Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/23



NTIL Christopher Columbus, by his voyage across the Atlantic, had proved that the world is round, no one in Europe thought of going westward to reach India. Merchants and travelers took the old caravan routes through Syria and the Valley of the Euphrates, or crossed Egypt and went by the Red Sea. Every path to the land of gold led men eastward. Marco Polo, a Venetian traveler of the thirteenth century, journeyed by these old paths so far east that he stood on the pine-clad hills of Xipangu (Japan) and looked out on the broad Pacific Ocean. He supposed that this was one of those great flat seas by which the flat world was encircled, and that if a vessel ventured too far upon it contrary winds might blow such unwary sailors over the edge of the world. Columbus, who was a student as well as a sailor, read the adventures of Marco Polo and other travelers, and came to quite a different conclusion. If the world is round, as he believed, the water which Marco Polo saw stretching far to the east was the same ocean as that which washed the western shores of Europe. Japan and India could be reached