With this clue, we can readily find in the conduct of the astute Domenico a wise determination to effect a compromise with his adventurous son. He did not want to be the father of a Red Revenger, but he knew that he could not compel his son to comb wool. He therefore induced him to consent to go to sea as a scourge and enemy of pirates; and accordingly in his fourteenth year young Christopher went to sea on board a vessel commanded by a distant relative, who was at one time an admiral in the Genoese service. In what capacity he shipped, whether as a first-class or a second-class boy, or as an acting third assistant cook, or an ordinary cabin-boy, we do not know. Fernando Columbus preserves a discreet silence as to this matter, and as to the first voyage of his father generally. Of course this silence means something, and perhaps Christopher had good reasons for never speaking of the voyage even to his son. Probably he was deathly sea-sick, and in that condition was severely kicked for not being able to lay his hand at a moment’s warning upon the starboard main-top-gallant-studding-sail tripping-line, or other abstruse rope. At all events, he always abstained from telling stories beginning, “I reck’lect on my first v’yge;” and we may be sure that he would never have put such an unseamanlike constraint upon his tongue unless he knew that the less he said about that voyage the better. [Æt. 23; 1459–70] He had been a sailor for some years when he joined a vessel forming part of an expedition fitted out in Genoa in 1459 by a certain Duke of Calabria named John of Anjou, who wanted to steal the kingdom of Naples in order to give it to his father, René, Count of Provence. So pious a son naturally commanded universal respect, and Genoa provided him with ships and lent him money. The expedition was very large, and the old Admiral Colombo, with whom Christopher sailed, probably commanded the Genoese contingent. The fleet cruised along the Neapolitan coast, and sailed in and out the Bay of Naples any number of times, but owing to a fear of the extortions of the Neapolitan hack-drivers and _valets-de-place_, there seems to have been no attempt made to land at Naples. For four years John of Anjou persevered in trying to conquer Naples, but in vain; and at the end of that time he must have had a tremendous bill to pay for his Genoese ships.