e Henry's idea of reaching the Indies
by the eastward route, a bold yet simple idea had seized upon a
Genoese sailor, which was intended to achieve the same purpose by
sailing westward. The ancients, as we have seen, had recognised
the rotundity of the earth, and Eratosthenes had even recognised
the possibility of reaching India by sailing westward. Certain
traditions of the Greeks and the Irish had placed mysterious islands
far out to the west in the Atlantic, and the great philosopher
Plato had imagined a country named Atlantis, far out in the Indian
Ocean, where men were provided with all the gifts of nature. These
views of the ancients came once more to the attention of the learned,
owing to the invention of printing and the revival of learning,
when the Greek masterpieces began to be made accessible in Latin,
chiefly by fugitive Greeks from Constantinople, which had been
taken by the Turks in 1453. Ptolemy's geography was printed at
Rome in 1462, and with maps in 1478. But even without the maps
the calculation which he had made of the length of the known world
tended to shorten the distance between Portugal and Farther India
by 2500 miles. Since his time the travels of Marco Polo had added
to the knowledge of Europe the vast extent of Cathay and the distant
islands of Zipangu (Japan), which would again reduce the distance
by another 1500 miles. As the Greek geographers had somewhat
under-estimated the whole circuit of the globe, it would thus seem
that Zipangu was not more than 4000 miles to the west of Portugal.
As the Azores were considered to be much farther off from the coast
than they really were, it might easily seem, to an enthusiastic
mind, that Farther India might be reached when 3000 miles of the
ocean had been traversed.

[Illustration: TOSCANELLI'S MAP (_restored_)]

This was the notion that seized the mind of Christopher Columbus,
born at Genoa in 1446, of humble parentage, his father being a
weaver. He seems to have obtained sufficient knowledge to enable
him to study the works of the learned, and of the ancients in Latin
translations. But in his early years he devoted his attention to
obtaining a practical acquaintance with seamanship. In his day, as
we have seen, Portugal was the centre of geographical knowledge,
and he and his brother Bartolomeo, after many voyages north and
south, settled at last in Lisbon--his brother as a map-maker, and
himself as a practical seaman. This was about the year 1