Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [36]
After the nuptials, Columbus and Felipa moved into the house of his prominent in-laws. Felipa became all but invisible to posterity, and there is no evidence to suggest that theirs was an affair of the heart. But the other Perestrellos endowed Columbus, a rough-and-ready sailor from Genoa, with a new context in which to pursue his career, thanks to his mother-in-law, who, Las Casas recounted, “realized that Columbus had a passion for the sea and for cosmography, as men who are possessed of a passion for something talk about it night and day.” So she told him how “her husband Perestrello had a great passion for things of the sea and how he had voyaged, at the request of Prince Henry [the Navigator] and in the company of two other knights, to settle the island of Porto Santo, discovered but a few days previously.” Porto Santo became the founding of Perestrello’s fortune and renown: an object lesson for the newly married Columbus.
His mother-in-law gave her late husband’s “instruments, documents, and navigation charts” to Columbus as if passing a scepter from one generation to another, and eventually he found himself living on his father-in-law’s demesne, Porto Santo, where Columbus’s wife gave birth to their firstborn son, Diego.
On Porto Santo and its newly discovered neighbor, Madeira Island, “there were a great many vessels bringing settlers and much talk of fresh discoveries that were being made every day.” Las Casas relates that Columbus talked with seamen returning from the “western seas” who had “visited the Azores and Madeira and other islands.” One in particular, a man named Martin, “a pilot in the service of the Portuguese crown,” told an intriguing tale. When 450 leagues west of Cape Vincent, “he sighted a piece of wood floating near his ship, and, fishing it out of the sea, discovered it was ingeniously carved, though not, as far as he could judge, with iron implements. Since the wind had for several days been blowing from the west he supposed that the piece of wood originated from some island or islands that lay to the west.”
Tantalizing sightings of exotic lands abounded. A “one-eyed sailor” claimed that during a voyage to Ireland he had caught a glimpse of the “Tartary,” or central Asia, “as it curved around to the west, but foul weather prevented them from reaching it.” Whatever that one-eyed sailor thought he saw, it was probably not central Asia, but it did not yet exist on European maps. And then there was the “seaman from Galicia called Pedro de Velasco who, in a conversation he had with Christopher Columbus in Murcia”—a city in southern Spain—“mentioned a voyage to Ireland on which he had sailed and which went so far to the northwest that they came across land to the west of Ireland.” Perhaps Iceland, or Nova Scotia, or some imaginary continent that existed somewhere between geography and mythology. An expedition was needed to decide which it was. Columbus learned of a wealthy merchant of Genoa, Luca di Cazana, who was badgered by a Portuguese pilot, Vicente Dias, into backing three or four expeditions in search of a mysterious island, “sailing over a hundred leagues and finding nothing.” After such failures, both pilot and sponsor gave up hope of “finding the land in question.” And two other expeditions with the same avowed goal both disappeared, “leaving behind not a trace.”
Another seaman, Pedro Correa, married to the sister of Columbus’s wife, corroborated Martin the pilot’s story. He swore, says Las Casas, that “he also came across a piece of wood that had been carried there by the winds from the same quarter and that it, too, had been carved in a similar fashion.” Not only that, but he had seen “canes so thick that one joint of such a cane could hold over six liters of water or of wine.” Columbus said that he heard the same story from the king of Portugal. It seemed to Columbus that King João “was persuaded that these canes had come from some island or islands not far