at Salamanca.]

The genesis of the grand scheme of Columbus has now been set forth, I
believe, with sufficient fulness. The cardinal facts are 1, that the
need for some such scheme was suggested in 1471, by the discovery that
the Guinea coast extended south of the equator; 2, that by 1474 advice
had been sought from Toscanelli by the king of Portugal, and not very
long after 1474 by Columbus; 3, that upon Toscanelli's letters and map,
amended by the Ptolemaic estimate of the earth's size and by the
authority of passages quoted in the book of Alliacus (one of which was a
verse from the Apocrypha), Columbus based his firm conviction of the
feasibleness of the western route. How or by whom the suggestion of that
route was first made--whether by Columbus himself or by Toscanelli or by
Fernando Martinez or, as Antonio Gallo declares, by Bartholomew
Columbus,[482] or by some person in Portugal whose name we know not--it
would be difficult to decide. Neither can we fix the date when Columbus
first sought aid for his scheme from the Portuguese government. There
seems to be no good reason why he should not have been talking about it
before 1474; but the affair did not come to any kind of a climax until
after his return from Guinea, some time after 1482 and certainly not
later than 1484. It was on some accounts a favourable time. The war with
Castile was out of the way, and Martin Behaim had just invented an
improved astrolabe which made it ever so much easier to find and keep
one's latitude at sea. It was in 1484 that Portuguese discoveries took a
fresh start after a ten years' lull, and Diego Cam, with the learned
Behaim and his bran-new astrolabe on board, was about to sail a thousand
miles farther south than white men had ever gone before. About this time
the scheme of Columbus was formally referred by King John II. to the
junto of learned cosmographers from whom the crown had been wont to seek
advice. The project was condemned as "visionary,"[483] as indeed it
was,--the outcome of vision that saw farther than those men could see.
But the king, who had some of his uncle Prince Henry's love for bold
enterprises, was more hospitably inclined toward the ideas of Columbus,
and he summoned a council of the most learned men in the kingdom to
discuss the question.[484] In this council the new scheme found some
defenders, while others correctly urged that Columbus must be wrong in
supposing Asia to extend so far to the east, and it mu