COLUMBUS, CHRISTOPHER (a mime latiuleed from the Italian Colombo, and the Spanish Colou); was horn at Genoa, about the yesi 1445 or 1446. The date of his birth is however only inferred from two of his letters to Ferdinand and Isabella, in one of which lie states that he went to sea at the age of fourteen, and in another dated 1501, that he had been in maritime service nearly forty years : his place of birth is twice stated iu hia will. But the history of hie early days is involved in obscurity. His son, Fernando, unwilling, from mistaken pride, to reveal the indigence and humble couditlon from which his father emerged, has left the biography of Columbus very incomplete. The father of Columbus, who was a wool•comber, sent him to Pavia, then the great school of learning in Lombardy ; but Columbus having shown a taste for geometry, geography, and astronomy, or as it was then termed astrology, went to sea at fourteen years of age. In addition to the hardy encounters and dangers attending the sea-faring life of that age, he was often under the rigid discipline of an old relation, Colombo, who carried on a predatory warfare against Moham medana and Venetians, the great rivals of the Genoese. In February 1467, Columbus, in- order to ascertain whether Iceland was inhabited, advanced 100 leagues beyond it, and was astonished at not finding the sea frozen. He also visited the Portuguese fort of St. George la on the coast of Guinea.
About the year 1470, be settled at Lisbon, then the great resort of travellers and navigators, whom Prince Henry highly encouraged. Here Columbus married the daughter of an Italian, called Patestrello, who had colonised and who governed the island of Porto Santo, and whose papers, charts, and journals, were highly serviceable to Colombos in his ocessaimal expeditions to Madeira, the Canaries, the Azores, and the Portuguese settlements of Africa, and for the con struction of maps and charts, which he sold to support his family, and his aged father at Genoa, as well as to defray the education of his younger brothers. Columbus resided also some time at the island of
Porto Santo, which had not long been discovered, • circumstance which at a period of great excitement and expectation as to maritime discovery, kindled his mind to enthusiasm, which was heightened by the allusions in the Bible to the ultimate universal diffusion of the gospel, which Columbus hoped that he was predestined to extend to the eastern extremity of Asia. He considered his projected discoveries as only a means to this end, and also for supplying him with ample treasures to furnish an army of 50,000 foot soldiers and 5000 horse for the recovery of the holy sepulchre. Moreover the legends of the island of Cipango (Japan), of Mango (Southern China), and Cathay, the opinion, of the ancients, the travels of the moderns, the conjectured sphericity of the earth, its supposed smallness, and the imaginary prolongation of Asia to the east, all this presumptive evidence, added to the recent application of the astrolabe to navigation, gave him eo firm a conviction of the practicability of crossing the Atlantic, and of landing on the eastern shores of Asia, that, after long dolaye, and repeated disappointments and struggles with poverty, he never made any abatement in those conditions which appeared to all the states (Genoa, Portugal, Genoa again, Venice, France, England, and Spain) to whom he made proposals to be the extravagant demands of a mere adventurer. John IL of Portugal, after having referred the project to a maritime jonto, and to his council, both of whom regarded it as visionary, nevertheless sent a caravel under the pretext of taking provisions to the Cape Verd Islands, but with secret instructions to try the route marked in the papers of Columbus. The pilots however hieing all courage, put back to Lisbon, and ridiculed the scheme. Indignant at such duplicity, Columbus sought patronage elsewhere, and sent his brother Bartholomew to make proposals to Henry VII. of England.