ar against the Moors of
Granada--A hearing at length afforded him--His demands refused--Leaves
the Court in poverty and visits Palos on his way to France--Met by Juan
Perez, Prior of the Rabida convent--The Prior listens to his plans--
Introduces him to the Pinzons, and informs the Queen of his intended
departure--Sent for back at Court--All his demands agreed to--Authority
given him to fit out a squadron.

In the year 1486 a council of learned professors of geography,
mathematics, and all branches of science, erudite friars, accomplished
bishops, and other dignitaries of the Church, were seated in the vast
arched hall of the old Dominican convent of Saint Stephen in Salamanca,
then the great seat of learning in Spain. They had met to hear a simple
mariner, then standing in their midst, propound and defend certain
conclusions at which he had arrived regarding the form and geography of
the earth, and the possibility, nay, the certainty, that by sailing
west, the unknown shores of Eastern India could be reached. Some of his
hearers declared it to be grossly presumptuous in an ordinary man to
suppose, after so many profound philosophers and mathematicians had been
studying the world, and so many able navigators had been sailing about
it for years past, that there remained so vast a discovery for him to
make. Some cited the books of the Old Testament to prove that he was
wrong, others the explanations of various reverend commentators.
Doctrinal points were mixed up with philosophical discussions, and a
mathematical demonstration was allowed no weight if it appeared to clash
with a text of Scripture or comment of one of the fathers.

Although Pliny and the wisest of the ancients had maintained the
possibility of an antipodes in the southern hemisphere, these learned
gentlemen made out that it was altogether a novel theory.

Others declared that to assert there were inhabited lands on the
opposite side of the globe would be to maintain that there were nations
not descended from Adam, as it would have been impossible for them to
have passed the intervening ocean, and therefore discredit would be
thrown on the Bible.

Again, some of the council more versed in science, though admitting the
globular form of the earth, and the possibility of an opposite habitable
hemisphere, maintained that it would be impossible to arrive there on
account of the insupportable heat of the torrid zone; besides which, if
the circumference of