314
APPENDIX.
are they entitled to our wonder as the achievements of a man, whom the weight of years and infirmities was pressing into the grave.
N o . V. LINEAGE
THE
OP
COLUMBUS.
ancestry of Christopher Columbus has formed a point of zealous
controversy, which is not yet satisfactorily
settled.
Several honorable
families, possessing domains in Placentia, Montferrat, and the different parts of the Genoese territories, claim him as belonging to their houses ; and to these has recently been added the noble family of Colombo in M o 足 dern.*
T h e natural desire to prove consanguinity with a man of dis足
tinguished renown has excited this rivalry ; but it has been heightened, in particular instances, by the hope of succeeding to titles and situations of wealth and honor, when
his male line of
descendants became extinct.
T h e investigation is involved in particular obscurity, as even his immediate relatives appear to have been in ignorance on the subject. Fernando Columbus in his biography of the admiral, after a pompous prelude, in which he attempts to throw a vague and cloudy magnificence about the origin of his father, notices slightly the attempts of some to obscure his fame, by making him a native of various small and insignifi足 cant villages ; and dwells with more complacency upon others who make him a native of places in which there were persons of much honor of the name, and many sepulchral monuments with arms and epitaphs of the Colombos.
H e relates his having himself gone to the castle of Cucureo,
to visit two brothers of the family of Colombo, who were rich and noble, the youngest of whom was above one hundred years of age, and who he had heard were relatives of his father ; but they could give him no infor足 mation upon the subject ; whereupon he breaks forth into his professed contempt for these adventitious
claims, declaring, that he thinks it better
to content himself with dating from the glory of the admiral, than to go about inquiring whether his father " were a merchant, or one who kept his * Spotomo, Hist. Mem., p. 5.