himself says and is preserved to us, we know nothing more than that he
desired in his will that masses should be said for the repose of her
soul; for she was then long dead, and, as Diego tells us, was buried in
Lisbon. We learn her name for the first time from Diego's will, in 1509,
and this is absolutely all the documentary evidence which we have
concerning her. Oviedo and the writers who wrote before the publication
of the _Historie_ had only said that Columbus had married in Portugal,
without further particulars.
[Sidenote: The Perestrellos.]
But the _Historie_, with Las Casas following it, does not wholly satisfy
our curiosity, neither does Oviedo, later, nor Gomara and Benzoni, who
copy from Oviedo. There arises a question of the identity of this
Bartolomeo Perestrello, among three of the name of three succeeding
generations. Somewhere about 1420, or later, the eldest of this line was
made the first governor of Porto Santo, after the island had been
discovered by one of the expeditions which had been down the African
coast. It is of him the story goes that, taking some rabbits thither,
their progeny so quickly possessed the island that its settlers deserted
it! Such genealogical information as can be acquired of this earliest
Perestrello is against the supposition of his being the father of Felipa
Moñiz, but rather indicates that by a second wife, Isabel Moñiz by name,
he had the second Bartolomeo, who in turn became the father of our
Felipa Moñiz. The testimony of Las Casas seems to favor this view. If
this is the Bartolomeo who, having attained his majority, was assigned
to the captaincy of Porto Santo in 1473, it could hardly be that a
daughter would have been old enough to marry in 1474-75.
The first Bartolomeo, if he was the father-in-law of Columbus, seems to
have died in 1457, and was succeeded in 1458, in command of the island
of Porto Santo, by another son-in-law, Pedro Correa da Cunha, who
married a daughter of his first marriage,--or at least that is one
version of this genealogical complication,--and who was later succeeded
in 1473 by the second Bartolomeo.
The Count Bernardo Pallastrelli, a modern member of the family, has of
late years, in his _Il Suocero e la Moglie di Cristoforo Colombo_ (2d
ed., Piacenza, 1876), attempted to identify the kindred of the wife of
Columbus. He has examined the views of Harrisse, who is on the whole
inclined to believe that the wife of Columbus was a daughter of one
Vasco Gill Moñiz, whose sister had married the Perestrello of the
_Historie_ story. The successive wills of Diego Columbus, it may be
observed, call her in one (1509) Philippa Moñiz, and in the other (1523)
Philippa Muñiz, without the addition of Perestrello. The genealogical
table of the count's monograph, on the other hand, makes Felipa to be
the child of Isabella Moñiz, who was the second wife of Bartolomeo
Pallastrelli, the son of Felipo, who came to Portugal some time after
1371, from Plaisance, in Italy. Bartolomeo had been one of the household
of Prince Henry, and had been charged by him with founding a colony at
Porto Santo, in 1425, over which island he was long afterward (1446)
made governor. We must leave it as a question involved in much doubt.
[Sidenote: Columbus's son Diego born.]
The issue of this marriage was one son, Diego, but there is no distinct
evidence as to the date of his birth. Sundry incidents go to show that
it was somewhere between 1475 and 1479. Columbus's marriage to Doña
Felipa had probably taken place at Lisbon, and not before 1474 at the
earliest, a date not difficult to reconcile with the year (1473-74) now
held to be that of his arrival in Portugal. It is supposed that it was
while Columbus was living at Porto Santo, where his wife had some
property, that Diego was born, though Harrisse doubts if any evidence
can be adduced to support such a statement beyond a sort of conjecture
on Las Casas's part, derived from something he thought he remembered
Diego to have told him.
[Sidenote: Perestrello's MSS.]
The story of Columbus's marriage, as given in the _Historie_
and followed by Oviedo, couples with it the belief that it was among the
papers of his dead father-in-law, Perestrello, that Columbus found
documents and maps which prompted him to the conception of a western
passage to Asia. In that case, this may perhaps have been the motive
which induced him to draw from Paolo Toscanelli that famous letter,
which is usually held to have had an important influence on the mind of
Columbus.
[Sidenote: Story of a sailor dying in Columbus's house.]
The fact of such relationship of Columbus with Perestrello is called in
question, and so is another incident often related by the biographers of
Columbus. This is that an old seaman who had returned from an
adventurous voyage westward had found shelter in the house of Columbus,
and had died there, but not before he had disclosed to him a discovery
he had made of land to the west. This story is not told in any writer
that is now known before Gomara (1552), and we are warned by Benzoni
that in Gomara's hands this pilot story was simply an invention "to
diminish the immortal fame of Christopher Columbus, as there were many
who could not endure that a foreigner and Italian should have acquired
so much honor and so much glory, not only for the Spanish kingdom, but
also for the other nations of the world."
[Sidenote: Pomponius Mela, Strabo, etc.]
[Sidenote: Manilius, Solinus, Ptolemy.]
It is certain, however, that under the impulse of the young art of
printing men's minds had at this time become more alive than they had
been for centuries to the search for cosmographical views. The old
geographers, just at this time, were one by one finding their way into
print, mainly in Italy, while the intercourse of that country with
Portugal was quickened by the attractions of the Portuguese discoveries.
While Columbus was still in Italy, the great popularity of Pomponius
Mela began with the first edition in Latin, which was printed at Milan
in 1471, followed soon by other editions in Venice. The _De Situ Orbis_
of Strabo had already been given to the world in Latin as early as 1469,
and during the next few years this text was several times reprinted at
Rome and Venice. The teaching of the sphericity of the earth in the
astronomical poem of Manilius, long a favorite with the monks of the
Middle Ages, who repeated it in their labored script, appeared in type
at Nuremberg at the same time. The _Polyhistor_ of Solinus did not long
delay to follow. A Latin version of Ptolemy had existed since 1409, but
it was later than the rest in appearing in print, and bears the date of
1475. These were the newer issues of the Italian and German presses,
which were attracting the notice of the learned in this country of the
new activities when Columbus came among them, and they were having their
palpable effect.
[Sidenote: Toscanelli's theory.]
[Sidenote: His letter to Columbus.]
Just when we know not, but some time earlier than this, Alfonso V. of
Portugal had sought, through the medium of the monk Fernando Martinez
(Fernam Martins), to know precisely what was meant by the bruit of
Toscanelli's theory of a westward way to India. To an inquiry thus
vouched Toscanelli had replied to Fernando Martinez (June 25, 1474),
some days before a similar inquiry addressed to Toscanelli reached
Florence, from Columbus himself, and through the agency of an aged
Florentine merchant settled in Lisbon. It seems probable that no
knowledge of Martinez's correspondence with Toscanelli had come to the
notice of Columbus; and that the message which the Genoese sent to the
Florentine was due simply to the same current rumors of Toscanelli's
views which had attracted the attention of the king. So in replying to
Columbus Toscanelli simply shortened his task by inclosing, with a brief
introduction, a copy of the letter, which he says he had sent "some days
before" to Martinez. This letter outlined a plan of western discovery;
but it is difficult to establish beyond doubt the exact position which
the letter of Toscanelli should hold in the growth of Columbus's views.
If Columbus reached Portugal as late as 1473-74, as seems likely, it is
rendered less certain that Columbus had grasped his idea anterior to the
spread of Toscanelli's theory. In any event, the letter of the
Florentine physician would strengthen the growing notions of the
Genoese.
As Toscanelli was at this time a man of seventy-seven, and as a belief
in the sphericity of the earth was then not unprevalent, and as the
theory of a westward way to the East was a necessary concomitant of such
views in the minds of thinking men, it can hardly be denied that the
latent faith in a westward passage only needed a vigilant mind to
develop the theory, and an adventurous spirit to prove its correctness.
The development had been found in Toscanelli and the proof was waiting
for Columbus,--both Italians; but Humboldt points out how the
Florentine very likely thought he was communicating with a Portuguese,
when he wrote to Columbus.
This letter has been known since 1571 in the Italian text as given in
the _Historie_, which, as it turns out, was inexact and overladen with
additions. At least such is the inference when we compare this Italian
text with a Latin text, supposed to be the original tongue of the
letter, which has been discovered of late years in the handwriting of
Columbus himself, on the flyleaf of an Æneas Sylvius (1477), once
belonging to Columbus, and still preserved in the Biblioteca Colombina
at Seville. The letter which is given in the _Historie_ is accompanied
by an antescript, which says that the copy had been sent to Columbus at
his request, and that it had been originally addressed to Martinez, some
time "before the wars of Castile." How much later than the date June 25,
1474, this copy was sent to Columbus, and when it was received by him,
there is no sure means of determining, and it may yet be in itself one
of the factors for limiting the range of months during which Columbus
must have arrived in Portugal.
[Sidenote: Toscanelli's visions of the East.]
The extravagances of the letter of Toscanelli, in his opulent
descriptions of a marvelous Asiatic region, were safely made in that age
without incurring the charge of credulity. Travelers could tell tales
then that were as secure from detection as the revealed arcana of the
Zuñi have been in our own days. Two hundred towns, whose marble bridges
spanned a single river, and whose commerce could incite the cupidity of
the world, was a tale easily to stir numerous circles of listeners in
the maritime towns of the Mediterranean, wherever wandering mongers of
marvels came and went. There were such travelers whose recitals
Toscanelli had read, and others whose tales he had heard from their own
lips, and these last were pretty sure to augment the wonders of the
elder talebearers.
Columbus had felt this influence with the rest, and the tales lost
nothing of their vividness in coming to him freshened, as it were, by
the curious mind of the Florentine physician. The map which accompanied
Toscanelli's letter, and which depicted his notions of the Asiatic coast
lying over against that of Spain, is lost to us, but various attempts
have been made to restore it, as is done in the sketch annexed. It will
be a precious memorial, if ever recovered, worthy of study as a reflex,
in more concise representation than is found in the text of the letter,
of the ideas which one of the most learned cosmographers of his day had
imbibed from mingled demonstrations of science and imagination.
[Illustration: TOSCANELLI'S MAP AS RESTORED IN _DAS AUSLAND_.]
[Sidenote: The passage westward.]
It is said that in our own day, in the first stages of a belief in the
practicability of an Atlantic telegraphic cable, it was seriously
claimed that the vast stretch of its extension could be broken by a
halfway station on Jacquet Island, one of those relics of the Middle
Ages, which has disappeared from our ocean charts only in recent years.
[Sidenote: Antillia.]
Just in the same way all the beliefs which men had had in the island of
Antillia, and in the existence of many another visionary bit of land,
came to the assistance of these theoretical discoverers in planning the
chances of a desperate voyage far out into a sea of gorgons and chimeras
dire. Toscanelli's map sought to direct the course of any one who dared
to make the passage, in a way that, in case of disaster to his ships, a
secure harbor could be found in Antillia, and in such other havens as no
lack of islands would supply.
Ferdinand claimed to have found in his father's papers some statements
which he had drawn from Aristotle of Carthaginian voyages to Antillia,
on the strength of which the Portuguese had laid that island down in
their charts in the latitude of Lisbon, as one occupied by their people
in 714, when Spain was conquered by the Moors. Even so recently as the
time of Prince Henry it had been visited by Portuguese ships, if records
were to be believed. It also stands in the Bianco map of 1436.
[Sidenote: Fabulous islands of the Atlantic.]
There are few more curious investigations than those which concern these
fantastic and fabulous islands of the Sea of Darkness. They are
connected with views which were an inheritance in part from the classic
times, with involved notions of the abodes of the blessed and of
demoniacal spirits. In part they were the aërial creation of popular
mythologies, going back to a remoteness of which it is impossible to
trace the beginning, and which got a variable color from the popular
fancies of succeeding generations. The whole subject is curiously
without the field of geography, though entering into all surveys of
mediæval knowledge of the earth, and depending very largely for its
elucidation on the maps of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
whose mythical traces are not beyond recognition in some of the best
maps which have instructed a generation still living.
[Sidenote: St. Brandan.]
To place the island of the Irish St. Brandan--whose coming there with
his monks is spoken of as taking place in the sixth century--in the
catalogue of insular entities is to place geography in such a marvelous
guise as would have satisfied the monk Philoponus and the rest of the
credulous fictionmongers who hang about the skirts of the historic
field. But the belief in it long prevailed, and the apparition sometimes
came to sailors' eyes as late as the last century.
[Sidenote: Antillia, or the Seven Cities.]
The great island of Antillia, or the Seven Cities, already referred to,
was recognized, so far as we know, for the first time in the Weimar map
of 1424, and is known in legends as the resort of some Spanish bishops,
flying from the victorious Moors, in the eighth century. It never quite
died out from the recognition of curious minds, and was even thought to
have been seen by the Portuguese, not far from the time when Columbus
was born. Peter Martyr also, after Columbus had returned from his first
voyage, had a fancy that what the Admiral had discovered was really the
great island of Antillia, and its attendant groups of smaller isles, and
the fancy was perpetuated when Wytfliet and Ortelius popularized the
name of Antilles for the West Indian Archipelago.
[Sidenote: Brazil Island.]
Another fleeting insular vision of this pseudo-geographical realm was a
smaller body of floating land, very inconstant in position, which is
always given some form of the name that, in later times, got a constant
shape in the word Brazil. We can trace it back into the portolanos of
the middle of the fourteenth century; and it had not disappeared as a
survival twenty or thirty years ago in the admiralty charts of Great
Britain. The English were sending out expeditions from Bristol in search
of it even while Columbus was seeking countenance for his western
schemes; and Cabot, at a little later day, was instrumental in other
searches.
[Sidenote: Travelers in the Orient.]
Foremost among the travelers who had excited the interest of Toscanelli,
and whose names he possibly brought for the first time to the attention
of Columbus, were Marco Polo, Sir John Mandeville, and Nicolas de Conti.
[Illustration: MODERN EASTERN ASIA, WITH THE OLD AND NEW NAMES.
[From Yule's _Cathay_.]]
[Sidenote: Marco Polo,]
It is a question to be resolved only by critical study as to what was
the language in which Marco Polo first dictated, in a Genoese prison in
1298, the original narrative of his experiences in Cathay. The inquiry
has engaged the attention of all his editors, and has invited the
critical sagacity of D'Avezac. There seems little doubt that it was
written down in French.
[Illustration: EASTERN ASIA, CATALAN MAP, 1375.
[From Yule's _Cathay_, vol. i.]]
[Illustration: MARCO POLO.
[From an original at Rome.]]
There are no references by Columbus himself to the Asiatic travels of
Marco Polo, but his acquaintance with the marvelous book of the Venetian
observer may safely be assumed. The multiplication of texts of the
_Milione_ following upon his first dictation, and upon the subsequent
revision in 1307, may not, indeed, have caused it to be widely known in
various manuscript forms, be it in Latin or Italian. Nor is it likely
that Columbus could have read the earliest edition which was put in
type, for it was in German in 1477; but there is the interesting
possibility that this work of the Nuremberg press may have been known to
Martin Behaim, a Nuremberger then in Lisbon, and likely enough to have
been a familiar of Columbus. The fact that there is in the Biblioteca
Colombina at Seville a copy of the first Latin printed edition (1485)
with notes, which seem to be in Columbus's handwriting, may be taken as
evidence, that at least in the later years of his study the inspiration
which Marco Polo could well have been to him was not wanting; and the
story may even be true as told in Navarrete, that Columbus had a copy
of this famous book at his side during his first voyage, in 1492.
At the time when Humboldt doubted the knowledge of Columbus in respect
to Marco Polo, this treasure of the Colombina was not known, and these
later developments have shown how such a question was not to be settled
as Humboldt supposed, by the fact that Columbus quoted Æneas Sylvius
upon Cipango, and did not quote Marco Polo.
[Sidenote: Sir John Mandeville.]
Neither does Columbus refer to the journey and strange stories of Sir
John Mandeville, whose recitals came to a generation which was beginning
to forget the stories of Marco Polo, and which, by fostering a passion
for the marvelous, had readily become open to the English knight's
bewildering fancies. The same negation of evidence, however, that
satisfied Humboldt as respects Marco Polo will hardly suffice to
establish Columbus's ignorance of the marvels which did more, perhaps,
than the narratives of any other traveler to awaken Europe to the
wonders of the Orient. Bernaldez, in fact, tells us that Columbus was a
reader of Mandeville, whose recital was first printed in French at Lyons
in 1480, within a few years after Columbus's arrival in Portugal.
[Sidenote: Nicolo di Conti.]
It was to Florence, in Toscanelli's time, not far from 1420, that Nicolo
di Conti, a Venetian, came, after his long sojourn of a quarter of a
century in the far East. In Conti's new marvels, the Florentine scholar
saw a rejuvenation of the wonders of Marco Polo. It was from Conti,
doubtless, that Toscanelli got some of that confidence in a western
voyage which, in his epistle to Columbus, he speaks of as derived from a
returned traveler.
Pope Eugene IV., not far from the time of the birth of Columbus,
compelled Conti to relate his experiences to Poggio Bracciolini. This
scribe made what he could out of the monstrous tales, and translated the
stories into Latin. In this condition Columbus may have known the
narrative at a later day. The information which Conti gave was eagerly
availed of by the cosmographers of the time, and Colonel Yule, the
modern English writer on ancient Cathay, thinks that Fra Mauro got for
his map more from Conti than that traveler ventured to disclose to
Poggio.
[Sidenote: Toscanelli's death, 1482.]
Toscanelli, at the time of writing this letter to Columbus, had long
enjoyed a reputation as a student of terrestrial and celestial
phenomena. He had received, in 1463, the dedication by Regiomontanus of
his treatise on the quadrature of the circle. He was, as has been said,
an old man of seventy-seven when Columbus opened his correspondence with
him. It was not his fate to live long enough to see his physical views
substantiated by Diaz and Columbus, for he died in 1482.
[Sidenote: Columbus confers with others.]
In two of the contemporary writers, Bartholomew Columbus is credited
with having incited his brother Christopher to the views which he
developed regarding a western passage, and these two were Antonio Gallo
and Giustiniani, the commentator of the Psalms. It has been of late
contended by H. Grothe, in his _Leonardo da Vinci_ (Berlin, 1874), that
it was at this time, too, when that eminent artist conducted a
correspondence with Columbus about a western way to Asia. But there is
little need of particularizing other advocates of a belief which had
within the range of credible history never ceased to have exponents. The
conception was in no respect the merit of Columbus, except as he grasped
a tradition, which others did not, and it is strange, that Navarrete in
quoting the testimony of Ferdinand and Isabella, of August 8, 1497, to
the credit of the discovery of Columbus, as his own proper work, does
not see that it was the venturesome, and as was then thought foolhardy,
deed to prove the conception which those monarchs commended, and not the
conception itself.
[Sidenote: Columbus writes out reasons for his belief.]
We learn from the _Historie_ that its writer had found among the papers
of Columbus the evidence of the grounds of his belief in the western
passage, as under varying impressions it had been formulated in his
mind. These reasons divide easily into three groups: First, those based
on deductions drawn from scientific research, and as expressed in the
beliefs of Ptolemy, Marinus, Strabo, and Pliny; second, views which the
authority of eminent writers had rendered weightier, quoting as such the
works of Aristotle, Seneca, Strabo, Pliny, Solinus, Marco Polo,
Mandeville, Pierre d'Ailly, and Toscanelli; and third, the stories of
sailors as to lands and indications of lands westerly.
From these views, instigated or confirmed by such opinions, Columbus
gradually arranged his opinions, in not one of which did he prove to be
right, except as regards the sphericity of the earth; and the last was a
belief which had been the common property of learned men, and at
intervals occupying even the popular mind, from a very early date.
[Sidenote: Sphericity of the earth.]
[Sidenote: Transmission of the belief in it.]
The conception among the Greeks of a plane earth, which was taught in
the Homeric and Hesiodic poems, began to give place to a crude notion of
a spherical form at a period that no one can definitely determine,
though we find it taught by the Pythagoreans in Italy in the sixth
century before Christ. The spherical view and its demonstration passed
down through long generations of Greeks, under the sanction of Plato and
their other highest thinkers. In the fourth century before Christ,
Aristotle and others, by watching the moon's shadow in an eclipse, and
by observing the rising and setting of the heavenly bodies in different
latitudes, had proved the roundness of the earth to their satisfaction;
Eratosthenes first measured a degree of latitude in the third century;
Hipparchus, in the second century, was the earliest to establish
geographical positions; and in the second century of the Christian era
Ptolemy had formulated for succeeding times the general scope of the
transmitted belief. During all these centuries it was perhaps rather a
possession of the learned. We infer from Aristotle that the view was a
novelty in his time; but in the third century before Christ it began to
engage popular attention in the poem of Aratus, and at about 200 B. C.
Crates is said to have given palpable manifestation of the theory in a
globe, ten feet in diameter, which he constructed.
The belief passed to Italy and the Latins, and was sung by Hyginus and
Manilius in the time of Augustus. We find it also in the minds of Pliny,
Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid. So the belief became the heirloom of the
learned throughout the classic times, and it was directly coupled in the
minds of Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Strabo, Seneca, and others with a
conviction, more or less pronounced, of an easy western voyage from
Spain to India.
[Sidenote: Seneca's _Medea_.]
[Sidenote: Cosmas.]
[Sidenote: Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Pierre d'Ailly.]
No one of the ancient expressions of this belief seems to have clung
more in the memory of Columbus than that in the _Medea_ of Seneca; and
it is an interesting confirmation that in a copy of the book which
belonged to his son Ferdinand, and which is now preserved in Seville,
the passage is scored by the son's hand, while in a marginal note he has
attested the fact that its prophecy of a western passage had been made
good by his father in 1492. Though the opinion was opposed by St.
Chrysostom in the fourth century, it was taught by St. Augustine and
Isidore in the fifth. Cosmas in the sixth century was unable to
understand how, if the earth was a sphere, those at the antipodes could
see Christ at his coming. That settled the question in his mind. The
Venerable Bede, however, in the eighth century, was not constrained by
any such arguments, and taught the spherical theory. Jourdain, a modern
French authority, has found distinct evidence that all through the
Middle Ages the belief in the western way was kept alive by the study of
Aristotle; and we know how the Arabs perpetuated the teachings of that
philosopher, which in turn were percolated through the Levant to
Mediterranean peoples. It is a striking fact that at a time when Spain
was bending all her energies to drive the Moor from the Iberian
peninsula, that country was also engaged in pursuing those discoveries
along the western way to India which were almost a direct result of the
Arab preservation of the cosmographical learning of Aristotle and
Ptolemy. A belief in an earth-ball had the testimony of Dante in the
twelfth century, and it was the well-known faith of Albertus Magnus,
Roger Bacon, and the schoolmen, in the thirteenth. It continued to be
held by the philosophers, who kept alive these more recent names, and
came to Columbus because of the use of Bacon which Pierre d'Ailly had
made.
The belief in the sphericity of the earth carried with it of necessity
another,--that the east was to be found in the west. Superstition,
ignorance, and fear might magnify the obstacles to a passage through
that drear Sea of Darkness, but in Columbus's time, in some learned
minds at least, there was no distrust as to the accomplishment of such a
voyage beyond the chance of obstacles in the way.
[Illustration: ALBERTUS MAGNUS.
[From Reusner's _Icones_.]]
[Sidenote: The belief opposed by the Church.]
It is true that in this interval of very many centuries there had been
lapses into unbelief. There were long periods, indeed, when no one dared
to teach the doctrine. Whenever and wherever the Epicureans supplanted
the Pythagoreans, the belief fell with the disciples of Pythagoras.
There had been, during the days of St. Chrysostom and other of the
fathers, a decision of the Church against it. There were doubtless, as
Humboldt says, conservers, during all this time, of the traditions of
antiquity, since the monasteries and colleges--even in an age when to be
unlearned was more pardonable than to be pagan--were of themselves quite
a world apart from the dullness of the masses of the people.
[Sidenote: Pierre D'Ailly's _Imago Mundi_.]
[Sidenote: Roger Bacon's _Opus Majus_.]
A hundred years before Columbus, the inheritor of much of this
conservation was the Bishop of Cambray, that Pierre d'Ailly whose _Imago
Mundi_ (1410) was so often on the lips of Columbus, and out of which it
is more than likely that Columbus drank of the knowledge of Aristotle,
Strabo, and Seneca, and to a degree greater perhaps than he was aware of
he took thence the wisdom of Roger Bacon. It was through the _Opus
Majus_ (1267) of this English philosopher that western Europe found
accessible the stories of the "silver walls and golden towers" of
Quinsay as described by Rubruquis, the wandering missionary, who in the
thirteenth century excited the cupidity of the Mediterranean merchants
by his accounts of the inexhaustible treasures of eastern Asia, and
which the reader of to-day may find in the collections of Samuel
Purchas.
Pierre d'Ailly's position in regard to cosmographical knowledge was
hardly a dominant one. He seems to know nothing of Marco Polo, Bacon's
contemporary, and he never speaks of Cathay, even when he urges the
views which he has borrowed from Roger Bacon, of the extension of Asia
towards Western Europe.
Any acquaintance with the _Imago Mundi_ during these days of Columbus in
Portugal came probably through report, though possibly he may have met
with manuscripts of the work; for it was not till after he had gone to
Spain that D'Ailly could have been read in any printed edition, the
first being issued in 1490.
[Sidenote: Rotundity and gravitation.]
The theory of the rotundity of the earth carried with it one objection,
which in the time of Columbus was sure sooner or later to be seized
upon. If, going west, the ship sank with the declivity of the earth's
contour, how was she going to mount such an elevation on her return
voyage?--a doubt not so unreasonable in an age which had hardly more
than the vaguest notion of the laws of gravitation, though some, like
Vespucius, were not without a certain prescience of the fact.
[Sidenote: Size of the earth.]
By the middle of the third century before Christ, Eratosthenes,
accepting sphericity, had by astronomical methods studied the extent of
the earth's circumference, and, according to the interpretation of his
results by modern scholars, he came surprisingly near to the actual
size, when he exceeded the truth by perhaps a twelfth part. The
calculations of Eratosthenes commended themselves to Hipparchus, Strabo,
and Pliny. A century later than Eratosthenes, a new calculation, made by
Posidonius of Rhodes, reduced the magnitude to a globe of about four
fifths its proper size. It was palpably certain to the observant
philosophers, from the beginning of their observations on the size of
the earth, that the portion known to commerce and curiosity was but a
small part of what might yet be known. The unknown, however, is always a
terror. Going north from temperate Europe increased the cold, going
south augmented the heat; and it was no bold thought for the naturalist
to conclude that a north existed in which the cold was unbearable, and a
south in which the heat was too great for life. Views like these stayed
the impulse for exploration even down to the century of Columbus, and
magnified the horrors which so long balked the exploration of the
Portuguese on the African coast. There had been intervals, however, when
men in the Indian Ocean had dared to pass the equator.
[Sidenote: Unknown regions.]
[Sidenote: Strabo and Marinus on the size of the earth.]
Therefore it was before the age of Columbus that, east and west along
the temperate belt, men's minds groped to find new conditions beyond the
range of known habitable regions. Strabo, in the first century before
Christ, made this habitable zone stretch over 120 degrees, or a third of
the circumference of the earth. The corresponding extension of Marinus
of Tyre in the second century after Christ stretched over 225 degrees.
This geographer did not define the land's border on the ocean at the
east, but it was not unusual with the cosmographers who followed him to
carry the farthest limits of Asia to what is actually the meridian of
the Sandwich Islands. On the west Marinus pushed the Fortunate Islands
(Canaries) two degrees and a half beyond Cape Finisterre, failing to
comprehend their real position, which for the westernmost, Ferro, is
something like nine degrees beyond the farther limits of the main land.
[Sidenote: Ptolemy's view.]
The belt of the known world running in the direction of the equator was,
in the conception of Ptolemy, the contemporary of Marinus, about
seventy-nine degrees wide, sixteen of these being south of the
equatorial line. This was a contraction from the previous estimate of
Marinus, who had made it over eighty-seven degrees.
[Sidenote: Toscanelli's view.]
Toscanelli reduced the globe to a circumference of about 18,000 miles,
losing about 6,000 miles; and the untracked ocean, lying west of Lisbon,
was about one third of this distance. In other words, the known world
occupied about 240 of the 360 degrees constituting the equatorial
length. Few of the various computations of this time gave such scant
dimensions to the unknown proportion of the line. The Laon globe, which
was made ten or twelve years later than Toscanelli's time, was equally
scant. Behaim, who figured out the relations of the known to the unknown
circuit, during the summer before Columbus sailed on his first voyage,
reduced what was known to not much more than a third of the whole. It
was the fashion, too, with an easy reliance on their genuineness, to
refer to the visions of Esdras in support of a belief in the small
part--a sixth--of the surface of the globe covered by the ocean.
[Illustration: LAON GLOBE.
[After D'Avezac.]]
[Sidenote: Views of Columbus.]
The problem lay in Columbus's mind thus: he accepted the theory of the
division of the circumference of the earth into twenty-four hours, as it
had come down from Marinus of Tyre, when this ancient astronomer
supposed that from the eastern verge of Asia to the western extremity of
Europe there was a space of fifteen hours. The discovery of the Azores
had pushed the known limit a single hour farther towards the setting
sun, making sixteen hours, or two thirds of the circumference of 360
degrees. There were left eight hours, or one hundred and twenty degrees,
to represent the space between the Azores and Asia. This calculation in
reality brought the Asiatic coast forward to the meridian of California,
obliterating the width of the Pacific at that latitude, and reducing by
so much the size of the globe as Columbus measured it, on the assumption
that Marinus was correct. This, however, he denied. If the _Historie_
reports Columbus exactly, he contended that the testimony of Marco Polo
and Mandeville carried the verge of Asia so far east that the land
distance was more than fifteen hours across; and by as much as this
increased the distance, by so much more was the Asiatic shore pushed
nearer the coasts of Europe. "We can thus determine," he says, "that
India is even neighboring to Spain and Africa."
[Sidenote: Length of a degree.]
The calculation of course depended on what was the length of a degree,
and on this point there was some difference of opinion. Toscanelli had
so reduced a degree's length that China was brought forward on his
planisphere till its coast line cut the meridian of the present
Newfoundland.
[Sidenote: Quinsay.]
We can well imagine how this undue contraction of the size of the globe,
as the belief lay in the mind of Columbus, and as he expressed it later
(July 7, 1503), did much to push him forward, and was a helpful illusion
in inducing others to venture upon the voyage with him. The courage
required to sail out of some Iberian port due west a hundred and twenty
degrees in order to strike the regions about the great Chinese city of
Quinsay, or Kanfu, Hangtscheufu, and Kingszu, as it has been later
called, was more easily summoned than if the actual distance of two
hundred and thirty-one degrees had been recognized, or even the two
hundred and four degrees necessary in reality to reach Cipango, or
Japan. The views of Toscanelli, as we have seen, reduced the duration of
risk westward to so small a figure as fifty-two degrees. So it had not
been an unusual belief, more or less prominent for many generations,
that with a fair wind it required no great run westward to reach Cathay,
if one dared to undertake it. If there were no insurmountable obstacles
in the Sea of Darkness, it would not be difficult to reach earlier that
multitude of islands which was supposed to fringe the coast of China.
[Sidenote: Asiatic islands.]
[Sidenote: Cipango.]
[Sidenote: Spanish and Portuguese explorations.]
It was a common belief, moreover, that somewhere in this void lay the
great island of Cipango,--the goal of Columbus's voyage. Sometimes
nearer and sometimes farther it lay from the Asiatic coast. Pinzon saw
in Rome in 1491 a map which carried it well away from that coast; and if
one could find somewhere in the English archives the sea-chart with
which Bartholomew Columbus enforced the views of his brother, to gain
the support of the English king, it is supposed that it would reveal a
somewhat similar location of the coveted island. Here, then, was a
space, larger or smaller, as men differently believed, interjacent along
this known zone between the ascertained extreme east in Asia and the
accepted most distant west at Cape St. Vincent in Spain, as was thought
in Strabo's time, or at the Canaries, as was comprehended in the days of
Ptolemy. What there was in this unknown space between Spain and Cathay
was the problem which balked the philosophers quite as much as that
other uncertainty, which concerned what might possibly be found in the
southern hemisphere, could one dare to enter the torrid heats of the
supposed equatorial ocean, or in the northern wastes, could one venture
to sail beyond the Arctic Circle. These curious quests of the
inquisitive and learned minds of the early centuries of the Christian
era were the prototypes of the actual explorations which it was given in
the fifteenth century to the Spaniards and Portuguese respectively to
undertake. The commercial rivalry which had in the past kept Genoa and
Venice watchful of each other's advantage had by their maritime ventures
in the Atlantic passed to these two peninsular nations, and England was
not long behind them in starting in her race for maritime supremacy.
[Sidenote: Sea of Darkness.]
It was in human nature that these unknown regions should become those
either of enchantment or dismay, according to personal proclivities. It
is not necessary to seek far for any reason for this. An unknown stretch
of waters was just the place for the resorts of the Gorgons and to find
the Islands of the Blest, and to nurture other creations of the literary
and spiritual instincts, seeking to give a habitation to fancies. It is
equally in human nature that what the intellect has habilitated in this
way the fears, desires, and superstitions of men in due time turn to
their own use. It was easy, under the stress of all this complexity of
belief and anticipation, for this supposable interjacent oceanic void to
teem in men's imaginations with regions of almost every imaginable
character; and when, in the days of the Roman republic, the Canaries
were reached, there was no doubt but the ancient Islands of the Blest
had been found, only in turn to pass out of cognizance, and once more to
fall into the abyss of the Unknown.
[Sidenote: Story of Atlantis.]
[Sidenote: Land of the Meropes.]
[Sidenote: Saturnian continent.]
There are, however, three legends which have come down to us from the
classic times, which the discovery of America revived with new interest
in the speculative excursions of the curiously learned, and it is one of
the proofs of the narrow range of Columbus's acquaintance with original
classic writers that these legends were not pressed by him in support of
his views. The most persistent of these in presenting a question for the
physical geographer is the story of Atlantis, traced to a tale told by
Plato of a tradition of an island in the Atlantic which eight thousand
years ago had existed in the west, opposite the Pillars of Hercules; and
which, in a great inundation, had sunken beneath the sea, leaving in mid
ocean large mud shoals to impede navigation and add to the terrors of a
vast unknown deep. There have been those since the time of Gomara who
have believed that the land which Columbus found dry and inhabited was a
resurrected Atlantis, and geographers even of the seventeenth century
have mapped out its provinces within the usual outline of the American
continents. Others have held, and some still hold, that the Atlantic
islands are but peaks of this submerged continent. There is no evidence
to show that these fancies of the philosopher ever disturbed even the
most erratic moments of Columbus, nor could he have pored over the
printed Latin of Plato, if it came in his way, till its first edition
appeared in 1483, during his stay in Portugal. Neither do we find that
he makes any references to that other creation, the land of the Meropes,
as figured in the passages cited by Ælian some seven hundred years after
Theopompus had conjured up the vision in the fourth century before
Christ. Equally ignorant was Columbus, it would appear, of the great
Saturnian continent, lying five days west from Britain, which makes a
story in Plutarch's _Morals_.
[Sidenote: Earlier voyages on the Atlantic.]
[Sidenote: Phoenicians.]
[Sidenote: Carthaginians.]
[Sidenote: Romans.]
We deal with a different problem when we pass from these theories and
imaginings of western lands to such records as exist of what seem like
attempts in the earliest days to attain by actual exploration the secret
of this interjacent void. The Phoenicians had passed the Straits of
Gibraltar and found Gades (Cadiz), and very likely attempted to course
the Atlantic, about 1100 years before the birth of Christ. Perhaps they
went to Cornwall for tin. It may have been by no means impossible for
them to have passed among the Azores and even to have reached the
American islands and main, as a statement in Diodorus Siculus has been
interpreted to signify. Then five hundred years later or more we observe
the Carthaginians pursuing their adventurous way outside the Pillars of
Hercules, going down the African coast under Hanno to try the equatorial
horrors, or running westerly under Hamilko to wonder at the Sargasso
sea. Later, the Phoenicians seem to have made some lodgment in the
islands off the coasts of northwestern Africa. The Romans in the fourth
century before Christ pushed their way out into the Atlantic under
Pytheas and Euthymenes, the one daring to go as far as Thule--whatever
that was--in the north, and the other to Senegal in the south. It was in
the same century that Rome had the strange sight of some unknown
barbarians, of a race not recognizable, who were taken upon the shores
of the German Ocean, where they had been cast away. Later writers have
imagined--for no stronger word can be used--that these weird beings were
North American Indians, or rather more probably Eskimos. About the same
time, Sertorius, a Roman commander in Spain, learned, as already
mentioned, of some salubrious islands lying westward from Africa, and
gave Horace an opportunity, in the evil days of the civil war, to
picture them as a refuge.
When the Romans ruled the world, commerce lost much of the hazard and
enterprise which had earlier instigated international rivalry. The
interest in the western ocean subsided into merely speculative concern;
and wild fancy was brought into play in depicting its horrors, its
demons and shoals, with the intermingling of sky and water.
[Sidenote: Knowledge of such early attempts.]
[Sidenote: Maps XVth cent.]
[Sidenote: Genoese voyages, 1291.]
It is by no means certain that Columbus knew anything of this ancient
lore of the early Mediterranean people. There is little or nothing in
the early maps of the fifteenth century to indicate that such knowledge
was current among those who made or contributed to the making of such of
these maps as have come down to us. The work of some of the more famous
chart makers Columbus could hardly have failed to see, or heard
discussed in the maritime circles of Portugal; and indeed it was to his
own countrymen, Marino Sanuto, Pizignani, Bianco, and Fra Mauro, that
Portuguese navigators were most indebted for the broad cartographical
treatment of their own discoveries. At the same time there was no dearth
of legends of the venturesome Genoese, with fortunes not always
reassuring. There was a story, for instance, of some of these latter
people, who in 1291 had sailed west from the Pillars of Hercules and had
never returned. Such was a legend that might not have escaped Columbus's
attention even in his own country, associating with it the names of the
luckless Tedisio Doria and Ugolino Vivaldi in their efforts to find a
western way to India. Harrisse, however, who has gone over all the
evidence of such a purpose, fails to be satisfied.
These stories of ocean hazards hung naturally about the seaports of
Portugal.
[Sidenote: Antillia.]
Galvano tells us of such a tale concerning a Portuguese ship, driven
west, in 1447, to an island with seven cities, where its sailors found
the people speaking Portuguese, who said they had deserted their country
on the death of King Roderigo. This is the legend of Antillia, already
referred to.
[Sidenote: Islands seen.]
Columbus recalled, when afterwards at the Canaries on his first voyage,
how it was during his sojourn in Portugal that some one from Madeira
presented to the Portuguese king a petition for a vessel to go in quest
of land, occasionally seen to the westward from that island. Similar
stories were not unknown to him of like apparitions being familiar in
the Azores. A story which he had also heard of one Antonio Leme having
seen three islands one hundred leagues west of the Azores had been set
down to a credulous eye, which had been deceived by floating fields of
vegetation.
[Sidenote: The Basques.]
There was no obstacle in the passing of similar reports around the Bay
of Biscay from the coasts of the Basques, and the story might be heard
of Jean de Echaide, who had found stores of stockfish off a land far
oceanward,--an exploit supposed to be commemorated in the island of
Stokafixia, which stands far away to the westward in the Bianco map of
1436. All these tales of the early visits of the Basques to what
imaginative minds have supposed parts of the American coasts derive much
of their perennial charm from associations with a remarkable people.
There is indeed nothing improbable in a hardy daring which could have
borne the Basques to the Newfoundland shores at almost any date earlier
than the time of Columbus.
[Sidenote: Newfoundland banks possibly visited.]
Fructuoso, writing as late as 1590, claimed that a Portuguese navigator,
João Vaz Cortereal, had sailed to the codfish coast of Newfoundland as
early as 1464, but Barrow seems to be the only writer of recent times
who has believed the tale, and Biddle and Harrisse find no evidence to
sustain it.
[Sidenote: Tartary supposed to be seen.]
There is a statement recorded by Columbus, if we may trust the account
of the _Historie_, that a sailor at Santa Maria had told him how, being
driven westerly in a voyage to Ireland, he had seen land, which he then
thought to be Tartary. Some similar experiences were also told to
Columbus by Pieter de Velasco, of Galicia; and this land, according to
the account, would seem to have been the same sought at a later day by
the Cortereals (1500).
[Sidenote: Dubious pre-Columbian voyages.]
It is not easy to deal historically with long-held traditions. The
furbishers of transmitted lore easily make it reflect what they bring to
it. To find illustrations in any inquiry is not so difficult if you
select what you wish, and discard all else, and the result of this
discriminating accretion often looks very plausible. Historical truth is
reached by balancing everything, and not by assimilating that which
easily suits. Almost all these discussions of pre-Columbian voyagings to
America afford illustrations of this perverted method. Events in which
there is no inherent untruth are not left with the natural defense of
probability, but are proved by deductions and inferences which could
just as well be applied to prove many things else, and are indeed
applied in a new way by every new upstart in such inquiries. The story
of each discoverer before Columbus has been upheld by the stock
intimation of white-bearded men, whose advent is somehow
mysteriously discovered to have left traces among the aborigines of every
section of the coast.
* * * * *
[Illustration: OCEANIC CURRENTS.
[From Reclus's _Amérique Boréale_.]]
[Sidenote: Traces of a western land in drift.]
There was another class of evidence which, as the _Historie_ informs us,
served some purpose in bringing conviction to the mind of Columbus. Such
were the phenomenal washing ashore on European coasts of unknown pines
and other trees, sculptured logs, huge bamboos, whose joints could be
made into vessels to hold nine bottles of wine, and dead bodies with
strange, broad faces. Even canoes, with living men in them of wonderful
aspects, had at times been reported as thrown upon the Atlantic islands.
Such events had not been unnoticed ever since the Canaries and the
Azores had been inhabited by a continental race, and conjectures had
been rife long before the time of Columbus that westerly winds had
brought these estrays from a distant land,--a belief more
comprehensible at that time than any dependence upon the unsuspected
fact that it was the oceanic currents, rather, which impelled these
migratory objects.
[Sidenote: Gulf Stream.]
It required the experiences of later Spanish navigators along the Bahama
Channel, and those of the French and English farther north upon the
Banks of Newfoundland, before it became clear that the currents of the
Atlantic, grazing the Cape of Good Hope and whirling in the Gulf of
Mexico, sprayed in a curling fringe in the North Atlantic. This in a
measure became patent to Sir Humphrey Gilbert sixty or seventy years
after the death of Columbus.
If science had then been equal to the microscopic tasks which at this
day it imposes on itself, the question of western lands might have been
studied with an interest beyond what attached to the trunks of trees,
carved timbers, edible nuts, and seeds of alien plants, which the Gulf
Stream is still bringing to the shores of Europe. It might have found in
the dust settling upon the throngs of men in the Old World, the shells
of animalcules, differing from those known to the observing eye in
Europe, which, indeed, had been carried in the upper currents of air
from the banks of the Orinoco.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Influence of Portuguese discoveries upon Columbus.]
[Sidenote: _Ephemerides_ of Regiomontanus.]
Once in Portugal, Columbus was brought in close contact with that eager
spirit of exploration which had survived the example of Prince Henry and
his navigators. If Las Casas was well informed, these Portuguese
discoveries were not without great influence upon the Genoese's
receptive mind. He was now where he could hear the fresh stories of
their extending acquaintance with the African coast. His wife's sister,
by the accepted accounts, had married Pedro Correa, a navigator not
without fame in those days, and a companion in maritime inquiry upon
whom Columbus could naturally depend,--unless, as Harrisse decides, he
was no navigator at all. Columbus was also at hand to observe the
growing skill in the arts of navigation which gave the Portuguese their
preëminence. He had not been long in Lisbon when Regiomontanus gave a
new power in astronomical calculations of positions at sea by publishing
his _Ephemerides_, for the interval from 1475 to 1506, upon which
Columbus was yet to depend in his eventful voyage.
[Sidenote: Martin Behaim.]
The most famous of the pupils of this German mathematician was himself
in Lisbon during the years of Columbus's sojourn. We have no distinct
evidence that Martin Behaim, a Nuremberger, passed any courtesies with
the Genoese adventurer, but it is not improbable that he did. His
position was one that would attract Columbus, who might never have been
sought by Behaim. The Nuremberger's standing was, indeed, such as to
gain the attention of the Court, and he was thought not unworthy to be
joined with the two royal physicians, Roderigo and Josef, on a
commission to improve the astrolabe. Their perfected results mark an
epoch in the art of seamanship in that age.
[Illustration: SAMPLES OF THE TABLES OF REGIOMONTANUS, 1474-1506.]
[Illustration: THE AFRICAN COAST, 1478.
[From Nordenskiöld's _Facsimile Atlas_.]]
[Sidenote: Guinea coast, 1482.]
[Sidenote: The Congo reached, 1484.]
It was a new sensation when news came that at last the Portuguese had
crossed the equator, in pushing along the African coast. In January,
1482, they had said their first mass on the Guinea coast, and the castle
of San Jorge da Mina was soon built under the new impulse to enterprise
which came with the accession of João II. In 1484 they reached the
Congo, under the guidance of Diogo Cam, and Martin Behaim was of his
company.
[Illustration: MARTIN BEHAIM.]
These voyages were not without strong allurements to the Genoese sailor.
He is thought to have been a participant in some of the later cruises.
The _Historie_ claims that he began to reason, from his new experiences,
that if land could be discovered to the south there was much the same
chance of like discoveries in the west. But there were experiences of
other kinds which, in the interim, if we believe the story, he underwent
in the north.