but whether he went
north in search of wool or as the captain of a ship we do not know. In
February of the year 1477, Colombo (if we are to believe his own words)
visited Iceland, but very likely he only got as far as the Faroe Islands
which are cold enough in February to be mistaken for Iceland by any
one. Here Colombo met the descendants of those brave Norsemen who in the
tenth century had settled in Greenland and who had visited America in
the eleventh century, when Leif's vessel had been blown to the coast of
Vineland, or Labrador.

What had become of those far western colonies no one knew. The American
colony of Thorfinn Karlsefne, the husband of the widow of Leif's brother
Thorstein, founded in the year 1003, had been discontinued three years
later on account of the hostility of the Esquimaux. As for Greenland,
not a word had been heard from the settlers since the year 1440. Very
likely the Greenlanders had all died of the Black Death, which had just
killed half the people of Norway. However that might be, the tradition
of a "vast land in the distant west" still survived among the people of
the Faroe and Iceland, and Colombo must have heard of it. He gathered
further information among the fishermen of the northern Scottish islands
and then went to Portugal where he married the daughter of one of the
captains who had served under Prince Henry the Navigator.

From that moment on (the year 1478) he devoted himself to the quest of
the western route to the Indies. He sent his plans for such a voyage to
the courts of Portugal and Spain. The Portuguese, who felt certain that
they possessed a monopoly of the eastern route, would not listen to
his plans. In Spain, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, whose
marriage in 1469 had made Spain into a single kingdom, were busy driving
the Moors from their last stronghold, Granada. They had no money for
risky expeditions. They needed every peseta for their soldiers.

Few people were ever forced to fight as desperately for their ideas as
this brave Italian. But the story of Colombo (or Colon or Columbus, as
we call him,) is too well known to bear repeating. The Moors surrendered
Granada on the second of January of the year 1492. In the month of April
of the same year, Columbus signed a contract with the King and Queen
of Spain. On Friday, the 3rd of August, he left Palos with three little
ships and a crew of 88 men, many of whom were criminals who had been
offered indemni