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 The waves of this ocean, although they roll as high as mountains, yet maintain themselves without breaking, for if they broke, it would be impossible for ship to plough them."

One man was, however, at last found bold enough to brave the dangers of the broad Atlantic and to force a passage across its troubled waters. Only a few years before Vasco de Gama started on his voyage of discovery in the East, a greater and better man had set sail to the West, in the hopes of thus reaching the fabled land of "Cathay." Christopher Columbus, a Genoese, who had been trained from boyhood to the sea, had long cherished the idea that if he could only penetrate the mysterious waters of the Atlantic, he would find beyond them and at less distance than was then supposed, the shores of India, whence Europe had been so long supplied with its spices and numerous luxuries. From the translations of the works of Ptolemy, Pliny, and Strabo, then but recently made known, Columbus obtained all the knowledge the ancients possessed of geography, a knowledge which, though happily preserved, had lain buried amid the darkness and tumults of the Middle Ages, and had been only brought again to light on the revival of science and letters during the fifteenth century.

Columbus had formed a crude idea of the extent of the waters which covered the earth; and their presumed limited extent and the shortness of the distance westward, as he supposed, between Spain and the Indies, had, no doubt, exercised considerable influence