Christopher Columbus

nt 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

us" by Elizabeth L. Seelys, courtesy of

s 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 s

e passed and of the forces that molded his character. To learn this we must look into the condi

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 necessit

rope 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

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 learni

Italy; furthermore, the Italian peninsula, jutting out into the much-navigated Mediterranean, was full of seaports, to which came ves

were gifted with great imagination, and you will see how natural it was that the Renaissance should have star

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n 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.

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. Pe

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

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 al

essed 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,

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

Mediterranean ship going to Chios, an island east of Greece. In 1476 we find him among the sailo

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. Fernan

d 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 proceed

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 t