In February, 1492, a poor gray-haired man, his head bowed with discouragement almost to the back of his mule, rode slowly out through the beautiful gateway of the Alhambra. From boyhood he had been haunted with the idea that the earth is round. He believed that the piece of carved wood picked up four hundred miles at sea and the bodies of two men unlike any other human beings known, found on the shores of Portugal, had drifted from unknown lands in the west. But his last hope of obtaining aid for a voyage of discovery had failed. King John of Portugal, while pretending to think of helping him, had sent out secretly an expedition of his own.
He had begged bread, drawn maps and charts to keep from starving; he had lost his wife; his friends had called him crazy, and forsaken him. The council of wise men called by Ferdinand and Isabella ridiculed his theory of reaching the east by sailing west.
"But the sun and moon are round," said Columbus, "why not the earth?"
"If the earth is a ball, what holds it up?" asked the wise men.
"What holds the sun and moon up?" inquired Columbus.
"But how can men walk with their heads hanging down, and their feet up, like flies on a ceiling?" asked a learned doctor; "how can trees grow with their roots in the air?"
"The water would run out of the ponds and we should fall off," said another philosopher.
"This doctrine is contrary to the Bible, which says, 'The heavens are stretched out like a tent:'—of course it is flat; it is rank heresy to say it is round," said a priest.
Columbus left the Alhambra in despair, intending to offer his services to Charles VII., but he heard a voice calling his name. An old friend had told Isabella that it would add great renown to her reign at a trifling expense if what the sailor believed should prove true. "It shall be done," said Isabella, "I will pledge my jewels to raise the money. Call him back."
Columbus turned and with him turned the world. Not a sailor would go voluntarily; so the king and queen compelled them. Three days out, in his vessels scarcely larger than fishing-schooners, the Pinta floated a signal of distress for a broken rudder. Terror seized the sailors, but Columbus calmed their fears with pictures of gold and precious stones from India. Two hundred miles west of the Canaries, the compass ceased to point to the North Star. The sailors are ready to mutiny, but he tells them the North Star is not exactly north. Twenty-three hundred miles from home, though he tells them it is but seventeen hundred, a bush with berries floats by, land birds fly near, and they pick up a piece of wood curiously carved. On October 12, Columbus raised the banner of Castile over the western world.