Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [25]
In 1336, Lanzarotto Malocello navigated his way to the Canary Islands, bestowing the name Lanzarote on one of them. Only five years later Nicoloso da Recco arrived at the Azores. Ever more ambitious voyages by sea came to seem inevitable. Many daring Genoese voyagers formed partnerships with the kingdom of Portugal, and in 1317 a Genoese led the emerging Portuguese navy. The plague and political instability slowed but did not halt the pace of discovery; by 1441, when António de Noli reached the Cape Verde Islands, the idea of additional islands beckoning across the Atlantic to the south and west became a powerful attraction for Columbus and other ambitious Italian navigators.
Tragic events at sea formed an essential part of Genoa’s culture, and that of the surrounding Ligurian region, the setting for some of Europe’s most ancient human settlements. The steep, rocky Ligurian coast offered rich and fertile soil, but in limited quantities. The meager amount of arable land forced farmers to carve narrow terraces into mountainsides. The most reliable crop happened to be Savona wine, produced west of Genoa. These restrictions spurred Ligurians to look to the sea for sustenance and survival. Of necessity, Ligurian sailors and pilots, rowers and riggers, emerged as the best and the bravest in Italy, or perhaps the most foolhardy. A Ligurian proverb warned, “O mare o l’é male” : The sea is evil.
A necessary evil, however.
All along its length, the region, known as the Ligurian Riviera, sheltered harbors and ports for sailors venturing into the sea for their livelihood. The port of Genoa, with its generous harbor, reigned over all, a semicircle jutting out from the hills of Sarzana, highlighted by a pier. Ships sought the port’s mandraccio, or shelter. “The harbor curves around in an arc here and, lest the fury of the sea damage the ships, comes protected by a jetty, which, it is said, would have cost only a little more had it been made of silver,” wrote Enea Silvio Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II) of Columbus’s home port in 1423.
It was here that Columbus was born in 1451. Questions and alternative theories about Columbus’s origins have long located his birth and upbringing in places as varied as Portugal, Spain, and northern Africa, but the evidence, including 453 legal and commercial documents, overwhelmingly places him in Genoa, the son of Domenico Columbus, a weaver, tavern keeper, and local politician.
Bartolomé de Las Casas, later a remorseless critic of the explorer, plainly states that “Christopher was universally acknowledged to be Genoese by birth.” Stories about his ancestors insist that “his forebears were people of rank and had once been wealthy,” as if to suggest that Columbus sought to restore the status of his family, who “appear to have lost their fortune during the wars and internecine squabbles that one finds at every turn throughout the history of Lombardy,” the dominant region of northern Italy.
Concerning the name Columbus, Las Casas relates that in antiquity it had been “Colonus,” but he “elected to style himself Colón,” a transformation Las Casas ascribed to the “will of the Lord, who had chosen him to carry out the task conveyed by the name Christopher Colón.” Following his subject’s interpretation of his name, “he was named Christopher, that is to say, Christum ferens, which is Latin for the bearer or carrier of Christ.”
Columbus took to signing his name with elaborate flourishes to underscore his reputation as the man “adjudged