erful as it had been; the
battle of life, with its crosses and difficulties, was thick about him;
and perhaps he looked into this new-comer's small face with conflicting
thoughts, and memories of the long white beach and the crashing surf at
Porto Santo, and regret for things lost--so strangely mingled and
inconsistent are the threads of human thought. At last he decided to
turn his face elsewhere. In September 1488 he went to Lisbon, for what
purpose it is not certain; possibly in connection with the affairs of his
dead wife; and probably also in the expectation of seeing his brother
Bartholomew, to whom we may now turn our attention for a moment.

After the failure of Columbus's proposals to the King of Portugal in
1486, and the break-up of his home there, Bartholomew had also left
Lisbon. Bartholomew Diaz, a famous Portuguese navigator, was leaving for
the African coast in August, and Bartholomew Columbus is said to have
joined his small expedition of three caravels. As they neared the
latitude of the Cape which he was trying to make, he ran into a gale
which drove him a long way out of his course, west and south.

The wind veered round from north-east to north-west, and he did not
strike the land again until May 1487. When he did so his crew insisted
upon his returning, as they declined to go any further south. He
therefore turned to the west, and then made the startling discovery that
in the course of the tempest he had been blown round the Cape, and that
the land he had made was to the eastward of it; and he therefore rounded
it on his way home. He arrived back in Lisbon in December 1488, when
Columbus met his brother again, and was present at the reception of Diaz
by the King of Portugal. They had a great deal to tell each other, these
two brothers; in the two years and a half that had gone since they had
parted a great deal had happened to them; and they both knew a good deal
more about the great question in which they, were interested than they
had known when last they talked.

It is to this period that I attribute the inception, if not the
execution, of the forgery of the Toscanelli correspondence, if, as I
believe, it was a forgery. Christopher's unpleasant experiences before
learned committees and commissions had convinced him that unless he were
armed with some authoritative and documentary support for his theories
they had little chance of acceptance by the learned. The, Idea was
right; he kn