We cannot say that the information which we have of this early seafaring life of Columbus, whenever beginning, is deserving of much credit, and it is difficult to place whatever it includes in chronological order.
We may infer from one of his statements that he had, at some time, been at Scio observing the making of mastic. Certain reports which most likely concern his namesakes, the French corsairs, are sometimes associated with him as leading an attack on Spanish galleys somewhere in the service of Louis XI., or as cruising near Cyprus.
So everything is misty about these early days; but the imagination of some of his biographers gives us abundant precision for the daily life of the school-boy, apprentice, cabin boy, mariner, and corsair, even to the receiving of a wound which we know troubled him in his later years. Such a story of details is the filling up of a scant outline with the colors of an unfaithful limner.
[Sidenote: Maritime enterprise in Portugal.]
Columbus, disappearing from Italy in 1473, is next found in Portugal, and it is a natural inquiry why an active, adventurous spirit, having tested the exhilaration of the sea, should have made his way to that outpost of maritime ambition, bordering on the great waters, that had for many ages attracted and puzzled the discoverer and cosmographer. It is hardly to be doubted that the fame of the Portuguese voyaging out upon the vasty deep, or following the western coast of Africa, had for some time been a not unusual topic of talk among the seamen of the Mediterranean. It may be only less probable that an intercourse of seafaring Mediterranean people with the Arabs of the Levant had brought rumors of voyages in the ocean that washed the eastern shores of Africa. These stories from the Orient might well have induced some to speculate that such voyages were but the complements of those of the Portuguese in their efforts to solve the problem of the circumnavigation of the great African continent. It is not, then, surprising that a doughty mariner like Columbus, in life's prime, should have desired to be in the thick of such discussions, and to no other European region could he have turned as a wanderer with the same satisfaction as to Portugal.