THE YOUTH OF COLUMBUS
Having seen how that great event in Spanish history, the fall of
Granada, set the date for the discovery of America, let us see how it
was that a humble Italian sailor came to be present among all those
noble Spanish soldiers and statesmen. Let us see why he had brought to
Spain the idea of a round world, when most Spaniards still believed in a
flat one; and why his round world was perfectly safe to travel over,
even to its farthest point, while their flat one was edged with monsters
so terrible that no man had ever sought their evil acquaintance.
[Illustration: From "The Story of Columbus" by Elizabeth L. Seelys,
courtesy of D. Appleton and Company. THE GENOA HOME]
The amount of really reliable information which we possess concerning
the childhood of Christopher Columbus could be written in a few lines.
We do not know accurately the date of his birth, though it was probably
1451. Sixteen Italian cities have claimed him as a native; and of these
Genoa in northern Italy offers the best proofs. Papers still exist
showing that his father owned a little house there. Men who have studied
the life of Columbus, and who have written much about him, say that he
was born in the province, not the city, of Genoa; but Columbus himself
says in his diary that he was a native of Genoa city; and present-day
Genoese have even identified the very street where he was born and where
he played as a child--the Vico Dritto di Ponticello. In the wall of the
house in which he is believed to have lived is placed an iron tablet
containing an inscription in Latin. It tells us that "no house is more
to be honored than this, in which Christopher Columbus spent his boyhood
and his early youth."
More important than the exact spot of his birth would be a knowledge of
the sort of childhood he passed and of the forces that molded his
character. To learn this we must look into the condition of
civilization, and particularly of Italian civilization, in the middle
sixteenth century.
Columbus was born in a brilliant period known now as the Renaissance--a
French word meaning re-birth--which marks the beginning of modern
history. It followed a long, painful period known to us as the Dark
Ages, or Middle Ages, namely, the period between ancient and modern
times. In the Middle Ages humanity was very ignorant, hampered by all
sorts of evil superstitions; while the daily life of the people was
miserable and without comforts, lacking many things which we consider
necessities. Yet even in those far-away days things were improving,
because man has always felt the desire to make his lot better; and the
constant effort of these people of the Middle Ages led to that beautiful
awakening which we call the Renaissance.
One of the first glimmers of this new life may be said to have come from
the Crusades. The Europeans who had journeyed down into Asia to drive
the Mohammedans, or Saracens, out of the Holy Land, came back impressed
with the fact that these infidel Asiatics had more refinement and
courtesy than Christian Europe knew. The returning Crusaders introduced
some of this refinement into their own countries, and it caused people
to abandon some of their rude ways. Of course there were many more
influences working toward the great awakening, principally the growth of
commerce. All Europe became alive with the desire for progress; many new
things were invented, many old ones perfected; and before the
Renaissance ended it had given us some wonderful discoveries and
achievements--paper and printing; the mariner's compass; an
understanding of the solar system; oil painting, music, and literature;
and lastly, the New World.
Why, then, if it brought all these arts and inventions and discoveries,
do we not call it the birth, instead of the _re_-birth? Because
many of the beautiful elements of the Renaissance, such as art, science,
and poetry, enjoyment of life, freedom to investigate and study nature--
all these had existed in the days of ancient Greece and Rome; but after
the fall of Roman civilization it took the barbarian peoples of other
portions of Europe a long, long time to grow civilized, and to establish
some sort of order out of their jumbled affairs; and while they were
slowly learning lessons of government and nationality, the culture of
the antique world was lost sight of. When it was found again, when young
men wished to learn Latin and Greek so that they could read the long-
neglected books and poetry of the ancients, human life was made much
richer and happier.
This desire came first to the people of Italy. It was very natural, for
ancient Rome, where great learning had last flourished, was in Italy;
furthermore, the Italian peninsula, jutting out into the much-navigated
Mediterranean, was full of seaports, to which came vessels with the
merchandise, the language, and the legends of other countries; and when
we learn of other countries, we broaden our ideas.
Add to Italy's favorable geographical position the fact that her people
were unusually quick of intellect, and were gifted with great
imagination, and you will see how natural it was that the Renaissance
should have started there. Also, you will see why the great discoverer
was a very natural product of Italy and its Renaissance.
* * * * *
Genoa, like other large Italian cities, was teeming with this new spirit
of investigation and adventure when Cristoforo Colombo (in his native
land his name was pronounced Cristof'oro Colom'bo) was born there or
first came there to live. Long before, Genoa had taken an active part in
the Crusades, and every Genoese child knew its story. It had carried on
victorious wars with other Italian seaports. It had an enormous
commerce. It had grown rich, it was so full of marble palaces and
churches, and it had such a glorious history, that its own people loved
to call it _Genova la Superba_ (Superb Genoa).
Although Cristoforo's family were humble people of little or no
education, the lad must have had, or made, many opportunities for
acquiring knowledge. Probably he _made_ them; for, as a boy in
those days generally followed his father's trade, Cristoforo must have
spent a good deal of time in "combing" wool; that is, in making the
tangled raw wool ready for weaving. Perhaps he was sent to school, the
school supported by the "Weavers' Guild." But between working at home
and going to school, he evidently made many little trips down to the
busy wharves.
Was there ever any spot more fascinating than the wharves in olden days
--in that far-off time when there were no books to read, and when a boy's
only chance of hearing about other countries was to go and talk to the
crew of each vessel that came into port? The men to whom our lad talked
had sailed the whole length and breadth of the biggest body of explored
water, the Mediterranean. Some had gone farther east, into the Black
Sea; and still others--bravest of all--had passed beyond the Straits of
Gibraltar and out on to the great unknown ocean. It was to these last,
we may be sure, that the adventurous boy listened most eagerly.
Those hardy sailors were the best possible professors for a boy who
intended to follow the sea. They were, doubtless, practical men who
never talked much about the sea-monsters and other nonsense that many
landsmen believed in; nor did they talk of the world being flat, with a
jumping-off place where the sun set. That belief was probably cherished
by men of book-learning only, who lived in convents and who never risked
their lives on the waves. Good men these monks were, and we are grateful
to them for keeping alive a little spark of learning during those long,
rude Middle Ages; but their ideas about the universe were not to be
compared in accuracy with the ideas of the practical mariners to whom
young Cristoforo talked on the gay, lively wharves of _Genova la
Superba_.
Many years after Columbus's death, his son Fernando wrote that his
father had studied geography (which was then called _cosmogony_) at
the University of Pavia. Columbus himself never referred to Pavia nor to
any other school; nor was it likely that poor parents could afford to
send the eldest of five children to spend a year at a far-off
university. Certain it is that he never went there after his seafaring
life began, for from then on his doings are quite clearly known; so we
must admit that while he may have had some teaching in childhood, what
little knowledge he possessed of geography and science were self-taught
in later years. The belief in a sphere-world was already very ancient,
but people who accepted it were generally pronounced either mad or
wicked. Long before, in the Greek and Roman days, certain teachers had
believed it without being called mad or wicked. As far back as the
fourth century B.C. a philosopher named Pythagoras had written that the
world was round. Later Plato, and next Aristotle, two very learned
Greeks, did the same; and still later, the Romans taught it. But Greece
and Rome fell; and during the Dark Ages, when the Greek and Roman ideas
were lost sight of, most people took it for granted that the world was
flat. After many centuries the "sphere" idea was resurrected and talked
about by a few landsmen, and believed in by many practical seamen; and
it is quite possible that the young Cristoforo had learned of the theory
of a sphere-world from Genoese navigators even before he went to sea.
Wherever the idea originated is insignificant compared with the fact
that, of all the men who held the same belief, Columbus alone had the
superb courage to sail forth and prove it true.
Columbus, writing bits of autobiography later, says that he took to the
sea at fourteen. If true, he did not remain a seafarer constantly, for
in 1472-73 he was again helping his father in the weaving or wool-
combing business in Genoa. Until he started on his famous voyage,
Columbus never kept a journal, and in his journal we find very little
about those early days in Genoa. While mentioning in this journal a trip
made when he was fourteen, Columbus neglects to state that he did not
definitely give up his father's trade to become a sailor until 1475.
Meanwhile he had worked as clerk in a Genoese bookshop. We know he must
have turned this last opportunity to good account. Printing was still a
very young art, but a few books had already found their way to Genoa,
and the young clerk must have pored over them eagerly and tried to
decipher the Latin in which they were printed.
At any rate, it is certain that in 1474 or 1475 Cristoforo hired out as
an ordinary sailor on a Mediterranean ship going to Chios, an island
east of Greece. In 1476 we find him among the sailors on some galleys
bound for England and attacked by pirates off the Portuguese Cape St.
Vincent.
About Columbus's connection with these pirates much romance has been
written,--so much, indeed, that the simple truth appears tame by
comparison. One of these two pirates was named Colombo, a name common
enough in Italy and France. Both pirates were of noble birth, but very
desperate characters, who terrorized the whole Mediterranean, and even
preyed on ships along the Atlantic coast. Columbus's son, Fernando, in
writing about his father, foolishly pretended that the discoverer and
the noble-born corsairs were of the same family; but the truth 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.