shores of the New, but on the fact
that by pure faith and belief in his own purpose he did set out for and
arrive in a world where no man of his era or civilisation had ever before
set foot, or from which no wanderer who may have been blown there ever
returned. It is enough to claim for him the merit of discovery in the
true sense of the word. The New World was covered from the Old by a veil
of distance, of time and space, of absence, invisibility, virtual
non-existence; and he discovered it.

CHAPTER VI

IN PORTUGAL

There is no reason to believe that before his twenty-fifth year Columbus
was anything more than a merchant or mariner, sailing before the mast,
and joining one ship after another as opportunities for good voyages
offered themselves. A change took place later, probably after his
marriage, when he began to adapt himself rapidly to a new set of
surroundings, and to show his intrinsic qualities; but all the attempts
that have been made to glorify him socially--attempts, it must be
remembered, in which he himself and his sons were in after years the
leaders--are entirely mistaken. That strange instinct for consistency
which makes people desire to see the outward man correspond, in terms of
momentary and arbitrary credit, with the inner and hidden man of the
heart, has in truth led to more biographical injustice than is fully
realised. If Columbus had been the man some of his biographers would
like to make him out--the nephew or descendant of a famous French
Admiral, educated at the University of Pavia, belonging to a family of
noble birth and high social esteem in Genoa, chosen by King Rene to be
the commander of naval expeditions, learned in scientific lore, in the
classics, in astronomy and in cosmography, the friend and correspondent
of Toscanelli and other learned scientists--we should find it hard indeed
to forgive him the shifts and deceits that he practised. It is far more
interesting to think of him as a common craftsman, of a lowly condition
and poor circumstances, who had to earn his living during the formative
period of his life by the simplest and hardest labour of the hand. The
qualities that made him what he was were of a very simple kind, and his
character owed its strength, not to any complexity or subtlety of
training and education, but rather to that very bareness and simplicity
of circumstance that made him a man of single rather than manifold ideas.
He was not capable of seei