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.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FIRE KINDLES

The next step in Columbus’s career was a move to Porto Santo, which probably took place very soon after his marriage—­that is to say, in the year 1479.  It is likely that he had the chance of making a voyage there; perhaps even of commanding a ship, for his experience of the sea and skill as a navigator must by this time have raised him above the rank of an ordinary seaman; and in that case nothing would be more natural than that he should take his young wife with him to visit her brother Bartolomeo, and to see the family property.  It is one of the charms of the seaman’s profession that he travels free all over the world; and if he has no house or other fixed possessions that need to be looked after he has the freedom of the world, and can go where he likes free of cost.  Porto Santo and Madeira, lying in the track of the busiest trade on the Atlantic coast, would provide Columbus with an excellent base from which to make other voyages; so it was probably with a heart full of eager anticipation for the future, and sense of quiet happiness in the present, that in the year 1479 Signor Cristoforo Colombo (for he did not yet call himself Senor Cristoval Colon) set out for Porto Santo—­a lonely rock some miles north of Madeira.  Its southern shore is a long sweeping bay of white sand, with a huddle of sand-hills beyond, and cliffs and peaks of basalt streaked with lava fringing the other shores.  When Columbus and his bride arrived there the place was almost as bare as it is to-day.  There were the governor’s house; the settlement of Portuguese who worked in the mills and sugar-fields; the mills