later, he begged a night's lodging at the Convent of La Rabida. By the year 1487, when the mystery of a path to India around Africa was solved, he had not only completely worked out his great idea of sailing West to find the East; but had offered his services in carrying it out, first to his native city, Genoa, without success, and had two years before brought it to Spain from Portugal where his proposals had been openly spurned and ridiculed, but treacherously though unsuccessfully tested. It is tolerably certain that much of his time had been spent in active and practical maritime service, for he had been down the coast of Africa as far as El Mina; had resided at Porto Santo, one of the out-lying Portuguese islands of the Atlantic, the daughter of whose first governor had become his wife; had visited England and Iceland, and was aċquainted with the whole of the Mediterranean. His brother Bartholomew had been a chart-maker at Lisbon, and was his advocate at the court of Henry VII. We know from the writings of his son Ferdinand that he was both a practical and a learned mathematician as well as navigator. He had read probably all the compilations named above, and his own experience, together with what he had learned from the Portuguese, had enabled him, with his Marco Polo in his pocket, to sift all the vague and contradictory notions of the ancients as to the Antipodes and the shape of our earth, as well as to cypher out a theory of his own. For seven long years, after being worn out and disgusted elsewhere, he danced attendance on the Spanish court, with no fortune but his idea; sometimes threadbare and barefooted, ever pressing his suit, never flagging in his confidence, questioned and ridiculed by commissions of geographers and scientific men, without ever

being able to penetrate the conservative ignorance of the learned and the courtly, or, as he complained, to convince any one man how it was possible to sail west and reach the East. But Time was working for him then, as it is now for Interoceanic Communication.

The fortieth year from the fall of Constantinople, the forty-fifth of the age of Columbus, witnessed the death of Lorenzo de Medici; but other suns were rising. Copernicus, in the far north, was in his twentieth year; Erasmus, his twenty-fifth; Cortes, his seventh; and Luther, his tenth. Martin Behaim, the old geographer of the Azores, aged sixty-two, was home on a visit to his native city of Nuremberg, from which the tide of commerce was ebbing. Here, in 1492, he made his famous globe of the whole world, as if to lay down upon it all the knowledge (and all the ignorance) of the geography of the earth, preparatory to the opening of new books. The same eventful year witnessed the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, the opening of the Mediterranean, and the discovery of America. Mohamedanism received its first check, and Christendom received a New World. These three Italian boys were men. When Columbus had balanced his egg for Spain, it was easy for Vespucci and the Cabots to do it for Portugal and England. Italy, whose noble sons did this in foreign service, never acquired a foot of the newly discovered lands for herself, yet how much of the honor was and still is hers.

In 1493, within three months from the return of Columbus, Alexander VI, a Spaniard, a Pope of not a year's standing, wishing to reward Ferdinand and Isabella for their struggles in expelling the Moors, divided our globė into two parts, by a line of demarcation passing from pole to

pole, one hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde islands, giving to Spain all she should discover within 180° to the west of it, leaving to Portugal all her African discoveries and the Indies for 180° east of it. But poor Portugal, that had been struggling seventy years in the dark in her circuitous route to India round Africa, jealous of the new short cut of Columbus, which had been offered to her and refused, protested against the position of this meridian. It was finally settled in the treaty of Tordesillas, of June, 1494, with the Pope's approval, that the line should stand at three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Azores. Had the King of Portugal's geographers and pilots advised him to contend for a line further east instead of further west, he would have received within his half the Moluccas and the other Spiceries. As some compensation for this geographical blunder, however, he secured a foothold in Brazil. Both nations were now running a race of discovery of India by divers routes. By India is here meant all the East beyond the Ganges, including China, Cathay, Japan, and the Spice Islands. The acquisitions of the Spanish were named the West Indies, while those of the Portuguese were called the East Indies.

Never was great discovery more modestly announced. "A Letter of Christopher Columbus, to whom our age is much indebted, respecting the Islands of India beyond the Ganges lately discovered," dated February, 1493. Columbus thought his success complete. He aimed at Zipangu, or Japan, and, to his dying day in 1506, believed that he had found it nearly where his calculations had placed it, but never was man more mistaken, and never did mistake produce greater results. Believing our earth to be a globe, Columbus rea

soned correctly that by sailing west he would come to the east of Marco Polo, but from want of knowledge of longitude, he, like everybody else, from Ptolemy down, was vastly deceived as to the size of the globe. From Cadiz to the Ganges the distance had been computed from the days of Alexander, but was always much overrated. From the Ganges to the Corea and Cathay, and thence to Zipangu fifteen hundred miles more, the distance was also exaggerated by Marco Polo. So that, still going cast, the distance from Zipangu to Cadiz was calculated to be about equal to the space from Palos to Saint Domingo. Upon this error in longitude hung no doubt the problem of circumnavigating the globe, for had Columbus suspected the real distance to Japan by the west, he would never probably have ventured to penetrate the "sea of darkness," or have found sailors bold enough to accompany him. The actual distance from San Francisco to Hong Kong is nearly one-third more than Columbus had reckoned it from Spain to Cuba.

The sensation produced throughout Europe by this discovery of a short and direct route to India was great, but for nearly twenty years nobody suspected the truth. The simple letter of Columbus in various editions, in prose and verse, was about all that was published for ten years, but the intelligence gave a new impulse to maritime discovery and commercial enterprise. Columbus, with full honors, returned in 1493, with a well equipped fleet to explore his Archipelago. He returned to Spain in June, 1496. Juan de la Cosa went with him in this second voyage. The Portuguese now redoubled their energies, and, in 1497, Vasco da Gama, just ten years after Diaz' discovery of the Cape, circumnavigated Africa

and reached Calcutta. The same year the Cabots, under a license of Henry VII, given in 1496, in trying for a short cut to Cathay by the northwest, discovered Newfoundland and other islands, and took possession, supposing them to be off China, and erected conjointly the flags of England and Venice, on the 24th of June, 1497. The next year Sebastian Cabot explored the coast from Labrador to Virginia, that is, as he expressed it, to the latitude of Gibraltar and the longitude of Cuba. These discoveries were in 1498 reported to the kings of Spain by their vigilant ambassador in London, with the remark that he had seen Cabot's chart, and would send home a copy of it. What steps followed it is difficult now to trace, but the result appears to be that Henry VII, never following up the discoveries after 1498, Sebastian Cabot remained quietly at home till the death of Henry, when he took service under the king of Spain, permitting his English and Venetian rights of discovery and plantation to lapse. Thus ended the first English and Venetian attempts to reach Cathay by the northwest.

On the 30th of May, 1498, in his third voyage, Columbus first touched the continent of America in Venezuela, though some still contend that Vespucci had anticipated him by nearly one year. He called it Paria, and reasoned himself into the belief that it was Paradise, whence our first parents had been driven. In 1499, Vicente Yañez Pinzon and Alonzo de Ojeda, private traders, with the latter of whom was Vespucci on his second voyage, visited Brazil under Spanish flags; and in 1500 Brazil was discovered accidentally (?) by Cabral, in that great fleet which the success of Gama had called forth. He was blown out of his course on his way to India, and took possession for the Portuguese. Portugal thus gained un