Bossi, the earliest biographer in recent times, considers that a Colombo named in a letter to the Duke of Milan as being in a naval fight off Cyprus, between Genoese and Venetian vessels, in 1476, was the discoverer of the New World. Harrisse, in his _Les Colombo_, has printed this letter, and from it it does not appear that the commander of the Genoese fleet is known by name, and that the only mention of a Colombo is that a fleet commanded by one of that name was somewhere encountered. There is no indication, however, that this commander was Christopher Columbus. The presumption is that he was the roving Casanove.
Leibnitz was doubtless misled by the assertion of the _Historie_ of 1571, which allows that Christopher Columbus had sailed under the orders of an admiral of his name and family, and, particularly, was in that naval combat off Lisbon, when, his vessel getting on fire, he swam with the aid of an oar to the Portuguese shore. The doubtful character of this episode will be considered later; but it is more to the purpose here that this same book, in citing a letter, of which we are supposed to have the complete text as preserved by Columbus himself, makes Columbus say that he was not the only admiral which his family had produced. This is a clear reference, it is supposed, to this vice-admiral of France. It is enough to say that the genuine text of this letter to the nurse of Don Juan does not contain this controverted passage, and the defenders of the truth of the _Historie_, like D'Avezac, are forced to imagine there must have been another letter, not now known.
Beside the elder admiral of France, the name of Colombo Junior belonged to another of these French sea-rovers in the fifteenth century, who has been held to be a nephew, or at least a relative, of the elder. He has also sometimes been confounded with the Genoese Columbus.
To determine the exact relationship between the various French and Italian Colombos and Coulons of the fifteenth century would be hazardous. It is enough to say that no evidence that stands a critical test remains to connect these famous mariners with the line of Christopher Columbus. The genealogical tables which Spotorno presents, upon which Caleb Cushing enlightened American readers at the time in the _North American Review_, and in which the French family is made to issue from an alleged great-grandfather of Christopher Columbus, are affirmed by Harrisse, with much reason, to have been made up not far from 1583, to support the claims of Bernardo and Baldassare (Balthazar) Colombo, as pretenders to the rights and titles of the discoverer of the New World.