Page:Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1912, Volume 1.djvu/33



To connect Oregon with the greatest event in the world of science and discovery—the grand achievement of Christopher Columbus—we must take a long look backward and see that the train of events set in motion by that great man never halted or turned aside from the day Columbus sighted Cat Island in the West Indies until the Oregon pioneers organized the provisional government at Champoeg. The settlement of this last and most distant portion of the United States was clearly the result of that world-wide racial impulse to move west on isothermal lines, take possession of new lands and colonize the North American continent. That impulse already in existence before the American colonies declared their independence of the Old "World, was vastly accelerated by the surrender of the British army at Yorktown.

As Columbus left no explanation of his studies of the great problem of sailing westward from Europe to find the east coast of Asia the world is left to judge him by contemporaneous events. That Columbus did ransack all possible sources of geographical knowledge in his day to get a clue to the mystery of the great western ocean there can be no doubt. It is known that he studied the works of the Greek geographer Ptolemy who wrote about 150 years after Christ. Ptolemy was the most learned man of his age; and the great problem with him and other learned men at that time was to determine the size of the inhabited world. It was the fixed belief at that age that the length of the inhabited world was not only longer than it was wide but that the length was twice that of its width. All the old Greek geographers, except Hipparchus, agreed on the proposition that the inhabited world was a vast flat plain island in the midst of a boundless ocean. Hipparchus flourished about 150 years before Christ, was the founder of the science of astronomy, calculated eclipses, discovered the precession of the equinoxes, and seeing that the heavenly bodies must be spheres concluded that the earth also was a globe. And it is a curious fact that all the calculations and speculations of those old geographers of eighteen hundred years ago continually kept pushing the coast of Asia—what we know as China and Siberia—farther and farther eastward into the supposed boundless ocean. Columbus had read and