the East
for Europe. Gold and jewels, diamond-hilted swords of Damascus steel,
carved ivory, and priceless gems,--all the treasures which the warriors
of the Cross brought home, helped to impress on the mind of Europe the
surpassing riches of the East.

Gradually a new interest was added. As time went on doubts increased
regarding the true shape of the earth. Early peoples had thought it a
great flat expanse, with the blue sky propped over it like a dome or
cover. This conception was giving way. The wise men who watched the sky
at night, who saw the sweeping circles of the fixed stars and the
wandering path of the strange luminous bodies called planets, began to
suspect a mighty secret,--that the observing eye saw only half the
heavens, and that the course of the stars and the earth itself rounded
out was below the darkness of the horizon. From this theory that the
earth was a great sphere floating in space followed the most
enthralling conclusions. If the earth was really a globe, it might be
possible to go round it and to reappear on the farther side of the
horizon. Then the East might be reached, not only across the deserts of
Persia and Tartary, but also by striking out into the boundless ocean
that lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules. For such an attempt an almost
superhuman courage was required. No man might say what awful seas, what
engulfing gloom, might lie across the familiar waters which washed the
shores of Europe. The most fearless who, at evening, upon the cliffs of
Spain or Portugal, watched black night settle upon the far-spreading
waters of the Atlantic, might well turn shuddering from any attempt to
sail into those unknown wastes.

It was the stern logic of events which compelled the enterprise.
Barbarous Turks swept westward. Arabia, Syria, the Isles of Greece,
and, at last, in 1453, Constantinople itself, fell into their hands.
The Eastern Empire, the last survival of the Empire of the Romans,
perished beneath the sword of Mahomet. Then the pathway by land to
Asia, to the fabled empires of Cathay and Cipango, was blocked by the
Turkish conquest. Commerce, however, remained alert and enterprising,
and men's minds soon turned to the hopes of a western passage which
should provide a new route to the Indies.

All the world knows the story of Christopher Columbus, his long years
of hardship and discouragement; the supreme conviction which sustained
him in his adversity; the final triumph which crowned