MANY PUZZLES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 156, 3 July 1937, Page 4 (Supplement)

MANY PUZZLES.

EXPLORER'S LIFE. BIRTH AND BURIAL PLACE. THE wealth of fact given to the world by Christopher Columbus is exceeded only by the plethora of doubt which lie left" to posterity. We can view him only through a thick fog of mystery. Historians cannot agree as to when he was horn, just when he died or where rest his bones— whether he was hero or impostor, genius or lunatic. Some say his father was an honest, industrious sheepcomber, others that, this paternal parent was an itinerant peddler, a vagrant, a cheat and a juggler. We were taught in school that Christopher was a genius far ahead of his time, whose superhuman perspicuity penetrated the set-rets Of physic# and geography. But his fellow-Italian, Cesare Lombroso, the famous anthropologist, branded him as a lunatic, who suffered from congenital paranoia, fixed ideas and religious illusions, who showed pronounced stigmata of degeneration; a "liar a'nd boaster," who was "given to cruelty," a "profound ignoramus," whose "overwhelming conceit" caused him "to draw comparisons between himself and the Saviour," to announce himself as the Lord's representative under divine commission to discover David's treasure and with those sinews of war recover the Holy Sepulchre, then rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem. Deep Mysteries. We used to learn that Columbua, in his wisdom, knew the earth to be a sphere, but savants who luve carefully studied him now say that he believed our old spinning top to be pear-shaped (as good spinning tops should be), tbo stem or apex pointing toward heaven. Over and over again we have pitied hinr in his martyrdom, endured only by virtue of his consciousness of having rendered ths world a great service. But authorities who have scrutinised him profoundly now hold that he never enjoyed even the knowledge that 'he had discovered America, and that his madness was so far advanced that he believed his prison to be «• great palace. The deepest of the many mysteries that veil this remarkable man relates to tin- r 'stin-r , i apc 0 f his bones. Once when their profanation was threatened. they were hidden awav so verv caiefully that r > one has been able to locate Lkeot exactly. It wa«