[103] “I find the first mention of the application of the log in a passage of Pigafetta’s journal of Magellan’s voyage of circumnavigation, which long lay buried among the manuscripts in the Ambrosian Library at Milan. It is there said that in the month of January, 1521, when Magellan had already arrived in the Pacific, ‘_Seconda la misura che facevamo del viaggio colla catena a poppa noi percorrevamo da 60 in 70 leghe al giorno_,’ [following the measure which we made of our progress with the chain at the stern, we ran from sixty to seventy leagues a day]. (Amoretti. Primo Viaggio intorno al Globo terracqueo ossia Navigazione fatta dal Cavaliere Antonio Pigafetta sulla squadra del Magaglianes, 1800. p. 46.) What can this arrangement of a chain at the hinder part of the ship (_catena a poppa_), ‘which we used throughout the entire voyage to measure the way,’ have been except an apparatus similar to our log?”—Humboldt: Cosmos. Otté’s trans. vol. ii. p. 633. [104] The Cape of Good Hope is in 34° 22´ south latitude. It is said that Dias found by the astrolabe that the cape was in 45° south latitude, and that it was 3,100 leagues distant from Lisbon. This distance, it is related, Dias set down, league by league, on a marine chart, which he presented to King John II. Historia General de las Indias. Bartolomé de las Casas. lib. i. cap. vii. [105] Cristoforo Colombo was born in the city of Genoa, about the year 1435. His father, Dominico Colombo, was a wool-comber. The navigator married, in Lisbon, Doña Felipa, the daughter of Bartolomeo Moñis de Perestrello, a distinguished mariner, who had been in the service of Prince Henry of Portugal. Ferdinand Columbus, in his history of the life and achievements of his father, remarks: “So it is that some, who would cast a cloud upon his fame, say he was of Nervi, others of Cugureo, and others of Bugiesco, all small towns near the city of Genoa, and upon its coast. Others, who wish to exalt him, say he was a native of Savona, others of Genoa, and others, more vain, make him of Piacenza, in which city there are some honorable persons of his family and tombs with the arms and inscriptions of the family of Colombi, this being the common surname of his ancestors, though he, complying with the customs of the country where he went to live and begin a new condition of life, altered the word that it might be like the old name, and designated the direct from the collateral line, calling himself Colon.... And the surname of Colon which he revived was appropriate, which in Greek signifies a member, and his Christian name being Christopher, designate him as being a member of Christ, by whom salvation was conveyed to those Indian people.”—Histoire del Signore Don Fernando Colombo. cap. 1.