Page:The life of Christopher Columbus.djvu/79

] At this period navigation was in a rude condition. Installation on shipboard made no concessions to the conveniences of life. Space was economized with great strictness. The merchant ship was forced to become somewhat warlike in appearance. It restricted itself to keep the defensive; but, exposed the pirates of every nation, and to the most unexpected attacks, it was armed, and ready to give an answer when needed. Notwithstanding his small scientific stock brought from the University of Pavia, the young student was obliged, according to the usages of that period, to commence his naval apprenticeship as a cabin-boy. Unheeded in a subaltern rank, it was long practice, close observation, and experience, that alone gave him a theoretical knowledge of the sea. Trained in this rugged school, the knowledge of arms became as familiar to him as that of the winds and of naval manœuvres. Undoubtedly he derived from the frequency of dangers from waves and from men, and from the frequency of complications the most unexpected and the most terrible, that coolness and promptitude of resolution, that surety of glance, and that firmness and precision in commanding, which, on sea, insures the safety of ships.

We know he traversed the whole extent of the Mediterranean; navigated in the Levant, — at that period infested with the pirates of the Archipelago, the Mahometan corsairs, and the freebooters of the Barbary States. In one of the combats, which has not been retraced by history, he received a deep wound, the cicatrix of which, though long forgotten, reopened towards his latter years, and endangered his life. Exposed to the most perilous hazards, he passed several years on the waves, during which period we have no account of the vicissitudes of his life. The first time that a historic document permits us to alight on his trace, he is sailing under the French flag. But already he is a seaman, and one of the officers of the famous Colombo, his grand-uncle, who commanded a fleet for King René, against the Kingdom of Naples, in 1459.