Page:The life of Christopher Columbus.djvu/95

] them; but the patriotism of Columbus was too sincere, that he should not at first have thought of that city to which family affections, and the endearments of his childhood, had attached him.

It is certain that he wished his country, in preference to all others, should reap the fruit of his discoveries. He came, then, to Genoa, and proposed his plan to the Senate. He would obligate himself that if he should be supplied with some equipped vessels, he would pass through the strait of Gibraltar and pursue his way westward into the Atlantic Ocean, until he would find the land where spices grow, and thus make the circuit of the world. But the cosmographic reasons which he advanced could not be appreciated by the noble members of that body. The Genoese, as able as they were intrepid in the basin of the Mediterranean, ventured but little on the ocean. The progress which the Portuguese had daily made in geography had yet done them no injury. They esteemed themselves masters in the art of navigation, thought they could not be surpassed, and looked on the offer of their countryman as a dream. They made a pretext of the emptiness of the treasury, exhausted by considerable armaments; and in order, perhaps, to abate the pretensions of Columbus, they told him that this desire for discoveries was nothing new for the Senate; that already many an explorer had paid with his life for his daring curiosity. The archives of the republic would prove the fact. There, it could be seen that two hundred years before the proposition now submitted to the council, that two captains of the highest nobility, Tedisio Doria and Ugolino Vivaldi, had departed for the great ocean without there being ever after any account of their fate.

Refused by the Senate of Genoa, Columbus, who wished absolutely to make Italy the beneficiary of his discovery, passed, it is said, to Venice; the republic of St. Mark appearing to him, as regarded finance and marine, to be in a way to second his views. But, notwithstanding his