the Levant, all the western coasts, and the North. I have seen England;
I have often made the voyage from Lisbon to the Guinea coast." This he
wrote in a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella. Again he says, "I went to
sea from the most tender age and have continued in a sea life to this
day. Whoever gives himself up to this art wants to know the secrets of
Nature here below. It is more than forty years that I have been thus
engaged. Wherever any one has sailed, there I have sailed."

Whoever goes into the detail of the history of that century will come
upon the names of two relatives of his--Colon el Mozo (the Boy, or the
Younger) and his uncle, Francesco Colon, both celebrated sailors. The
latter of the two was a captain in the fleets of Louis XI of France,
and imaginative students may represent him as meeting Quentin Durward at
court. Christopher Columbus seems to have made several voyages under
the command of the younger of these relatives. He commanded the Genoese
galleys near Cyprus in a war which the Genoese had with the Venetians.
Between the years 1461 and 1463 the Genoese were acting as allies with
King John of Calabria, and Columbus had a command as captain in their
navy at that time.

"In 1477," he says, in one of his letters, "in the month of February, I
sailed more than a hundred leagues beyond Tile." By this he means Thule,
or Iceland. "Of this island the southern part is seventy-three degrees
from the equator, not sixty-three degrees, as some geographers pretend."
But here he was wrong. The Southern part of Iceland is in the latitude
of sixty-three and a half degrees. "The English, chiefly those of
Bristol, carry their merchandise, to this island, which is as large as
England. When I was there the sea was not frozen, but the tides there
are so strong that they rise and fall twenty-six cubits."