Christopher Columbus and the New World of His Discovery

Christopher Columbus
and the New World of His Discovery

The Stream Of The World

A man standing on the sea-shore is perhaps as ancient and as primitive a symbol of
wonder as the mind can conceive. Beneath his feet are the stones and grasses of an
element that is his own, natural to him, in some degree belonging to him, at any rate
accepted by him. He has place and condition there. Above him arches a world of
immense void, fleecy sailing clouds, infinite clear blueness, shapes that change and
dissolve; his day comes out of it, his source of light and warmth marches across it, night
falls from it; showers and dews also, and the quiet influence of stars. Strange that
impalpable element must be, and for ever unattainable by him; yet with its gifts of sun
and shower, its furniture of winged life that inhabits also on the friendly soil, it has links
and partnerships with life as he knows it and is a complement of earthly conditions. But
at his feet there lies the fringe of another element, another condition, of a vaster and more
simple unity than earth or air, which the primitive man of our picture knows to be not his
at all. It is fluent and unstable, yet to be touched and felt; it rises and falls, moves and
frets about his very feet, as though it had a life and entity of its own, and was engaged
upon some mysterious business. Unlike the silent earth and the dreaming clouds it has a
voice that fills his world and, now low, now loud, echoes throughout his waking and
sleeping life. Earth with her sprouting fruits behind and beneath him; sky, and larks
singing, above him; before him, an eternal alien, the sea: he stands there upon the shore,
arrested, wondering. He lives,—this man of our figure; he proceeds, as all must proceed,
with the task and burden of life. One by one its miracles are unfolded to him; miracles of
fire and cold, and pain and pleasure; the seizure of love, the terrible magic of
reproduction, the sad miracle of death. He fights and lusts and endures; and, no more
troubled by any wonder, sleeps at last. But throughout the days of his life, in the very act
of his rude existence, this great tumultuous presence of the sea troubles and overbears
him. Sometimes in its bellowing rage it terrifies him, sometimes in its tranquillity it
allures him; but whatever he is doing, grubbing for roots, chipping experimentally with
bones and stones, he has an eye upon it; and in his passage by the shore he pauses, looks,
and wonders. His eye is led from the crumbling snow at his feet, past the clear green of
the shallows, beyond the furrows of the nearer waves, to the calm blue of the distance;
and in his glance there shines again that wonder, as in his breast stirs the vague longing
and unrest that is the life-force of the world.
What is there beyond? It is the eternal question asked by the finite of the infinite, by the
mortal of the immortal; answer to it there is none save in the unending preoccupation of
life and labour. And if this old question was in truth first asked upon the sea-shore, it was
asked most often and with the most painful wonder upon western shores, whence the
journeying sun was seen to go down and quench himself in the sea. The generations that
followed our primitive man grew fast in knowledge, and perhaps for a time wondered the

less as they knew the more; but we may be sure they never ceased to wonder at what
might lie beyond the sea. How much more must they have wondered if they looked west
upon the waters, and saw the sun of each succeeding day sink upon a couch of glory
where they could not follow? All pain aspires to oblivion, all toil to rest, all troubled
discontent with what is present to what is unfamiliar and far away; and no power of
knowledge and scientific fact will ever prevent human unhappiness from reaching out
towards some land of dreams of which the burning brightness of a sea sunset is an image.
Is it very hard to believe, then, that in that yearning towards the miracle of a sun
quenched in sea distance, felt and felt again in human hearts through countless
generations, the westward stream of human activity on this planet had its rise? Is it
unreasonable to picture, on an earth spinning eastward, a treadmill rush of feet to follow
the sinking light? The history of man's life in this world does not, at any rate, contradict
us. Wisdom, discovery, art, commerce, science, civilisation have all moved west across
our world; have all in their cycles followed the sun; have all, in their day of power, risen
in the East and set in the West.
This stream of life has grown in force and volume with the passage of ages. It has always
set from shore to sea in countless currents of adventure and speculation; but it has set
most strongly from East to West. On its broad bosom the seeds of life and knowledge
have been carried throughout the world. It brought the people of Tyre and Carthage to the
coasts and oceans of distant worlds; it carried the English from Jutland across cold and
stormy waters to the islands of their conquest; it carried the Romans across half the
world; it bore the civilisation of the far East to new life and virgin western soils; it carried
the new West to the old East, and is in our day bringing back again the new East to the
old West. Religions, arts, tradings, philosophies, vices and laws have been borne, a
strange flotsam, upon its unchanging flood. It has had its springs and neaps, its trembling
high-water marks, its hour of affluence, when the world has been flooded with golden
humanity; its ebb and effluence also, when it has seemed to shrink and desert the
kingdoms set upon its shores. The fifteenth century in Western Europe found it at a pause
in its movements: it had brought the trade and the learning of the East to the verge of the
Old World, filling the harbours of the Mediterranean with ships and the monasteries of
Italy and Spain with wisdom; and in the subsequent and punctual decadence that
followed this flood, there gathered in the returning tide a greater energy and volume
which was to carry the Old World bodily across the ocean. And yet, for all their wisdom
and power, the Spanish and Portuguese were still in the attitude of our primitive man,
standing on the sea-shore and looking out in wonder across the sea.
The flood of the life-stream began to set again, and little by little to rise and inundate
Western Europe, floating off the galleys and caravels of King Alphonso of Portugal, and
sending them to feel their way along the coasts of Africa; a little later drawing the mind
of Prince Henry the Navigator to devote his life to the conquest and possession of the
unknown. In his great castle on the promontory of Sagres, with the voice of the Atlantic
thundering in his ears, and its mists and sprays bounding his vision, he felt the full force
of the stream, and stretched his arms to the mysterious West. But the inner light was not
yet so brightly kindled that he dared to follow his heart; his ships went south and south
again, to brave on each voyage the dangers and terrors that lay along the unknown

African coast, until at length his captains saw the Cape of Good Hope. South and West
and East were in those days confusing terms; for it was the East that men were thinking
of when they set their faces to the setting sun, and it was a new road to the East that they
sought when they felt their way southward along the edge of the world. But the rising tide
of discovery was working in that moment, engaging the brains of innumerable sages,
stirring the wonder of innumerable mariners; reaching also, little by little, to quarters less
immediately concerned with the business of discovery. Ships carried the strange tidings
of new coasts and new islands from port to port throughout the Mediterranean; Venetians
on the lagoons, Ligurians on the busy trading wharves of Genoa, were discussing the
great subject; and as the tide rose and spread, it floated one ship of life after another that
was destined for the great business of adventure. Some it inspired to dream and speculate,
and to do no more than that; many a heart also to brave efforts and determinations that
were doomed to come to nothing and to end only in failure. And among others who felt
the force and was swayed and lifted by the prevailing influence, there lived, some four
and a half centuries ago, a little boy playing about the wharves of Genoa, well known to
his companions as Christoforo, son of Domenico the wool-weaver, who lived in the Vico
Dritto di Ponticello.

The Home In Genoa


It is often hard to know how far back we should go in the ancestry of a man whose life
and character we are trying to reconstruct. The life that is in him is not his own, but is
mysteriously transmitted through the life of his parents; to the common stock of his
family, flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone, character of their character, he has but
added his own personality. However far back we go in his ancestry, there is something of
him to be traced, could we but trace it; and although it soon becomes so widely scattered
that no separate fraction of it seems to be recognisable, we know that, generations back,
we may come upon some sympathetic fact, some reservoir of the essence that was him, in
which we can find the source of many of his actions, and the clue, perhaps, to his
character.
In the case of Columbus we are spared this dilemma. The past is reticent enough about
the man himself; and about his ancestors it is almost silent. We know that he had a father
and grandfather, as all grandsons of Adam have had; but we can be certain of very little
more than that. He came of a race of Italian yeomen inhabiting the Apennine valleys; and
in the vale of Fontanabuona, that runs up into the hills behind Genoa, the two streams of
family from which he sprang were united. His father from one hamlet, his mother from
another; the towering hills behind, the Mediterranean shining in front; love and marriage
in the valley; and a little boy to come of it whose doings were to shake the world.
His family tree begins for us with his grandfather, Giovanni Colombo of Terra-Rossa,
one of the hamlets in the valley—concerning whom many human facts may be inferred,
but only three are certainly known; that he lived, begot children, and died. Lived, first at
Terra Rossa, and afterwards upon the sea-shore at Quinto; begot children in number
three—Antonio, Battestina, and Domenico, the father of our Christopher; and died,
because one of the two facts in his history is that in the year 1444 he was not alive, being
referred to in a legal document as quondam, or, as we should say, "the late." Of his wife,
Christopher's grandmother, since she never bought or sold or witnessed anything
requiring the record of legal document, history speaks no word; although doubtless some
pleasant and picturesque old lady, or lady other than pleasant and picturesque, had place
in the experience or imagination of young Christopher. Of the pair, old Quondam
Giovanni alone survives the obliterating drift of generations, which the shores and brown
slopes of Quinto al Mare, where he sat in the sun and looked about him, have also
survived. Doubtless old Quondam could have told us many things about Domenico, and
his over-sanguine buyings and sellings; have perhaps told us something about
Christopher's environment, and cleared up our doubts concerning his first home; but he
does not. He will sit in the sun there at Quinto, and sip his wine, and say his Hail Marys,
and watch the sails of the feluccas leaning over the blue floor of the Mediterranean as
long as you please; but of information about son or family, not a word. He is content to
have survived, and triumphantly twinkles his two dates at us across the night of time.
1440, alive; 1444, not alive any longer: and so hail and farewell, Grandfather John.

Of Antonio and Battestina, the uncle and aunt of Columbus, we know next to nothing.
Uncle Antonio inherited the estate of Terra-Rossa, Aunt Battestina was married in the
valley; and so no more of either of them; except that Antonio, who also married, had
sons, cousins of Columbus, who in after years, when he became famous, made
themselves unpleasant, as poor relations will, by recalling themselves to his remembrance
and suggesting that something might be done for them. I have a belief, supported by no
historical fact or document, that between the families of Domenico and Antonio there
was a mild cousinly feud. I believe they did not like each other. Domenico, as we shall
see presently, was sanguine and venturesome, a great buyer and seller, a maker of
bargains in which he generally came off second best. Antonio, who settled in Terra-
Rossa, the paternal property, doubtless looked askance at these enterprises from his
vantage-ground of a settled income; doubtless also, on the occasion of visits exchanged
between the two families, he would comment upon the unfortunate enterprises of his
brother; and as the children of both brothers grew up, they would inherit and exaggerate,
as children will, this settled difference between their respective parents. This, of course,
may be entirely untrue, but I think it possible, and even likely; for Columbus in after life
displayed a very tender regard for members of his family, but never to our knowledge
makes any reference to these cousins of his, till they send emissaries to him in his hour of
triumph. At any rate, among the influences that surrounded him at Genoa we may reckon
this uncle and aunt and their children—dim ghosts to us, but to him real people, who
walked and spoke, and blinked their eyes and moved their limbs, like the men and
women of our own time. Less of a ghost to us, though still a very shadowy and doubtful
figure, is Domenico himself, Christopher's father. He at least is a man in whom we can
feel a warm interest, as the one who actually begat and reared the man of our story. We
shall see him later, and chiefly in difficulties; executing deeds and leases, and striking a
great variety of legal attitudes, to the witnessing of which various members of his family
were called in. Little enough good did they to him at the time, poor Domenico; but he
was a benefactor to posterity without knowing it, and in these grave notarial documents
preserved almost the only evidence that we have as to the early days of his illustrious son.
A kind, sanguine man, this Domenico, who, if he failed to make a good deal of money in
his various enterprises, at least had some enjoyment of them, as the man who buys and
sells and strikes legal attitudes in every age desires and has. He was a wool-carder by
trade, but that was not enough for him; he must buy little bits of estates here and there;
must even keep a tavern, where he and his wife could entertain the foreign sailors and
hear the news of the world; where also, although perhaps they did not guess it, a sharp
pair of ears were also listening, and a pair of round eyes gazing, and an inquisitive face
set in astonishment at the strange tales that went about.
There is one fragment of fact about this Domenico that greatly enlarges our knowledge of
him. He was a wool-weaver, as we know; he also kept a tavern, and no doubt justified the
adventure on the plea that it would bring him customers for his woollen cloth; for your
buyer and seller never lacks a reason either for his selling or buying. Presently he is
buying again; this time, still with striking of legal attitudes, calling together of relations,
and accompaniments of crabbed Latin notarial documents, a piece of ground in the
suburbs of Genoa, consisting of scrub and undergrowth, which cannot have been of any
earthly use to him. But also, according to the documents, there went some old wine-vats

with the land. Domenico, taking a walk after Mass on some feast-day, sees the land and
the wine-vats; thinks dimly but hopefully how old wine-vats, if of no use to any other
human creature, should at least be of use to a tavern-keeper; hurries back, overpowers the
perfunctory objections of his complaisant wife, and on the morrow of the feast is off to
the notary's office. We may be sure the wine-vats lay and rotted there, and furnished no
monetary profit to the wool-weaving tavern-keeper; but doubtless they furnished him a
rich profit of another kind when he walked about his newly-acquired property, and
explained what he was going to do with the wine-vats.
And besides the weaving of wool and pouring of wine and buying and selling of land,
there were more human occupations, which Domenico was not the man to neglect. He
had married, about the year 1450, one Susanna, a daughter of Giacomo of Fontana-Rossa,
a silk weaver who lived in the hamlet near to Terra-Rossa. Domenico's father was of the
more consequence of the two, for he had, as well as his home in the valley, a house at
Quinto, where he probably kept a felucca for purposes of trade with Alexandria and the
Islands. Perhaps the young people were married at Quinto, but if so they did not live there
long, moving soon into Genoa, where Domenico could more conveniently work at his
trade. The wool-weavers at that time lived in a quarter outside the old city walls, between
them and the outer borders of the city, which is now occupied by the park and public
gardens. Here they had their dwellings and workshops, their schools and institutions,
receiving every protection and encouragement from the Signoria, who recognised the
importance of the wool trade and its allied industries to Genoa. Cloth-weavers, blanketmakers,
silk-weavers, and velvet-makers all lived in this quarter, and held their houses
under the neighbouring abbey of San Stefano. There are two houses mentioned in
documents which seem to have been in the possession of Domenico at different times.
One was in the suburbs outside the Olive Gate; the other was farther in, by St. Andrew's
Gate, and quite near to the sea. The house outside the Olive Gate has disappeared; and it
was probably here that our Christopher first saw the light, and pleased Domenico's heart
with his little cries and struggles. Neither the day nor even the year is certainly known,
but there is most reason to believe that it was in the year 1451. They must have moved
soon afterwards to the house in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello, No. 37, in which most of
Christopher's childhood was certainly passed. This is a house close to St. Andrew's Gate,
which gate still stands in a beautiful and ruinous condition.
From the new part of Genoa, and from the Via XX Settembre, you turn into the little
Piazza di Ponticello just opposite the church of San Stefano. In a moment you are in old
Genoa, which is to-day in appearance virtually the same as the place in which
Christopher and his little brothers and sisters made the first steps of their pilgrimage
through this world. If the Italian, sun has been shining fiercely upon you, in the great
modern thoroughfare, you will turn into this quarter of narrow streets and high houses
with grateful relief. The past seems to meet you there; and from the Piazza, gay with its
little provision-shops and fruit stalls, you walk up the slope of the Vico Dritto di
Ponticello, leaving the sunlight behind you, and entering the narrow street like a traveller
entering a mountain gorge.

courtesy - manorama