of coasting trip, from Norway to Iceland, from Iceland to Greenland, from Greenland to Vinland. To follow them would have been to steer north-northwest, whereas his glory lies in the fact that he sailed due west into the open sea, and found America. His will begins, "In the name of the Most Holy Trinity who inspired me with the idea, and afterwards confirmed me in it, that by traversing the ocean westwardly," etc. Thus accurately did he state his own title to fame.

So far as climate and weather were concerned, he actually incurred less risk than the Northmen; but when we consider that he sailed directly out across an unknown ocean on the faith of a theory, his deed was incomparably greater.

There is one strong reason for believing that Columbus. knew but vaguely of their voyage, or did not know of it at all, or did not connect the Vinland they found with the India he sought. This is the fact, that he never, so far as we know, used their success as an argument in trying to persuade other people. For eight years, by his own statement, he was endeavoring to convert men to his project. "For eight years," he says, "I was torn with disputes, and my project was matter of mockery" (cosa de burla). During this time he never made one convert among those best qualified, either through theory or practice, to form an opinion-"not a pilot, nor a sailor, nor a philosopher, nor any kind of scientific man," he says, "put any faith in it." Now these were precisely the men whom the story of Vinland, if he had been able to quote it, would have convinced. The fact that they were not convinced shows that they were not told the story; and if Columbus did not tell it, the reason must have been either that he did not know it, or did not attach much weight to it. He would have told it if only to shorten his own labor in argument; for in converting practical men an ounce of Vinland would have been worth a pound of cosmography. Certainly he knew how to deal with individual minds, and he could well adapt his arguments to

each one.

The way in which he managed his sailors on his voyage shows that he sought all sorts of means to command confidence. He would have treated his hearers to all the tales in the sagas if that would have helped the matter; the Skraelings and the unipeds, or one-legged men, of the Norse legends, would have been discussed by many a Genoese or Portuguese fireside; and Columbus might never have needed to trouble Ferdinand and Isabella with his tale. We may safely assume that if he knew the traditions about Vinland, they made no great impression on his mind.

The

Why should they have made much impression? Northmen themselves had had five hundred years to forget Vinland, and had employed the time pretty effectually for that purpose. None of them had continued to go there. As it met the ears of Columbus, Vinland may have seemed but one more island in the northern seas, and very remote indeed from that gorgeous India which Marco Polo had described, and which was the subject of so many dreams. More than all, Columbus was a man of abstract thought, whose nature it was to proceed upon theories, and he fortified himself with the traditions of philosophers, authorities of whom the Northmen had never heard. That one saying of the cosmographer Aliaco, quoting Aristotle, had more weight with one like Columbus than a ship's crew of Vikings would have had: "Aristotle holds that there is but a narrow sea [parvum mare] between the western points of Spain and the eastern border of India." Ferdinand Columbus tells us how much influence that sentence had with his father; but we should have known it at any rate.

When he finally set sail (August 3, 1492), it was with the distinct knowledge that he should have a hard time of it unless Aristotle's "narrow sea" proved very narrow indeed. Instead of extending his knowledge to the sailors and to the young adventurers who sailed with him, he must keep them.

in the dark, must mislead them about the variations of the magnetic needle, and must keep a double log-book of his daily progress, putting down the actual distance sailed, and then a smaller distance to tell the men, in order to prevent them from being more homesick than the day before. It was hard enough, at any rate. The sea into which they sailed was known as the Sea of Darkness-Mare Tenebrosum, the Bahral-Zulmat of the Arabians. It had been described by an Arab geographer a century before as "a vast and boundless ocean, on which ships dare not venture out of sight of land, for even if they knew the direction of the winds, they would not know whither those winds would carry them, and as there is no inhabited country beyond, they would run great risk of being lost in mist and vapor." We must remember that at that period the telescope and quadrant were not yet invented, and the Copernican system was undiscovered. It was a time when the compass itself was so imperfectly known that its variations. were not recognized; when Mercator's system of charts, now held so essential to the use even of the compass, was not devised. The instrument was of itself an object of dread among the ignorant, as being connected with enchantment. One of its Spanish names, bruxula, was derived from bruxo, a sorcerer.

No one knew the exact shape of the earth; Columbus believed in his third voyage that it was pear-shaped. Somewhere near the stalk of the pear, he thought, was the Earthly Paradise; somewhere else there was Chaos or Erebus. In sailing over those waters, no one knew what a day might bring forth. Above them, it was thought by some, hovered the gigantic bird known as the roc-familiar to the readers of "Sindbad the Sailor"-which was large enough to grasp a ship with all its crew and fly away with it into upper air. Columbus himself described three mermaids, and reported men with tails, men with dogs' heads, and one-eyed men. In the history of Peter Martyr, one of those who first recorded the

discoveries of Columbus, the innocent cetacean called the manatee became a half-mythological monster covered with knobbed scales, and with a head like an ox; it could carry a dozen men on its back, and was kind and gentle to all but Christians, to whom it had an especial aversion. Philo

ponus has delineated the manatee, and De Bry has pictured the imaginary beings that Columbus saw.

The old maps peopled the ocean depths with yet more frightful and mysterious figures; and the Arab geographers, prohibited by their religion from portraying animals real or imaginary, supplied their place by images even more terrific, as that of the black and clinched hand of Satan rising above

in the dark, must mislead them about the variations of the magnetic needle, and must keep a double log-book of his daily progress, putting down the actual distance sailed, and then a smaller distance to tell the men, in order to prevent them. from being more homesick than the day before. It was hard enough, at any rate. The sea into which they sailed was known as the Sea of Darkness-Mare Tenebrosum, the Bahral-Zulmat of the Arabians. It had been described by an Arab geographer a century before as "a vast and boundless ocean, on which ships dare not venture out of sight of land, for even if they knew the direction of the winds, they would not know whither those winds would carry them, and as there is no inhabited country beyond, they would run great risk of being lost in mist and vapor." We must remember that at that period the telescope and quadrant were not yet invented, and the Copernican system was undiscovered. It was a time when the compass itself was so imperfectly known that its variations were not recognized; when Mercator's system of charts, now held so essential to the use even of the compass, was not devised. The instrument was of itself an object of dread among the ignorant, as being connected with enchantment. One of its Spanish names, bruxula, was derived from bruxo, a sorcerer.

No one knew the exact shape of the earth; Columbus believed in his third voyage that it was pear-shaped. Somewhere near the stalk of the pear, he thought, was the Earthly Paradise; somewhere else there was Chaos or Erebus. In sailing over those waters, no one knew what a one knew what a day might bring forth. Above them, it was thought by some, hovered the gigantic bird known as the roc-familiar to the readers of "Sindbad the Sailor"-which was large enough to grasp a ship with all its crew and fly away with it into upper air. Columbus himself described three mermaids, and reported men. with tails, men with dogs' heads, and one-eyed men. In the history of Peter Martyr, one of those who first recorded the