course this
made the needle in the compass change its position also. Now the sailors
had been taught to believe so fully in the compass that they thought it
could never change its position. And here it was playing a cruel trick
upon them. We are trapped! they cried. The goblins in this dreadful sea
are making our compass point wrong so as to drag us to destruction. Go
back; take us back! they demanded.

But Columbus, though he knew that his explanation was wrong, said the
compass was all right. The North Star, toward which the needle always
pointed, had, so he said, changed its position. This quieted the sailors
for a while.

When they had been about forty days out from Palos, the ship ran into
what is marked upon your maps as the Sargasso Sea. This is a vast meadow
of floating seaweed and seagrass in the middle of the Atlantic; it is
kept drifting about in the same place by the two great sea currents that
flow past it but not through it.

The sailors did not know this, of course, and when the ships began to
sail slower and slower because the seaweed was so thick and heavy and
because there was no current to carry them along, they were sure that
they were somewhere near to the jumping-off place, and that the horrible
monsters they had heard of were making ready to stop their ships, and
when they had got them all snarled up in this weed to drag them all down
to the bottom of the sea.

For nearly a week the ships sailed over these vast sea-meadows, and
when they were out of them they struck what we call the trade-winds--a
never-failing breeze that blew them ever westward. Then the sailors
cried out that they were in an enchanted land where there was but one
wind and never a breeze to blow the poor sailors home again. Were they
not fearfully "scarey?" But no doubt we should have been so, too, if we
had been with them and knew no more than they did.

And when they had been over fifty days from home on the twenty-fifth of
September, some one suddenly cried Land! Land! And all hands crowded
to the side. Sure enough, they all saw it, straight ahead of them--fair
green islands and lofty hills and a city with castles and temples and
palaces that glittered beautifully in the sun.

Then they all cried for joy and sang hymns of praise and shouted to each
other that their troubles were over. Cathay, it is Cathay! they cried;
and they steered straight for the shining city. But, worst of all their
troubles, even as they sailed