Page 202 - Lanzarotto Malocello from Italy to the Canary Islands

202 from Italy to the Canary Islands

How Jean de Bethencourt and Gadifer departed from the island of Fuerteventura
and arrived in the port of Harfleur. Plate found in “Le Canarien”.

1312 to 1659 it had only been three centuries, compared to the conclusions
th
drawn by 19 century scholars.
It is certain that he built at least a castle there, since the building could
still be seen after nearly a century. For more than three decades after 1312,
and that is in 1345, some of Lanzarotto’s travel mates still lived on the
island. Probably richer because of his discovery, Lanzarotto must have
then married Eliana Fiesco, certainly widowed before 1384; which would
suggest that Malocello lived to be seventy or eighty. We suppose that he
discovered Lanzarote when he was twenty-five to thirty years old, returned
to Genoa around fifty, and died about twenty to thirty years later.
At this point, we would like to share a humorous anecdote. A local
author, Vincenzo Testa, writing the book Celle e Cellaschi [The town of
Celle and its inhabitants], relates an episode narrated by Colonel Enrico
Biestri in 1957, who said that in 1678 the Marquis Goffredo Malocello
(known as quite the joker, an author of brilliant pranks, like the Roman