Meanwhile he had worked as clerk in a Genoese bookshop. We know he must
have turned this last opportunity to good account. Printing was still a
very young art, but a few books had already found their way to Genoa,
and the young clerk must have pored over them eagerly and tried to
decipher the Latin in which they were printed.
At any rate, it is certain that in 1474 or 1475 Cristoforo hired out as
an ordinary sailor on a Mediterranean ship going to Chios, an island
east of Greece. In 1476 we find him among the sailors on some galleys
bound for England and attacked by pirates off the Portuguese Cape St.
Vincent.
About Columbus's connection with these pirates much romance has been
written,--so much, indeed, that the simple truth appears tame by
comparison. One of these two pirates was named Colombo, a name common
enough in Italy and France. Both pirates were of noble birth, but very
desperate characters, who terrorized the whole Mediterranean, and even
preyed on ships along the Atlantic coast. Columbus's son, Fernando, in
writing about his father, foolishly pretended that the discoverer and
the noble-born corsairs were of the same family; but the truth is, one
of the corsairs was French and the other Greek; they were not Italians
at all. Fernando further says that his father was sailing under them
when the battle off Cape St.
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