the houses of marble covered with gold, the jewels and the spices and
the precious stones, and all the other wonderful and magnificent things.
I do not wonder you wish to try, he said, for if you find Cathay it will
be a wonderful thing for you and for Portugal.

That settled it with Columbus. If this wise old scholar said he was
right, he must be right. So he left his home in the Azores and went to
Portugal. This was in 1475, and from that time on, for seventeen long
years he was trying to get some king or prince to help him sail to the
West to find Cathay.

But not one of the people who could have helped him, if they had really
wished to, believed in Columbus. As I told you, they said that he was
crazy. The king of Portugal, whose name was John, did a very unkind
thing--I am sure you would call it a mean trick. Columbus had gone to
him with his story and asked for ships and sailors. The king and his
chief men refused to help him; but King John said to himself, perhaps
there is something in this worth looking after and, if so, perhaps I
can have my own people find Cathay and save the money that Columbus will
want to keep for himself as his share of what he finds. So one day he
copied off the sailing directions that Columbus had left with him,
and gave them to one of his own captains without letting Columbus know
anything about it, The Portuguese captain sailed away to the West in
the direction Columbus had marked down, but a great storm came up and
so frightened the sailors that they turned around in a hurry. Then they
hunted up Columbus and began to abuse him for getting them into such a
scrape. You might as well expect to find land in the sky, they said, as
in those terrible waters.

And when, in this way, Columbus found out that King John had tried to