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But this is also at best a negative argument: the 'Livy of Portugal' never mentions the great mathematician, Martin Behaim, who accompanied Diego Cam to his discovery of the Congo. In those days fair play was not a jewel. The truth is that it would be as easy to name the discoverer of gunpowder or steam-power as to find the first circumnavigator of the African continent.
Martin Béhaim, of whom we have already spoken, was amongst his correspondents, and also the celebrated Florentine astronomer, Toscanelli, whose opinions in some degree influenced those of Columbus. At this time Columbus, according to the portrait of him given by his biographer Washington Irving, was a tall man, of robust and noble presence.
The old magistrate and his wife, on the contrary, thought that they knew. They had helped the sisters to receive the first callers; but when Frau Barbara Behaim, a cousin of the late Frau Maria, had appeared, they gave up their post to her, and slipped quietly into the next room to escape the throng.
As soon as they were unnoticed a moment Ursel kissed her newly regained friend, and whispered, pointing to her lover, with whom Fran Barbara Behaim was talking: "He first taught me to know what true love is, and since then I have realised that it was wrong and foolish for me to be angry with you, my dear Els, and that Wolff did right to keep his troth, hard as his family made it for him to do so.
Hogg suspected to be the Congo. Martin von Behaim of Nurnberg in whose day Africa began to assume her present form, makes the Rio de Padron drain the western face of the Montes Lunae. Mercator and Henry Hondt make the Zaire Lacus the northern part of the Zembre Lacus.
What the Barberighi, the Foscari, the Grimaldi, the Giustiniani and the like, are there, the families of Stromer, Behaim, Im Hoff, Tucher, Kresz, Baumgartner, Pfinzing, Pukheimer, Holzschuher, and so forth, are with us; and the Schoppers certainly do not rank lowest on the list.
The globe of Martin Behaim at that time depicted Zipango as off the coast of Asia and near the longitude actually occupied by the Carolinas and Florida, the eastward extension of Asia being fearfully exaggerated. The globe of John Schöner, of 1520, fourteen years after the death of Columbus, had Zipango in the same place, and Cuba alongside of it, ranging north and south.
Franz, who dedicated himself to the Church at an early age, under the protection of my lord Cardinal Bernhardi, has already been named to be the next in office after our present aged and weakly Bishop. The son of Agnes, Herdegen's younger daughter, is Martin Behaim, a high-spirited youth in whom his grandfather's fiery and restless temper lives again, albeit somewhat quelled.
In a general way, as to these distances from Spain to China, Toscanelli and Behaim agreed, and there is no reason to believe that the views of Columbus were in any noteworthy degree different.
Now was it my part to make known to her that her returned son held fast to his oath; and I had already begun to tell her this when she waved her hands, and eagerly broke in: "And do you think I ever looked that he, who is a Waldstromer and a Behaim both in one, should ever break a vow? And of a truth he hath given me time enough to consider of it!
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