BIRTH OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS—HIS EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION—HIS FIRST VOYAGE—HIS MARRIAGE—HIS MARITIME CONTEMPLATIONS—HE MAKES PROPOSALS TO THE SENATE OF GENOA, THE COURT OF VENICE, AND THE KING OF PORTUGAL—THE DUPLICITY OF THE LATTER—COLUMBUS VISITS SPAIN—JUAN DE MARCHENA—COLUMBUS REPAIRS TO CORDOVA—HIS SECOND MARRIAGE—HIS LETTER TO THE KING—THE JUNTO OF SALAMANCA—COLUMBUS RESOLVES TO SHAKE THE DUST OF SPAIN FROM HIS FEET—MARCHENA'S LETTER TO ISABELLA—THE QUEEN GIVES AUDIENCE TO COLUMBUS—THE CONDITIONS STIPULATED BY THE LATTER—ISABELLA ACCEPTS THE ENTERPRISE, WHILE FERDINAND REMAINS ALOOF.

Cristofero Colombo (in Spanish Colon, in French Colomb, in Latin and English Columbus) was born in Genoa, in the year 1435.[1] His father was a wool-comber, and Christopher followed, for a time, the same occupation. He was sent, however, at the age of ten years, to the University of Pavia, where he seems to have studied, though with little advantage, natural philosophy and astronomy, or, as it was then called, astrology. Returning to his father's bench, he worked at wool-combing, with his brother Bartholomew, till he was fourteen years of age. By this time the natural influence of the situation, the atmosphere, and the traditions of Genoa had awakened in him the tastes and the ambition of a sailor. The sea had long been the home and the life of the Genoese: it was the theatre of their glory, and their avenue to wealth. Christopher's great-uncle, Colombo, commanded a fleet intrusted to him by the king, and with which he carried on a predatory warfare against the Venetians and Neapolitans. His nephew joined his ship, and thus became acquainted with the whole extent of the Mediterranean, which was at that period ploughed by the pirates of the Archipelago and the corsairs of the Barbary States. As the vessel went armed to the teeth, the young sailor not only learned the art of navigation, but acquired those habits of discipline and subordination, of self-command and presence of mind, which afterwards served him in so good stead. This manner of life lasted for many years, till Columbus, at the age of thirty, was wrecked off the coast of Portugal, and reached, with some difficulty, the city of Lisbon. Here he found his brother Bartholomew settled, and occupying himself in drawing plans, charts, and maps for the use of navigators. Christopher joined him, and gained a sufficient livelihood by copying manuscripts and black-letter books, and aiding his brother in his avocations. He soon married an Italian lady named Felippa di Perestrello, whose father, now dead, had been Governor of the island of Porto Santo, one of the Madeiras. This union between the humble son of a wool-comber and the daughter of an Italian gentleman is deemed, by several of the biographers of Columbus, a strong proof of the nobility of his ancestry. After his marriage, he left for Porto Santo,—the sterile dowry of his wife,—where his first son, Diego, was born.

We have already seen that the period was one of the greatest excitement and expectancy in regard to maritime discovery. Columbus had long reflected upon the existence of land in the west, upon the sphericity of the earth, and upon the possibility of crossing the Atlantic. He had already conceived the idea of reaching Asia by following the setting sun across the immensity of the waters. His mind, too, was kindled to religious enthusiasm by the allusions in the Bible to the universal diffusion of the gospel, and, in his dreams of nautical discovery, the belief that he was destined to be an apostle, sent to extend the dominion of the cross, predominated over more worldly aspirations. For years, while struggling with disappointment and harassed by poverty, he pursued this idea with the pertinacity of a monomaniac. When forty years old, and residing at Lisbon, he proposed to the Senate of Genoa to leave the Mediterranean by the Straits of Gibraltar and to proceed to the west, in the sea known as the Ocean, as far as the "lands where spices bloom," and thus circumnavigate the earth. The Genoese, whose maritime knowledge was confined to the Mediterranean, and who had no fancy for adventures upon the ocean, declined listening to the proposition, pretexting the penury of the treasury. It would also seem that overtures made by Columbus to the Council of Venice were similarly rejected. For a time, therefore, he abandoned all efforts to further his desires. In 1477, he made a voyage to Iceland, in order to discover whether it was inhabited, and even sailed one hundred leagues beyond it,—where, to his astonishment, he found the sea not frozen.

Upon the accession of John II. to the throne of Portugal,—a sovereign whom we have already shown to be deeply interested in the progress of the art of navigation,—Columbus made known to him his opinions and his plans, assigning the extension of the gospel as the avowed and final object of the expedition. The subject was referred to a maritime junto and to a high council, by both of whom it was rejected as visionary and absurd. The king was induced, however, by one of his councillors, to equip a caravel and send it on a voyage of discovery upon the route traced out by Columbus, and thus obtain for himself the glory of the expedition, if successful. Columbus was invited to hand in to the Government his maps and charts, together with his written views upon the whole subject. This he did, supposing, in his simplicity, that another examination was to be made of the practicability of the venture. The king despatched a caravel, under the command of one of the ablest pilots of his marine, to follow the track indicated. The vessel left, but soon returned, her crew having been appalled at sight of the boundless horizon, and her captain having lost his courage in a storm. Columbus, indignant at this duplicity, secretly left Lisbon and returned home to Genoa. At this period he had the misfortune to lose his wife Felippa, who had shared his confidence in the existence of unknown lands, and whose encouragement had sustained him in his disappointments. This was in the year 1484. He renewed his proposal to the Senate of Genoa, which was again rejected. He now cast his eyes upon the other European powers, among whom the two sovereigns of Spain, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, seemed to deserve the preference.

Not far from Palos, upon the Spanish coast, and in sight of the ocean, stood, upon a promontory half hidden by pine-trees, a monastery—known as La Rabida—dedicated to the Virgin, and inhabited by Franciscan friars. The Superior, Juan Perez de Marchena, offered an example of fervent piety and of theological erudition, at the same time that he was a skilful mathematician and an ardent practitioner of the exact sciences. He was at once an astronomer, a devotee, and a poet. During the hours of slumber, he often ascended to the summit of the abbey, and, looking out upon the ocean,—known as the Sea of Darkness,—would ask himself if beyond this expanse of waters there was no land yet unclaimed by Christianity. He rejected as fabulous the current idea that a vessel might sail three years to the west without reaching a hospitable shore. The ocean, formidable to others and intelligible to few, was to him the abode of secrets which man was invited to unfold.

One day a traveller rang at the gate and asked for refreshment for himself and his son. Being interrogated as to the object of his journey, he replied that he was on his way to the court of Spain to communicate an important matter to the king and queen. The traveller was Christopher Columbus. How he came to pass by this obscure monastery—which lay altogether off his route—has never been explained. A providential guidance had brought him into the presence of the man the best calculated to comprehend his purpose, in a country where he was totally without friends and with whose language he was completely unacquainted. A common sympathy drew them together; and Columbus, accepting for a period the hospitality of Marchena, made him the confidant of his views. Thus, while the colleges and universities of Christendom still held the childish theory that the earth was flat, and that the sea was the path to utter and outer darkness, Columbus and Marchena, filled with a spontaneous and implicit faith, intuitively believed in the sphericity of the globe and the existence of a nameless continent beyond the ocean. In theory they had solved the great question whether the ship which should depart by the west would come back by the east.

Marchena gave Columbus a letter of recommendation to the queen's confessor, and, during his absence, promised to educate and maintain his son Diego. Thus tranquillized in his affections, and aided in his schemes, Columbus departed for Cordova. Here he was destined to undergo another disappointment; for the queen's confessor, his expected patron, treated him as a dreaming speculator and needy adventurer. He soon became again isolated and forgotten. In the midst of his indigence, however, a noble lady, Beatrix Enriquez, young and beautiful, though not rich, noticed his manners and his language, so evidently above his condition, and detained him at Cordova long after his hopes were extinguished. He married her: she bore him a son, Fernando, who afterwards became his father's biographer and historian.

Columbus now wrote to the king a brief and concise letter, setting forth his desires. It was never answered. After a multitude of similar deceptions and disappointments, Geraldini, the ambassador of the Pope, presented him to Mendoza, the Grand Cardinal, through whose influence Columbus obtained an audience of Ferdinand, who appointed a junto of wise men to examine and report upon his scheme. This junto, made up of theologians and not of navigators and geographers, and which sat at Salamanca, opposed Columbus on biblical grounds, declared the theory a dangerous if not heretical innovation, and finally reported unfavorably. This decision was quite in harmony with public opinion in Salamanca, where Columbus was spoken of as "a foreigner who asserted that the world was round like an orange, and that there were places where the people walked on their heads." Seven years were thus wasted in solicitation, suspense, and disappointment. From time to time Columbus had reason to hope that his proposals would be reconsidered; but in 1490 the siege of Baza, the last stronghold of the Moors, and in 1491 the marriage of Isabella, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, with Don Alonzo of Portugal, absorbed the attention of their majesties to the exclusion of all scientific pre-occupations. Finally, when the matter was reopened, and the junto was reassembled, its president, Fernando de Talavera, was instructed to say that the exhaustion of the treasury necessitated the postponement of the whole subject until the close of the war with Grenada. At last, Columbus, reflecting upon the delays, refusals, affronts, and suspicions of which he had been the object, the time he had wasted, and the antechambers in which he had waited the condescension of the great, resolved to shake the dust of Spain from his feet, and returned to the abbey of his friend Marchena. He arrived there bearing upon his person the impress of poverty, fatigue, and exhausted patience. Marchena was profoundly annoyed by the reflection that the glory of the future discoveries of Columbus would be thus taken from Spain and conferred upon some rival power. Fearing, however, that he had too readily lent his ear to theories which had been twice rejected as puerile by a competent junto, he sent for an eminent mathematician of Palos, Garcia Hernandez, a physician by profession. They then conferred together upon the subject and pronounced the execution of the project feasible. The assertion that the famous sailor Martin Alonzo Pinzon was a party to the conference would appear to be an error. Pinzon was at this period at Rome, and did not see Columbus for a year or more afterwards.

Marchena at once wrote an eloquent letter to Queen Isabella, and intrusted it to a pilot whose relations with the court rendered him a safe and reliable messenger. He gave the missive into the hands of the queen, and returned to the monastery the bearer of an invitation to Marchena to repair at once to Santa Fe, where the court then was, engaged in investing Grenada. Columbus borrowed a mule for the friar, who left secretly at midnight and arrived safely at Santa Fe. That Isabella should, at such a moment, when engaged in war and harassed by financial embarrassments, listen to a proposition which had been twice condemned by a learned body of men, is a circumstance which entitles her in the highest degree to a share in the glory which her protÉgÉ Columbus was, through her, destined to obtain. She received Marchena graciously, and instructed him to summon Columbus, to whom she sent twenty thousand maravedis—seventy dollars, nearly—with which to purchase a horse and a proper dress in which to appear before her.

Columbus arrived at Santa Fe just before the surrender of Grenada and the termination of the struggle between the Crescent and the Cross. He was present at the delivery of the keys of the city and the abandonment of the Alhambra to Isabella by the Moorish king, Boabdil el Chico. After the official rejoicings, the queen gave audience to Columbus. As she already believed in the practicability of the scheme, the only subjects to be discussed were the means of execution, and the recompense to be awarded to Columbus in case of success. A committee was appointed to consider this latter point. Columbus fixed his conditions as follows:

He should receive the title of Grand Admiral of the Ocean:

He should be Viceroy and Governor-General of all islands and mainlands he might discover:

He should levy a tax for his own benefit upon all productions—whether spices, fruits, perfumes, gold, silver, pearls, or diamonds—discovered in, or exported from, the lands under his authority:

And his titles should be transmissible in his family, forever, by the laws of primogeniture.

These conditions, being such as would place the threadbare solicitor above the noblest house in Spain, were treated with derision by the committee, and Columbus was regarded as an insolent braggart. He would not abate one tittle of his claims, though, after eighteen years of fruitless effort, he now saw all his hopes at the point of being again dashed to earth. He mounted his mule, and departed for Cordova before quitting Spain forever.

Two friends of the queen now represented the departure of Columbus as an immense and irreparable loss, and, by their supplications and protestations, induced her once more to consider the vast importance of the plans he proposed. Moved by their persuasions, she declared that she accepted the enterprise, not jointly, as the wife of the King of Spain, but independently, as Queen of Castile. As the treasury was depleted by the drains of war, she offered to defray the expenses with her own jewels. A messenger was despatched for Columbus, who was overtaken a few miles from Grenada. He at first hesitated to return; but, after reflecting upon the heroic determination of Isabella, who thus took the initiative in a perilous undertaking, against the report of the junto, the advice of her councillors, and in spite of the indifference of the king, he obeyed with alacrity, and returned to Santa Fe.

He was received with distinction by the court and with affectionate consideration by the queen. Ferdinand remained a stranger to the expedition. He applied his signature to the stipulations, but caused it to be distinctly set down that the whole affair was undertaken by the Queen of Castile, at her own risk and peril,—thus excluding himself forever from lot or parcel in this transcendent enterprise.