CHAPTER II.  Early Years of Columbus.

  Birth of Columbus

The question of Columbus’s birthplace has been almost as hotly contested as that of Homer’s.  A succession of pamphleteers had discussed the pretensions of half a dozen different Italian villages to be the birthplace of the great navigator; but still archaeologists were divided on the subject, when, at a comparatively recent period, the discovery of the will in which Columbus bequeathed part of his property to the Bank of Genoa, conclusively settled the point in favour of that city.  “Thence I came,” he says, “and there was I born.”  As to the date of his birth there is no such direct evidence; and conjectures and inferences, founded on various statements in his own writings, and in those of his contemporaries, range over the twenty years from 1436 to 1456, in attempting to assign the precise time of his appearance in the world.  Mr. Irving adopts the earlier of these two dates, upon the authority of a remark by Bernaldez, the curate of Los Palacios, which speaks of the death of Columbus in the year 1506, “at a good old age, being seventy years old, a little more or less.”  But this statement has an air of vagueness, and is, moreover, inconsistent with several passages in Columbus’s own letters.[6] And the evidence of the ancient authorities who seem most to be relied on, points rather to the year 1447 or 1448 as the probable date.

  [Footnote 6:  “His hair,” says his son Fernando, “turned white before
  he was thirty.”  This would add to his apparent age, and might have
  deceived Bernaldez.]

  His education.

His father was a wool-carder; but this fact does not necessarily imply, in a city of traders like Genoa, that his family was of particularly humble origin.  At any rate, like most others, when the light of a great man’s birth is thrown upon its records, real and possible, it presents some other names not altogether unworthy to be inscribed among the great man’s ancestors.  Christopher was not, he says in a letter to a lady of the Spanish court, the first admiral of his family—­referring, evidently, to two naval commanders bearing his name, who had attained some distinction in the maritime service of Genoa and France, and the younger of whom, Colombo el Mozo, was in command of a French squadron in the expedition undertaken by John of Anjou against Naples for the recovery of the Neapolitan crown.  But his relationship with these Colombos, if traceable at all, was probably only a very distant one, and his son, in admitting this, wisely says that the glory of Christopher is quite enough, without, there being a necessity to borrow any from his ancestors.