Los Angeles Herald

SHE SHOULD BE HONORED.

The Wife of America's Discoverer Is Entitled to Considerable Credit.

"With all the preparations now going on for the big event of 1893, everybody, the women in particular, seem to be forgetting something, and thereby the loyalty of woman to woman and the chivalry of man to woman promises to suffer exceedingly."

The speaker was a charming old school gentleman who is stopping at the Auditorium.

"We have been surfeited," he continued, "with talk regarding Christopher Columbus and schemes to have his picture, an illustrated history of him, relics of his birthplace and of his wanderings brought here and put on exhibition.

This homage paying to Christopher is proceeding on all hands with excess, and it is quite right and proper; but why don't we hear something about Mrs. Columbus? Probably but few women nowadays ever knew there was such a woman as Mrs. Christopher Columbus!

It occurs to me as particularly singular that in this day, especially when women are being accorded so much of prominence—and largely by reason of their own enterprise, too—that upon this occasion the memory of Mrs. Christopher Columbus is permitted to be so entirely 'out of it' instead of in it.

"I have been reading upon the subject lately, and find that Mrs. Columbus was probably more deserving of a share of the credit of Mr. Columbus' success than have been most of the unknown wives of well known men.

"Columbus was married in 1470, or thereabout, to a Miss Palestrello, of Lisbon, whose father had distinguished himself as a navigator. A part of Miss Palestrello's marriage dower was a great collection of valuable charts, journals and important memoranda. From childhood she had displayed wonderful enthusiasm on the subject, partaking to a marked degree of the speculative and adventurous ideas and schemes in the line of geographical discovery for which Lisbon was then headquarters. She possessed a fine education and was widely known as a brainy, brilliant woman, who was constantly urging her husband on in the path which finally brought him to the wonderful goal with which we are so familiar. While a girl Miss Palestrello made a number of hazardous voyages with her father in unfamiliar waters, and later made many geographical drawings, several of which were used with great profit by Columbus when he had won her for wife and set out upon his more important wanderings on the great deep.

"There probably is no picture of this brave, talented woman extant, but certainly it would seem a gracious and most fitting thing that her memory receive some tribute upon the forthcoming occasion,"—Chicago Tribune.