awful Sea of Darkness and would never see land any more.

When Columbus thought that he was sailing too slowly--he had now been
away from Palos a month and was only about a hundred miles out at
sea--and when he saw what babies his sailors were, he did something that
was not just right (for it is never right to do anything that is not
true) but which he felt he really must do. He made two records (or
reckonings as they are called) of his sailing. One of these records was
a true one; this he kept for himself. The other was a false one; this he
kept to show his sailors. So while they thought they were sailing slowly
and that the ocean was not so very wide, Columbus knew from his own true
record that they were getting miles and miles away from home.

Soon another thing happened to worry the sailors. The pilots were
steering by the compass. You know what that is--a sort of big
magnet-needle perfectly balanced and pointing always to the north. At
the time of Columbus the compass was a new thing and was only understood
by a few. On the thirteenth of September they had really got into the
middle of the ocean, and the line of the north changed. Of 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.