Vincent was fought; that when the vessels
caught fire, his father clung to a piece of wreckage and was washed
ashore. Thus does Fernando explain the advent of Columbus into Portugal.
But all this took place years before Fernando was born.
What really appears to have happened is that Columbus was in much more
respectable, though less aristocratic, company. It was not on the side
of the pirates that he was fighting, but on the side of the shipowner
under whom he had hired, and whose merchandise he was bound to protect,
for the Genoese galleys were bound for England for trading purposes.
Some of the galleys were destroyed by the lawless Colombo, but our
Colombo appears to have been on one that escaped and put back into
Cadiz, in southern Spain, from which it later proceeded to England,
stopping first at Lisbon. This is a less picturesque version, perhaps,
than Fernando's, but certainly it shows Columbus in a more favorable
light. Late the next year, 1477, or early in 1478, Cristoforo went back
to Lisbon with a view to making it his home.
Besides this battle with corsairs, Columbus had many and varied
experiences during his sea trips, not gentle experiences either. Even on
the huge, palatial steamships of to-day the details of the common
seaman's life are harsh and rough; and we may be sure that on the tiny,
rudely furnished, poorly equipped sailboats of the fifteenth century it
was a thousand times harsher and rougher.
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