Adventures Bodily And Spiritual - 3
This Isabel, mother of Philippa, was a very important acquaintance indeed for Columbus.
It must be noted that he left the shop and poor Bartholomew to take care of themselves or
each other, and went to live in the house of his mother-in-law. This was a great social
step for the wool-weaver of Genoa; and it was probably the result of a kind of
compromise with his wife's horrified relatives at the time of her marriage. It was
doubtless thought impossible for her to go and live over the chart-maker's shop; and as
you can make charts in one house as well as another, it was decided that Columbus
should live with his mother-in-law, and follow his trade under her roof. Columbus, in
fact, seems to have been fortunate in securing the favour of his female relatives-in-law,
and it was probably owing to the championship of Philippa's mother that a marriage so
much to his advantage ever took place at all. His wife had many distinguished relatives in
the neighbourhood of Lisbon; her cousin was archbishop at this very time; but I can
neither find that their marriage was celebrated with the archiepiscopal blessing or that he
ever got much help or countenance from the male members of the Moniz family.
Archbishops even today do not much like their pretty cousins marrying a man of
Columbus's position, whether you call him a woolweaver, a sailor, a map-maker, or a
bookseller. "Adventurer" is perhaps the truest description of him; and the word was as
much distrusted in the best circles in Lisbon in the fifteenth century as it is to-day.
Those of his new relatives, however, who did get to know him soon began to see that
Philippa had not made such a bad bargain after all. With the confidence and added belief
in himself that the recognition and encouragement of those kind women brought him,
Columbus's mind and imagination expanded; and I think it was probably now that he
began to wonder if all his knowledge and seamanship, his quite useful smattering of
cartography and cosmography, his real love of adventure, and all his dreams and
speculations concerning the unknown and uncharted seas, could not be turned to some
practical account. His wife's step-sister Iseult and her husband had, moreover, only lately
returned to Lisbon from their long residence in Porto Santo; young Bartolomeo
Perestrello, her brother, was reigning there in their stead, and no doubt sending home
interesting accounts of ships and navigators that put in at Madeira; and all the
circumstances would tend to fan the spark of Columbus's desire to have some adventure
and glory of his own on the high seas. He would wish to show all these grandees, with
whom his marriage had brought him acquainted, that you did not need to be born a
Perestrello—or Pallastrelli, as the name was in its original Italian form—to make a name
in the world. Donna Isabel, moreover, was never tired of talking about Porto Santo and
her dead husband, and of all the voyages and sea adventures that had filled his life. She
was obviously a good teller of tales, and had all the old history and traditions of Madeira
at her fingers' ends; the story of Robert Machin and Anne Dorset; the story of the isle of
Seven Cities; and the black cloud on the horizon that turned out in the end to be Madeira.
She told Christopher how her husband, when he had first gone to Porto Santo, had taken
there a litter of rabbits, and how the rabbits had so increased that in two seasons they had
eaten up everything on the island, and rendered it uninhabitable for some time.
She brought out her husband's sea-charts, memoranda, and log-books, the sight of which
still farther inflamed Christopher's curiosity and ambition. The great thing in those days
was to discover something, if it was only a cape down the African coast or a rock in the
Atlantic. The key to fame, which later took the form of mechanical invention, and later
still of discovery in the region of science, took the form then of actual discovery of parts
of the earth's surface. The thing was in the air; news was coming in every day of
something new seen, something new charted. If others had done so much, and the field
was still half unexplored, could not he do something also? It was not an unlikely thought
to occur to the mind of a student of sea charts and horizons.
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