be to sail from Spain and around Africa to India, China and Japan. It is
such a long sail that, as you know, the Suez Canal was dug some twenty
years ago so that ships could sail through the Mediterranean Sea and out
into the Indian Ocean, and not have to go away around Africa.

But when Columbus was a boy it was even worse than now, for no one
really knew how long Africa was, or whether ships really could sail
around it. But Prince Henry said he knew they could, and he sent out
ships to try. He died before his Portuguese sailors, Bartholomew Diaz,
in 1493, and Vasco de Gama, in 1497, at last did sail around it and got
as far as "the Indies."

So while Prince Henry was trying to see whether ships could sail around
Africa and reach Cathay in that way, the boy Columbus was listening to
the stories the sailors told and was wondering whether some other and
easier way to Cathay might not be found.

When he was at school he had studied about a certain man named
Pythagoras, who had lived in Greece thousands of years before he was
born, and who had said that the earth was round "like a ball or an
orange."

As Columbus grew older and made maps and studied the sea, and read books
and listened to what other people said, he began to believe that this
man named Pythagoras might be right, and that the earth was round,
though everybody declared it was flat. If it is round, he said to
himself, "what is the use of trying to sail around Africa to get to
Cathay? Why not just sail west from Italy or Spain and keep going right
around the world until you strike Cathay? I believe it could be done,"
said Columbus.