THE MAN AND THE WORLD HE SAILED IN gained appointments that insured his family ' s station in the developing middle class of the seaport city.
To Sea: East, North, South-and West?
I
It was natural for young Columbus to go to sea. The sea was Genoa's connection with the world- she faces outward on it, watching the sun sink into blue water at day's end , with the whole city overlooking the little harbor as it rises, tier on tier, up the steep incline of the coastal hills. If you wanted to get to Ancona, the next town, you took a boat. If you had business in the great foreign cities of Naples, down the peninsula, or Marseilles, on the French coast, you sent and received your cargoes by ship. As Columbus comes into early manhood we learn about his voyaging, for he tells us about it himself, in incidental (or maybe not so incidental) remarks thrown out in the daily record that he kept on his voyage to the Americas, to make up his ultimate report to his sponsors, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and in letters he sent them . He mentions, in a 1495 letter from Hispanolia, that he was at sea in a Genoese ship which took part in a war with Aragon (of which Ferdinand, incidentally, later became king). This was between late 1470 and early 1472. Columbus, around twenty years old , suggests that he was in a position of importance in the ship which he almost certainly didn ' t hold-but who among us hasn't put into a job application, under the heading " responsible for," matters which we didn ' t really control? He next went to the Greek island of Chios in the Genoese ship Roxana, in 1474, to help the city ' s Genoese trading post there defend itself against the Turks. He mentions this because he says he recognized (incorrectly) the plant from which the Genoese on Chios extracted mastic gum , the base for varnish. He may have made a second voyage to Chios in 1475. And then , in 1476, he signs on aboard the Genoese ship Bechalla, part of a convoy bound out into the Atlantic world to carry mastic from Chios to Flanders. Attacked by a French and Portuguese fleet off Lagos, in southern Portugal , the convoy broke up, and the Bechalla was sunk. Columbus , wounded in the fray, grabbed a floating oar and swam six miles to shore. From there he made his way to Lisbon , where he joined his brother Bartholemew, who was installed there as a chartmaker in the Genoese community. SEA HISTORY 53, SPRING 1990
This was a critical step for the young mariner. As Morison puts it: At the age of twenty-five, chance had brought him to the European center for blue-water voyaging and overseas discovery. He was among people who could teach him all he wanted to learn: Portuguese, Castilian , and Latin ; mathematics and astronomy for celestial navigation. He already knew all the basic seamanship that a common sailor could pick up. In February 1477, according to a note found among Columbus ' s papers by his son Ferdinand after his death , he went on a voyage to Iceland "and a hundred leagues beyond." Possibly, Columbus picked up word in Iceland oflands across the Western Ocean discovered and settled by Norsemen 500 years before. The traffic from Iceland to Greenland had died out just over the horizon of living memory , 100 years before. But as Morison points out, the accurate reports of these voyages carried in the Sagas then current in Iceland would have been oflittle interest to him. Who cared about hardscrabble farming and fights with Skraelings (Eskimos)? What did interestColumbus was two dead people found in a boat that drifted into Galway, a stopping point on this northern trip. These had Oriental-looking faces -that was interesting indeed! In 1478, the year after his trip to the north, Columbus sailed to the offshore island of Madeira, to pick up sugar for a Genoese owner- and by now he was captain of his ship. The next year he married Dona Filipa de Perestrelo e Moniz at Porto Santo in the Madeira group. There is a charming story of his mother-in-Jaw, widow of the governor of Porto Santo, getting out her husband ' s charts and journals to help Columbus learn about the Atlantic world in which he had now established himself. Some students feel Columbus may have got only as far as Bristol on his northern swing, picking the rest of the itinerary from sailors in that busy seaport, a center of oceanic trades like Lisbon . The important point is that he was adding to his picture of that ocean world. The next years brought further trips to the frontiers of that expanding world . He had been to Bristol, at least, in the north , and possibly to Iceland and beyond. He sailed south to Sao Jorge de la Mina, the fortified camp the Portuguese had built in Guinea , in West Africa, to protect the gold mining operation they
had developed there. And sometime in this period he began to work seriously on his dream of being the first to sail westward , to come to Japan and China that way, rather than southward along the African coast as the Portuguese had been doing in organized fashion since 1420, when Prince Henry set up his center for navigation in Sagres.
A Sea Captain Makes His Bid In 1484 Columbus, in his early 30s, now well connected in Lisbon, and fresh from his service to the King in his Guinea voyaging , secured an audience with the young King Joao II, who had just ascended the throne of Portugal the year before. Columbus ' s wife had died, leaving him a young son, Diego, to whom he was much attached. But the wide, awakening world around him drew him toward what he clearly felt was his destiny. He presented his plan for a short route to the Indies to the King. We get a glimpse of this interview with King Joao from the court historian, who notes he is " Of the Genoese nation, a man expert, eloquent and good Latinist," and that he asked Joao for ships " to go and discover the Isle Cypango through this Western Ocean." But despite a good presentation (the King never lost his interest in Columbus) the whole idea of sailing west to the Orient seemed fantastic, and the chronicler mentions Japan as "that Isle Cypango of Marco Polo"-in other words a mythic island known only through centuriesold traveller's tales. And indeed, there were mythical islands abounding in sailor' s yams. Cypango of course was real-but fantastically more distant than Columbus imagined. Columbus bent every piece of evidence his way to show it cou Id be donebut it is surely wrong to see him as an obsessed fanatic. He had learned Castilian, then the court language of Portugal , and knew enough Latin to cite the ancient authorities. He was in touch with the intellectual currents of the time, and, a few years before his interview, had corresponded with the learned physician Paolo dal Pazzo Toscanelli in Florence, who had written that the distance from Portugal to China, heading due west, was only 5000 miles-and to Japan , only 3000. Toscanelli appears to have been happy to repeat his ideas to Columbus , and furnished him with a map designed to these concepts. One way and another, Columbus came out with even shorter distances-3550 miles 17