Home Almanac

Excerpt from Home Almanac: A Souvenir Christopher Columbus, the great navigator, I was probably born in Genoa, and even the house of his birth has, it is thought, been identified. The date of his birth has been conjecturally established as between March, 1446, and March, 1447. Though virtually the greatest man of his era, there is little definite information about his family and his early life. He was the son of a wool comber, and attended the then great school of learning in Pavia, where he evinced a taste for astronomy and cosmography. He early went to sea, and made several voyages in the Mediterra. nean. In Lisbon, in 1470, he married the daughter of an Italian named Perestrello, an eminent navigator in the Portuguese service, and with her obtained many valuable charts, journals and memoranda. Here Columbus first appears to have imbibed the idea of land to the westward, which he was destined to establish as a fact. After long, disheartening years, on the third of August, 1492, Columbus set sail from the Bar of Saltes, near Palos. On the twelfth of October he sighted land, which proved to be one of the Bahama Islands. After discovering several other of the West India Islands, Columbus set sail again for Spain, where he arrived on March 15th, 1493, and was received with every demonstration of joy and admiration, as well by the people as the court. Within the next twelve years Columbus made several other voyages, adding to his valuable discoveries the Caribbee Islands, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Paria, on the coast of South America. On May 20th, 1506, this the noblest navigator the world has ever seen, died at Valladolid, and King Ferdinand erected a magnificent monument to his memory. Biography furnishes no parallel to the life of Christopher Columbus. Great men there have been who have met with disappointment and injustice, but there is perhaps no other instance of a great man whom disappointments and injustice did not dishearten and disgust; who had his greatness recognized in his lifetime, and yet was robbed of the emoluments it entitled him to, and who, after death, had the honor he had so hardly won conferred upon another. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.