written,--so much, indeed, that the simple truth appears tame by
comparison. One of these two pirates was named Colombo, a name common
enough in Italy and France. Both pirates were of noble birth, but very
desperate characters, who terrorized the whole Mediterranean, and even
preyed on ships along the Atlantic coast. Columbus's son, Fernando, in
writing about his father, foolishly pretended that the discoverer and
the noble-born corsairs were of the same family; but the truth is, one
of the corsairs was French and the other Greek; they were not Italians
at all. Fernando further says that his father was sailing under them
when the battle off Cape St. Vincent was fought; that when the vessels
caught fire, his father clung to a piece of wreckage and was washed
ashore. Thus does Fernando explain the advent of Columbus into Portugal.
But all this took place years before Fernando was born.

What really appears to have happened is that Columbus was in much more
respectable, though less aristocratic, company. It was not on the side
of the pirates that he was fighting, but on the side of the shipowner
under whom he had hired, and whose merchandise he was bound to protect,
for the Genoese galleys were bound for England for trading purposes.
Some of the galleys were destroyed by the lawless Colombo, but our
Colombo appears to have been on one that escaped and put back into
Cadiz, in southern Spain, from which it later proceeded to England,
stopping first at Lisbon. This is a less picturesque version, perhaps,
than Fernando's, but certainly it shows Columbus in a more favorable
light. Late the next year, 1477, or early in 1478, Cristoforo went back
to Lisbon with a view to making it his home.

Besides this battle with corsairs, Columbus had many and varied
experiences during his sea trips, not gentle experiences either. Even on
the huge, palatial steamships of to-day the details of the common