policy and government funds. The Italian navigator John Cabot and
his son Sebastian made their voyages from England in 1498 and 1500
with very feeble support from Henry VII, though it was upon their
discoveries that England later based her American claims. Even in
Spain there seems to have been little eagerness to emulate the
methods by which her neighbor Portugal had so rapidly risen to
wealth and power.

But the influence of revived classical information on geographical
matters was keenly felt; and the idea of a direct westerly passage
to India was suggested, not only by Portugal's monopoly of the
Cape route, but by classical authority, generally accepted by the
best geographers of the time. The _Imago Mundi_ of 1410, already
mentioned, embodying Roger Bacon's arguments that the Atlantic washed
the shores of Asia and that the voyage thither was not long, was a
book carefully studied by Columbus. Paul Toscanelli, a Florentine
physicist and astronomer, adopting and developing this theory, sent
in 1474 to Alfonso V of Portugal a map of the world in which he
demonstrated the possibilities of the western route. The distance
round the earth at the equator he estimated almost exactly to be
24,780 statute miles, and in the latitude of Lisbon 19,500 miles;
but he so exaggerated the extent of Europe and Asia as to reduce
the distance between them by an Atlantic voyage to about 6500 miles,
putting the east coast of China in about the longitude of Oregon.
This distance he still further shortened by locating Cipango (Japan)
far to the eastward of Asia, in about the latitude of the Canary
Islands and distant from them only 3250 miles.

With all these opinions Columbus was familiar, for the list of his
library and the annotations still preserved in his own handwriting,
show that he was not an ignorant sailor, nor yet a wild visionary,
but prepared by closest study for the task to which he gave his
later years. His earlier career, on the other hand, had supplied
him with abundant practical knowledge. Born in Genoa, a mother
city of great seamen, probably in the year 1436, he had received
a fair education in Latin, geography, astronomy, drafting, and
other subjects useful to the master-mariner of those days. He had
sailed the Mediterranean, and prior to his great adventure, had
been as far north as Iceland, and on many voyages down the African
coast. Following his brother Bartholomew, who was a map-maker in
the Portuguese service