to Cathay by sailing out into the
West and across the Atlantic Ocean.

Now this Atlantic Ocean, the western waves of which break upon our rocks
and beaches, was thought in Columbus's day to be a dreadful place.
People called it the Sea of Darkness, because they did not know what was
on the other side of it, or what dangers lay beyond that distant blue
rim where the sky and water seem to meet, and which we call the horizon.
They thought the ocean stretched to the end of a flat world, straight
away to a sort of "jumping-off place," and that in this jumping-off
place were giants and goblins and dragons and monsters and all sorts of
terrible things that would catch the ships and destroy them and the
sailors.

So when Columbus said that he wanted to sail away toward this dreadful
jumping-off place, the people said that he was worse than crazy. They
said he was a wicked man and ought to be punished.

But they could not frighten Columbus. He kept on trying. He went from
place to place trying to get the ships and sailors he wanted and was
bound to have. As you will see later, he tried to get help wherever he
thought it could be had. He asked the people of his own home, the city
of Genoa, where he had lived and played when a boy; he asked the people
of the beautiful city that is built in the sea--Venice; he tried the
king of Portugal, the king of England, the king of France, the king and
queen of Spain. But for a long time nobody cared to listen to such a
wild and foolish and dangerous plan--to go to Cathay by the way of the
Sea of Darkness and the jumping-off place. "You would never get there
alive," they said.

And so Columbus waited. And his hair grew white while he waited, though
he was not yet an old man. He had thought and worked and hoped so much
that he began to look like an old man when he was forty years old. But
still he would never say that perhaps he was wrong, after all. He said
he knew he was right, and that some day he should find the Indies and
sail to Cathay.

I do not wish you to think that Columbus was the first man to say that
the earth was round, or the first to sail to the West over the Atlantic
Ocean. He was not. Other men had said that they believed the earth was
round; other men had sailed out into the Atlantic Ocean. But no sailor
who believed the earth was round had ever tried to prove that it was by
crossing the Atlantic. So, you see, Columbus was really the first man to
say, I believe the eart