h is round and I will show you that it is by
sailing to the lands that are on the other side of the earth.

He even figured out how far it was around the world. Your geography, you
know, tells you now that what is called the circumference of the
earth--that is, a straight line drawn right around it--is nearly
twenty-five thousand miles. Columbus had figured it up pretty carefully
and he thought it was about twenty thousand miles. "If I could start
from Genoa," he said, "and walk straight ahead until I got back to Genoa
again, I should walk about twenty thousand miles." Cathay, he thought,
would take up so much land on the other side of the world that, if he
went west instead of east, he would only need to sail about twenty-five
hundred or three thousand miles.

If you have studied your geography carefully you will see what a mistake
he made.

It is really about twelve thousand miles from Spain to China (or Cathay
as he called it). But America is just about three thousand miles from
Spain, and if you read all this story you will see how Columbus's
mistake really helped him to discover America.

I have told you that Columbus had a longing to do something great from
the time when, as a little boy, he had hung around the wharves in Genoa
and looked at the ships sailing east and west and talked with the
sailors and wished that he could go to sea. Perhaps what he had learned
at school--how some men said that the earth was round--and what he had
learned on the wharves about the wonders of Cathay set him to thinking
and dreaming that it might be possible for a ship to sail around the
world without falling off. At any rate, he kept on thinking and dreaming
and longing until, at last, he began doing.

Some of the sailors sent out by Prince Henry of Portugal, of whom I have
told you, in their trying to sail around Africa discovered two groups
of islands out in the Atlantic that they called the Azores, or Isles of
Hawks, and the Canaries, or Isles of Dogs. When Columbus was in Portugal
in 1470 he became acquainted with a young woman whose name was Philippa
Perestrelo. In 1473 he married her.

Now Philippa's father, before his death, had been governor of Porto
Santo, one of the Azores, and Columbus and his wife went off there to
live. In the governor's house Columbus found a lot of charts and maps
that told him about parts of the ocean that he had never before seen,
and made him feel certain that he was right in saying that if