e. But he came of a great race; and it was the qualities of his race,
combined with this simplicity and even perhaps vacancy of mind, that gave
to his idea, when once the seed of it had lodged in his mind, so much
vigour in growth and room for expansion. Think of him, then, at the age
of twenty-five as a typical plebeian Genoese, bearing all the
characteristic traits of his century and people--the spirit of adventure,
the love of gold and of power, a spirit of mysticism, and more than a
touch of crafty and elaborate dissimulation, when that should be
necessary.

He had been at sea for ten or eleven years, making voyages to and from
Genoa, with an occasional spell ashore and plunge into the paternal
affairs, when in the year 1476 he found himself on board a Genoese vessel
which formed one of a convoy going, to Lisbon. This convoy was attacked
off Cape St. Vincent by Colombo, or Colomb, the famous French corsair, of
whom Christopher himself has quite falsely been called a relative. Only
two of the Genoese vessels escaped, and one of these two was the ship
which carried Columbus. It arrived at Lisbon, where Columbus went ashore
and took up his abode.

This, so far as can be ascertained, is the truth about the arrival of
Columbus in Portugal. The early years of an obscure man who leaps into
fame late in life are nearly always difficult to gather knowledge about,
because not only are the annals of the poor short and simple and in most
cases altogether unrecorded, but there is always that instinct, to which
I have already referred, to make out that the circumstances of a man who
late in life becomes great and remarkable were always, at every point in
his career, remarkable also. We love to trace the hand of destiny
guiding her chosen people, protecting them from dangers, and preserving
them for their great moment. It is a pleasant study, and one to which
the facts often lend themselves, but it leads to a vicious method of
biography which obscures the truth with legends and pretences that have
afterwards laboriously to be cleared away. It was so in the case of
Columbus. Before his departure on his first voyage of discovery there is
absolutely no temporary record of him except a few dates in notarial
registers. The circumstances of his life and his previous conditions
were supplied afterwards by himself and his contemporaries; and both he
and they saw the past in the light of the present, and did their best to
make