Moguer, and other ports where he can question sailors newly returned
from the west. For half a dozen years he has been out of touch with
mariners and their doings, and these trips must have given him deep
pleasure. For this is his true place,--among men who have known the
rough hardships of seafaring life, and not among grandees and courtiers.
He breathes in the salt air and chats with every man he meets. A pilot
of Palos, Pedro de Velasco by name, tells him that he too once thought
of going into the west, but after sailing one hundred and fifty leagues
southwest of Fayal (one of the Azores), and seeing nothing but banks of
seaweed, he turned north and then northwest, only to again turn back;
but he is sure, he adds, that _if only he had kept on_ he would
have found land.

Christopher, also, as we know, is quite sure of it, and says so. Another
day, in a seaport near Cadiz, he meets another pilot who tells him that
he sailed far west from the Irish coast and saw the shores of Tartary!
Christopher probably has some doubts of this, so he merely shrugs his
shoulders and walks off. He is impatient for Martin Alonzo Pinzon to
return. It is disturbing to learn that other men have been getting
nearer and nearer to _his_ land.

At last Pinzon comes and announces, to add to Christopher's uneasiness,
that he has been searching in the Pope's library, in Rome, for
information regarding that enormously rich Asiatic island called
Cipango. As they all sit in the little cell at La Rabida, talking about
the proposed western voyage of discovery, Pinzon cannot help throwing in
a word occasionally about Cipango. He has been reading Marco Polo, and
Japan, or Cipango, is very much on his mind. Perhaps on Christopher's,
also, but _he_ is content to stick to his "western lands." About
this scheme the two men of Palos, Pinzon and Doctor Fernandez, are as