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 Strabo had already expressed his opinion (following the judgments of Homer and of Poseidonius) that an ocean surrounded the earth; and Marco Polo, and perhaps also Sir John Maundeville, had in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries visited parts of Asia far beyond the regions laid down by Ptolemy: from the narratives of these travellers, Columbus judged that it would not be difficult to sail from Spain to India on the same parallel, and that a voyage to the West of no long duration would bring him to that far-famed but mysterious land. The most eastern part of Asia known to the ancients, he thought, could not be separated from the Azores by more than a third of the circumference of the globe, the intervening space being in all probability filled up by the unknown residue of Asia.

"It is singular," remarks Washington Irving in his interesting history of the Life and Correspondence of Columbus, "how much the success of this great