the Ocean,
and no doubt talking with a deal of pride and inaccuracy about the
discovery of the New World, lived on until 1498; when he died also, and
vanished out of this world. He had fulfilled a noble destiny in being
the father of Christopher Columbus.

CHAPTER V

SEA THOUGHTS

The long years that Christopher Columbus spent at sea in making voyages
to and from his home in Genoa, years so blank to us, but to him who lived
them so full of life and active growth, were most certainly fruitful in
training and equipping him for that future career of which as yet,
perhaps, he did not dream. The long undulating waves of the
Mediterranean, with land appearing and dissolving away in the morning and
evening mists, the business of ship life, harsh and rough in detail, but
not too absorbing to the mind of a common mariner to prevent any thoughts
he might have finding room to grow and take shape; sea breezes, sea
storms, sea calms; these were the setting of his knowledge and experience
as he fared from port to port and from sea to sea. He is a very elusive
figure in that environment of misty blue, very hard to hold and identify,
very shy of our scrutiny, and inaccessible even to our speculation. If
we would come up with him, and place ourselves in some kind of sympathy
with the thoughts that were forming in his brain, it is necessary that we
should, for the moment, forget much of what we know of the world, and
assume the imperfect knowledge of the globe that man possessed in those
years when Columbus was sailing the Mediterranean.

That the earth was a round globe of land and water was a fact that, after
many contradictions and uncertainties, intelligent men had by this time
accepted. A conscious knowledge of the world as a whole had been a part
of human thought for many hundreds of years; and the sphericity of the
earth had been a theory in the sixth century before Christ. In the
fourth century Aristotle had watched the stars and eclipses; in the third
century Eratosthenes had measured a degree of latitude, and measured it
wrong;--[Not so very wrong. D.W.]--in the second century the
philosopher Crates had constructed a rude sort of globe, on which were
marked the known kingdoms of the earth, and some also unknown. With the
coming of the Christian era the theory of the roundness of the earth
began to be denied; and as knowledge and learning became gathered into
the hands of the Church they lost something of thei