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True Story of Christopher Columbus, Admiral; told for youngest readers by Elbridge Streeter Brooks
page 7 of 91 (07%)

By this time Columbus was a man. He was thirty years old and was a great
sailor. He had been captain of a number of vessels; he had sailed north
and south and east; he knew all about a ship and all about the sea. But,
though he was so good a sailor, when he said that he believed the earth
was round, everybody laughed at him and said that he was crazy. "Why,
how can the earth be round?" they cried. "The water would all spill out
if it were, and the men who live on the other side would all be standing
on their heads with their feet waving in the air." And then they laughed
all the harder.

But Columbus did not think it was anything to laugh at. He believed it
so strongly, and felt so sure that he was right, that he set to work to
find some king or prince or great lord to let him have ships and sailors
and money enough to try to find a way to Cathay by sailing out into the
West and across the Atlantic Ocean.

Now this Atlantic Ocean, the western waves of which break upon our
rocks and beaches, was thought in Columbus's day to be a dreadful place.
People called it the Sea of Darkness, because they did not know what was
on the other side of it, or what dangers lay beyond that distant blue
rim where the sky and water seem to meet, and which we call the horizon.
They thought the ocean stretched to the end of a flat world, straight
away to a sort of "jumping-off place," and that in this horrible
jumping-off place were giants and goblins and dragons and monsters and
all sorts of terrible things that would catch the ships and destroy them
and the sailors.

So when Columbus said that he wanted to sail away toward this dreadful
jumping-off place, the people said that he was worse than crazy. They
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