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 and referred it to a learned junto, who were charged with all questions of maritime enterprise. This scientific body, however, treated the project as extravagant, an opinion confirmed by a council composed of the prelates and persons of the greatest learning in the kingdom. But the junto, though unwilling to accept the proposal of Columbus, were not slow to profit by the information he had given to them; and while pretending to afford him their best attention, despatched a vessel on their own account to test some of his views. The whole plan failed; the mariners after sailing for some days to the west of the Cape Verde Islands came back in terror at the rough weather they had experienced, and the seemingly vast extent of ocean to be sailed over; and Columbus, justly indignant at the contemptible treatment he had received, at once took his departure from such a court and country, to seek elsewhere a patron surrounded by more honest counsellors.

Broken-hearted, friendless, and almost penniless, he left Lisbon with his son Diego, then a little boy, towards the close of 1484, and is supposed to have retraced his steps to Genoa, and thence carried his proposal to Venice. Receiving no encouragement at either of these places, he found his way to Spain, in the winter of 1485, and there had the good fortune to make friends at the ancient convent of La Rabida, situated not far from the small seaport of Palos in Andalusia.

At the gate of this convent the discoverer of a new world stopped to ask a little bread and water for his famishing boy, and the prior, Juan Perez