The Life of Columbus; in his own words eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 196 pages of information about The Life of Columbus; in his own words.

The Life of Columbus; in his own words eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 196 pages of information about The Life of Columbus; in his own words.
of spices and precious stones.”  In Toscanelli’s letter, he not only indicates Japan, but, in the middle of the ocean, he places the island of Antilia.  This old name afterwards gave the name by which the French still call the West Indies, Les Antilles.  Toscanelli gives the exact distance which Columbus will have to sail:  “From Lisbon to the famous city of Quisay (Hang-tcheou-fou, then the capital of China) if you take the direct route toward the West, the distance will be thirty-nine hundred miles.  And from Antilia to Japan it will be two hundred and twenty-five leagues.”  Toscanelli says again, “You see that the voyage that you wish to attempt is much legs difficult than would be thought.  You would be sure of this if you met as many people as I do who have been in the country of spices.”

While there were so many suggestions made that it would be possible to cross the Atlantic, there was one man who determined to do this.  This man was Christopher Columbus.  But he knew well that he could not do it alone.  He must have money enough for an expedition, he must have authority to enlist crews for that expedition, and he must have power to govern those crews when they should arrive in the Indies.  In our times such adventures have been conducted by mercantile corporations, but in those times no one thought of doing any such thing without the direct assistance and support of some monarch.

It is easy now to see and to say that Columbus himself was singularly well fitted to take the charge of the expedition of discovery.  He was an excellent sailor and at the same time he was a learned geographer and a good mathematician.  He was living in Portugal, the kings of which country had, for many years, fostered the exploration of the coast of Africa, and were pushing expeditions farther and farther South.

In doing this, they were, in a fashion, making new discoveries.  For Europe was wholly ignorant of the western coast of Africa, beyond the Canaries, when their expeditions began.  But all men of learning knew that, five hundred years before the Christian era, Hanno, a Carthaginian, had sailed round Africa under the direction of the senate of Carthage.  The efforts of the King of Portugal were to repeat the voyage made by Hanno.  In 1441, Gonzales and Tristam sailed as far as Sierra Leone.  They brought back some blacks as slaves, and this was the beginning of the slave trade.

In 1446 the Portuguese took possession of the Azores, the most western points of the Old World.  Step by step they advanced southward, and became familiar with the African coast.  Bold navigators were eager to find the East, and at last success came.  Under the king’s orders, in August, 1477, three caravels sailed from the Tagus, under Bartolomeo Diaz, for southern discovery.  Diaz was himself brave enough to be willing to go on to the Red Sea, after he made the great discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, but his crews mutinied, after he had gone much farther than his predecessors, and compelled him to return.  He passed the southern cape of Africa and went forty miles farther.  He called it the Cape of Torments, “Cabo Tormentoso,” so terrible were the storms he met there.  But when King John heard his report he gave it that name of good omen which it has borne ever since, the name of the “Cape of Good Hope.”

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The Life of Columbus; in his own words from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.