While he may have
known the learned Behaim, certain it is that, from his earliest days in
Lisbon, he sought the society of men who had been out to the Azores or
to Madeira; men who told him the legends, plentiful enough on these
islands, of lands still farther out toward the setting sun, that no one
had yet ventured to visit.
CHAPTER IV
THE SOJOURN IN MADEIRA
Columbus had not been very long in Lisbon when he met, at church, a girl
named Felipa Monez Perestrello. Felipa was of noble birth; Christopher
was not; but he was handsome--tall, fair-haired, dignified,--and full of
earnestness in his views of life. Felipa consented to marry him.
Felipa must have been a most interesting companion for a man who loved
voyaging, for she had been born in the Madeiras. Her father, now dead,
had been appointed governor, by Prince Henry, of a little island called
Porto Santo, and Felipa and her mother (with whom the young couple went
to live) had many a tale to tell about that far outpost of the Atlantic.
This is probably what set Christopher yearning for the sea; and so,
about 1479, he and his wife and her mother, Senora Perestrello, all
sailed off for Porto Santo. The Senora must have liked her new son-in-
law's enthusiasm for the sea, for she gave him the charts and
instruments that had belonged to her husband; but as Governor
Perestrello had never been a navigator, these could not have been either
very numerous or very helpful.
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