the dream of Columbus's life was to make his way by an unknown route to
what was known, or to what he considered to be known. He wished to find
out an easy pathway to the territories of Kublai Khan, or Prester-John.

Neither were his motives such as have been generally supposed. They were,
for the most part, purely religious. With the gold gained from potentates
such as Kublai Khan, the Holy Sepulchre was to be rebuilt, and the
Catholic Faith was to be spread over the remotest parts of the earth.

Columbus had all the spirit of a crusader, and, at the same time, the
investigating nature of a modern man of science. The Arabs have a proverb
that a man is more the son of the age in which he lives than of his own
father. This was not so with Columbus; he hardly seems to belong at all to
his age. At a time when there was never more of worldliness and
self-seeking; when Alexander Borgia was Pope; when Louis the Eleventh
reigned in France, Henry the Seventh in England, and Ferdinand the
Catholic in Arragon and Castille--about the three last men in the world to
become crusaders--Columbus was penetrated with the ideas of the twelfth
century, and would have been a worthy companion of Saint Louis in that
pious king's crusade.

Again, at a time when Aristotle and "the Angelic Doctor" ruled the minds
of men with an almost unexampled tyranny: when science was more dogmatic
than theology; when it was thought a sufficient and satisfactory
explanation to say that bodies falling to the earth descended because it
is their nature to descend--Columbus regarded natural phenomena with the
spirit of inductive philosophy that would belong to a follower of Lord
Bacon.

Perhaps it will be found that a very great man seldom does belong to his