ably carrying with them
Columbus, who, after a short stay in England, claims to have made a
voyage in the northern seas, and even to have visited Iceland about
February 1477. This last pretension is gravely disputed, but it is
perhaps not to be rejected, and we may also trace the Genoese about this
time at Bristol, at Galway, and probably among the islands west and
north of Scotland. Soon after this he returned to Portugal, where
(probably in 1478) he married a lady of some rank, Felipa Moniz de
Perestrello, daughter of Bartholomew Perestrello, a captain in the
service of Prince Henry the Navigator, and one of the early colonists
and first governor of Porto Santo. Felipa was also a cousin of the
archbishop of Lisbon at this time (1478).

Idea of western passage to Asia.

About 1479 Columbus visited Porto Santo, here as in Portugal probably
employing his time in making maps and charts for a livelihood, while he
pored over the logs and papers of his deceased father-in-law, and talked
with old seamen of their voyages, and of the mystery of the western
seas. About this time, too, if not earlier, he seems to have arrived at
the conclusion that much of the world remained undiscovered, and step by
step conceived that design of reaching Asia by sailing west which was to
result in the discovery of America. In 1474 he is said to have
corresponded with Paolo Toscanelli, the Florentine physician and
cosmographer, and to have received from him valuable suggestions, both
by map and letter, for such a Western enterprise. (The whole of this
incident has been disputed by some recent critics.) He had perhaps
already begun his studies in a number of works, especially the _Book_ of
Marco Polo and the _Imago Mundi_ of Pierre d'Ailly, by which his
cosmographical and geographical conceptions were largely moulded. His
views, as finally developed and presented to the courts of Portugal and
Spain, were supported by three principal lines of argument, derived from
natural reasons, from the theories of geographers, and from the reports
and traditions of mariners. He believed the world to be a sphere; he
underestimated its size; he overestimated the size of the Asiatic
continent. And the farther that continent extended towards the east, the
nearer it came towards Spain. Nor were these theories the only supports
of his idea. Martin Vicente, a Portuguese pilot, was said to have found,
400 leagues to the westward of Cape St Vincent, and after a we