himself actually concerned in these African expeditions we have no means
of deciding. But there can be little doubt that this raising the curtain
of the unknown, this glimpse of new countries, gave a keen stimulus to the
researches of geographers, and, in fact, set the fashion of discovery.
Men's minds were drawn into this special channel; and it remained for
Christopher Columbus first to form a sound theory out of the conflicting
views of the cosmographers, and finally to carry out that theory with the
boldness and resolution which have made his name one of those beacon-fires
which carry on from period to period the tidings of the world's great
history through successive ages.



CHAPTER II. Early Years of Columbus.


BIRTH OF COLUMBUS

The question of Columbus's birthplace has been almost as hotly contested
as that of Homer's. A succession of pamphleteers had discussed the
pretensions of half a dozen different Italian villages to be the
birthplace of the great navigator; but still archaeologists were divided
on the subject, when, at a comparatively recent period, the discovery of
the will in which Columbus bequeathed part of his property to the Bank of
Genoa, conclusively settled the point in favour of that city. "Thence I
came," he says, "and there was I born." As to the date of his birth there
is no such direct evidence; and conjectures and inferences, founded on
various statements in his own writings, and in those of his
contemporaries, range over the twenty years from 1436 to 1456, in
attempting to assign the precise time of his appearance in the world. Mr.