The True Story of Christopher Columbus Called The Great Admiral | Page 5

really could sail
around it. But Prince Henry said he knew they could, and he sent out
ships to try. He died before his Portuguese sailors, Bartholomew Diaz,
in 1493, and Vasco de Gama, in 1497, at last did sail around it and got
as far as "the Indies."
So while Prince Henry was trying to see whether ships could sail
around Africa and reach Cathay in that way, the boy Columbus was
listening to the stories the sailors told and was wondering whether
some other and easier way to Cathay might not be found.
When he was at school he had studied about a certain man named
Pythagoras, who had lived in Greece thousands of years before he was
born, and who had said that the earth was round "like a ball or an
orange."
As Columbus grew older and made maps and studied the sea, and read
books and listened to what other people said, he began to believe that
this man named Pythagoras might be right, and that the earth was round,
though everybody declared it was flat. If it is round , he said to himself,
"what is the use of trying to sail around Africa to get to Cathay? Why
not just sail west from Italy or Spain and keep going right around the
world until you strike Cathay? I believe it could be done," said
Columbus.
By this time Columbus was a man. He was thirty years old and was a
great sailor. He had been captain of a number of vessels; he had sailed
north and south and east; he knew all about a ship and all about the sea.
But, though he was so good a sailor, when he said that he believed the
earth was round, everybody laughed at him and said that he was crazy.
"Why, how can the earth be round?" they cried. "The water would all
spill out if it were, and the men who live on the other side would all be
standing on their heads with their feet waving in the air." And then they
laughed all the harder.
But Columbus did not think it was anything to laugh at. He believed it
so strongly, and felt so sure that he was right, that he set to work to find
some king or prince or great lord to let him have ships and sailors and
money enough to try to find a way to Cathay by sailing out into the
West and across the Atlantic Ocean.
Now this Atlantic Ocean, the western waves of which break upon our

rocks and beaches, was thought in Columbus's day to be a dreadful
place. People called it the Sea of Darkness, because they did not know
what was on the other side of it, or what dangers lay beyond that distant
blue rim where the sky and water seem to meet, and which we call the
horizon. They thought the ocean stretched to the end of a flat world,
straight away to a sort of "jumping-off place," and that in this horrible
jumping- off place were giants and goblins and dragons and monsters
and all sorts of terrible things that would catch the ships and destroy
them and the sailors.
So when Columbus said that he wanted to sail away toward this
dreadful jumping-off place, the people said that he was worse than
crazy. They said he was a wicked man and ought to be punished.
But they could not frighten Columbus. He kept on trying. He went from
place to place trying to get the ships and sailors he wanted and was
bound to have. As you will see in the next chapter, he tried to get help
wherever he thought it could be had. He asked the people of his own
home, the city of Genoa, where he had lived and played when a boy; he
asked the people of the beautiful city that is built in the sea--Venice; he
tried the king of Portugal, the king of England, the king of France the
king and queen of Spain. But for a long time nobody cared to listen to
such a wild and foolish and dangerous plan--to go to Cathay by the way
of the Sea of Darkness and the Jumping-off place. You would never get
there alive, they said.
And so Columbus waited. And his hair grew white while he waited,
though he was not yet an old man. He had thought and worked and
hoped so much that he began to look like an old man when he was forty
years old. But still he would never say that perhaps he was wrong, after
all. He said he knew he was right, and that some day he should find the
Indies and sail to Cathay.