said he was a wicked man and ought to be punished.

But they could not frighten Columbus. He kept on trying. He went from
place to place trying to get the ships and sailors he wanted and was
bound to have. As you will see in the next chapter, he tried to get
help wherever he thought it could be had. He asked the people of his own
home, the city of Genoa, where he had lived and played when a boy; he
asked the people of the beautiful city that is built in the sea--Venice;
he tried the king of Portugal, the king of England, the king of France
the king and queen of Spain. But for a long time nobody cared to listen
to such a wild and foolish and dangerous plan--to go to Cathay by the
way of the Sea of Darkness and the Jumping-off place. You would never
get there alive, they said.

And so Columbus waited. And his hair grew white while he waited, though
he was not yet an old man. He had thought and worked and hoped so much
that he began to look like an old man when he was forty years old. But
still he would never say that perhaps he was wrong, after all. He said
he knew he was right, and that some day he should find the Indies and
sail to Cathay.



CHAPTER II. WHAT PEOPLE THOUGHT OF THE IDEA.

I do not wish you to think that Columbus was the first man to say that
the earth was round, or the first to sail to the West over the Atlantic
Ocean. He was not. Other men had said that they believed the earth was
round; other men had sailed out into the Atlantic Ocean. But no sailor
who believed the earth was round had ever yet tried to prove that it was