Donna Isabel, moreover, was never tired of talking about Porto Santo and her dead husband, and of all the voyages and sea adventures that had filled his life.

She was obviously a good teller of tales, and had all the old history and traditions of Madeira at her fingers' ends; the story of Robert Machin and Anne Dorset; the story of the isle of Seven Cities; and the black cloud on the horizon that turned out in the end to be Madeira.

She told Christopher how her husband, when he had first gone to Porto Santo, had taken there a litter of rabbits, and how the rabbits had so increased that in two seasons they had eaten up everything on the island, and rendered it uninhabitable for some time.
She brought out her husband's sea-charts, memoranda, and log-books, the sight of which still farther inflamed Christopher's curiosity and ambition.

The great thing in those days was to discover something, if it was only a cape down the African coast or a rock in the Atlantic.

The key to fame, which later took the form of mechanical invention, and later still of discovery in the region of science, took the form then of actual discovery of parts of the earth's surface.