cult for us to think
of the world in other terms than those of map and diagram; knowledge and
science have focussed things for us, and our imagination has in
consequence shrunk. It is almost impossible, when thinking of the earth
as a whole, to think about it except as a picture drawn, or as a small
globe with maps traced upon it. I am sure that our imagination has a far
narrower angle--to borrow a term from the science of lenses--than the
imagination of men who lived in the fifteenth century. They thought of
the world in its actual terms--seas, islands, continents, gulfs, rivers,
oceans. Columbus had seen maps and charts--among them the famous
'portolani' of Benincasa at Genoa; but I think it unlikely that he was so
familiar with them as to have adopted their terms in his thoughts about
the earth. He had seen the Mediterranean and sailed upon it before he
had seen a chart of it; he knew a good deal of the world itself before he
had seen a map of it. He had more knowledge of the actual earth and sea
than he had of pictures or drawings of them; and therefore, if we are to
keep in sympathetic touch with him, we must not think too closely of
maps, but of land and sea themselves.

The world that Columbus had heard about as being within the knowledge of
men extended on the north to Iceland and Scandinavia, on the south to a
cape one hundred miles south of the Equator, and to the east as far as
China and Japan. North and South were not important to the spirit of
that time; it was East and West that men thought of when they thought of
the expansion and the discovery of the world. And although they admitted
that the earth was a sphere, I think it likely that they imagined
(although the imagination was contrary to their knowledge) that the line
of West and East was far longer, and full of vaster possibilities, than
that of North and South. North was familiar ground to them--one voyage
to England, another to Iceland, another to Scandinavia; there was nothing
impossible about that. Southward was another matter; but even here there
was no ambition to discover the limit of the world. It is an error
continually made by the biographers of Columbus that the purpose of
Prince Henry's explorations down the coast of Africa was to find a sea
road to the West Indies by way of the East. It was nothing of the kind.
There was no idea in the minds of the Portuguese of the land which
Columbus discovered, and which we now know as the W