at in three
days she was dead. Her lover, who had braved so much and won her so
gallantly, was turned to stone by this misfortune. Remorse and aching
desolation oppressed him; from the moment of her death he scarcely ate
nor spoke; and in five days he also was dead, surely of a broken heart.
They buried him beside his mistress under a spreading tree, and put up a
wooden cross there, with a prayer that any Christians who might come to
the island would build a chapel to Jesus the Saviour. The rest of the
party then repaired their little boat and put to sea; were cast upon the
coast of Morocco, captured by the Moors, and thrown into prison. With
them in prison was a Spanish pilot named Juan de Morales, who listened
attentively to all they could tell him about the situation and condition
of the island, and who after his release communicated what he knew to
Prince Henry of Portugal. The island of Madeira was thus rediscovered in
1418, and in 1425 was colonised by Prince Henry, who appointed as
Governor Bartolomeo de Perestrello, whose daughter was afterwards to
become the wife of Columbus.

So much for the outposts of the Old World. Of the New World, about the
possibility of which Columbus is beginning to dream as he sails the
Mediterranean, there was no knowledge and hardly any thought. Though new
in the thoughts of Columbus, it was very old in itself; generations of
men had lived and walked and spoken and toiled there, ever since men came
upon the earth; sun and shower, the thrill of the seasons, birth and life
and death, had been visiting it for centuries and centuries. And it is
quite possible that, long before even the civilisation that produced
Columbus was in its dawn, men from the Old World had journeyed there.
There are two very old fragments of knowledge which indicate at least the
possibility of a Western World of which the ancients had knowledge.
There is a fragment, preserved from the fourth century before Christ, of
a conversation between Silenus and Midas, King of Phrygia, in which
Silenus correctly describes the Old World--Europe, Asia, and Africa--as
being surrounded by the sea, but also describes, far to the west of it, a
huge island, which had its own civilisation and its own laws, where the
animals and the men were of twice our stature, and lived for twice our
years. There is also the story told by Plato of the island of Atlantis,
which was larger than Africa and Asia together, and which in an
ea