Of actual fact this much emerges, that, still a boy, probably about the age of fourteen, he gave up his father’s trade to which he had been apprenticed and turned to the sea for a livelihood. His voyages were not confined to the Mediterranean but took him as far north as England and to the south along the Guinea coast of Africa, till about the year 1476 they landed him either by chance or mischance on the shores of Portugal. In Lisbon he found a wife and home, living in the house of his mother-in-law, and earning a small income, it is supposed, by drawing the maps and charts demanded by the most seafaring nation of the day. It was a task that with such a temperament would be certain to draw dormant theories of nautical enterprise from the realm of dreams to that of possibilities; and from this time Columbus’s ambitions and hopes began to take definite shape. Amongst men of science, and indeed amongst the cultured people of Europe generally, the idea that the earth was a sphere composed of land and water had been long accepted; though theologians were still found who declared that such a theory conflicted with the Gospels and statements of the early Fathers of the Church and must therefore be false. If an Antipodes existed, how could all the nations of the world see Christ at His coming? Another popular argument had been based on the assumption that the ever-increasing warmth of the atmosphere, experienced by travellers as they journeyed southwards, culminated in a zone of unendurable heat. The ship that ventured too far in southern waters might find itself driven forward by sudden winds or unknown currents into a belt of perpetual flame and there perish miserably. That fear at least had been dispelled by the enterprise of the very nation with whom Columbus had cast in his fortunes. Always, from the wide extent of their coast, interested in the sea and its wonders, the Portuguese had received a special stimulus in the field of discovery during the fifteenth century from the brother of their King, the famous “Prince Henry the Navigator.” Under his orders, as he sat in his castle at Sagres overlooking the great Atlantic, studying charts and records of exploration by day, the course of the stars by night, his captains had pursued their way, league by league, along the West African coast. Ever as they went, new lands, rich in possibilities of trade, were exposed, and old doubts and fears receded. Madeira and the Canary Islands were added to the dominions of Portugal; Cape Bojador, once believed the gateway to unknown horrors, was doubled; the Cape Verde Islands and the Guinea coast explored.