After him came others, and there was fighting with the red men, whom they called Skrellings. In the end the Northmen left the country, and before many years all was forgotten about it. Only lately the story has been found again in some old writings. And so time went on for nearly five hundred years more, and nothing was known in Europe about the land beyond the seas.
Now let us go from the north to the south of Europe. Here there is a kingdom called Italy, which runs down into the Mediterranean Sea almost in the shape of a boot. On the western shore of this kingdom is a famous old city named Genoa, in which many daring sailors have dwelt; and here, long ago, lived a man named Columbus, a poor man, who made his living by carding wool.
This poor wool-carder had four children, one of whom (born about 1436) he named Christopher. Almost everybody who has been at school in the world knows the name of this little Italian boy, for he became one of the most famous of men.
Many a boy in our times has to help his father in his shop. The great Benjamin Franklin began work by pouring melted tallow into moulds to make candles. In the same way little Columbus had to comb wool for his father, and very likely he got as tired of wool as Franklin did of candles.
The city he lived in was full of sailors, and no doubt he talked to many of them about life on the wild waters, and heard so many stories of danger and adventure that he took the fancy to go to sea himself.
At any rate we are told that he became a sailor when only fourteen years old, and made long and daring voyages while he was still young. Some of those were in Portuguese ships down the coast of Africa, of which continent very little was known at that time. He went north, too; some think as far as Iceland. Who knows but that he was told there of what the Northmen had done?
Columbus spent some time in the island of Madeira, far out in the Atlantic ocean, and there the people told him of strange things they had seen. These had come over the seas before the west winds and floated on their island shores. Among them were pieces of carved wood, and canes so long that they would hold four quarts of wine between their joints. And the dead bodies of two men had also come ashore, whose skins were the color of bronze or copper.
These stories set Columbus thinking. He was now a man, and had read many books of travel, and had studied all that was then known of geography. For a time he lived by making maps and charts for ship captains. This was in the city of Lisbon, in Portugal, where he married and settled down and had little boys of his own.
At that time some of the most learned people had odd notions about the earth. You may have seen globes as round as an orange, with the countries laid out on them. But the people then had never seen such a globe, and the most of them thought that the earth was as flat as a table, and that any one who sailed too far over the ocean would come to the edge of the earth and fall off.
This seems very absurd, does it not? But you must remember that people then knew very little about the earth they lived on, and could not understand how people could keep on a round globe like flies on a ball of glass.
But there were some who thought the earth to be round, and Columbus was one of these.
At that time silk and spices and other rich goods were brought from China and India, thousands of miles to the east, by caravans that traveled overland. Columbus thought that by sailing west, over the broad Atlantic, he would come to these far countries, just as a fly may walk around the surface of an orange, and come to the place it started from.
The more Columbus thought about this, the more certain he became that he was right. He was so sure of it that he set out to try and make other people think the same way. He wanted ships with which to sail across the unknown seas to the west, but he had no money of his own to buy them with.
Ah! what a task poor Columbus now had. For years and years he wandered about among the kings and princes of Europe, but no one would believe his story, and many laughed at him and mocked him.
First he tried Genoa, the city where he was born, but the people there told him he was a fool or had lost his senses.
Then he went to the king of Portugal. This king was a rascal, and tried to cheat him. He got his plans from him, and sent out a vessel in secret, hoping to get the honor of the discovery for himself. But the captain he sent was a coward and was scared by the rolling waves. He soon came back, and told the king that there was nothing to be found but water and storm. King John, of Portugal, was very sorry afterward that he had tried to rob Columbus of his honor.
Columbus was very angry when he heard what the king had done. He left Portugal for Spain, and tried to get the king and queen of that country to let him have ships and sailors. But they were at war with a people called the Moors, and had no money to spare for anything but fighting and killing.
Columbus stayed there for seven long years. He talked to the wise men, but they made sport of him. "If the earth is round," they said, "and you sail west, your ships will go down hill, and they will have to sail up hill to come back. No ship that was ever made can do that. And you may come to places where the waters boil with the great heat of the sun; and frightful monsters may rise out of the sea and swallow your ships and your men." Even the boys in the street got to laughing at him and mocking him as a man who had lost his wits.
After these many years Columbus got tired of trying in Spain. He now set out for France, to see what the king of that country would do. He sent one of his brothers to England to see its king and ask him for aid.
He was now so poor that he had to travel along the dusty roads on foot, his little son going with him. One day he stopped at a convent called La Rabida, to beg some bread for his son, who was very hungry.
The good monks gave bread to the boy, and while he was eating it the prior of the convent came out and talked with Columbus, asking him his business. Columbus told him his story. He told it so well that the prior believed in it. He asked him to stay there with his son, and said he would write to Isabella, the queen of Spain, whom he knew very well.
So Columbus stayed, and the prior wrote a letter to the queen, and in the end the wandering sailor was sent for to come back to the king's court.
Queen Isabella deserves much of the honor of the discovery of America. The king would not listen to the wandering sailor, but the queen offered to pledge her jewels to raise the money which he needed for ships and sailors.
Columbus had won. After years and years of toil and hunger and disappointment, he was to have ships and sailors and supplies, and to be given a chance to prove whether it was he or the wise men who were the fools.
But such ships as they gave him! Why, you can see far better ones every day, sailing down your rivers. Two of them did not even have decks, but were like open boats. With this small fleet Columbus set sail from Palos, a little port in Spain, on the 3d of August, 1492, on one of the most wonderful voyages that has ever been known.
Away they went far out into the "Sea of Darkness," as the Atlantic ocean was then called. Mile after mile, day after day, on and on they went, seeing nothing but the endless waves, while the wind drove them steadily into the unknown west.
The sailors never expected to see their wives and children again. They were frightened when they started, and every day they grew more scared. They looked with staring eyes for the bleak fogs or the frightful monsters of which they had been told. At one place they came upon great tracts of seaweed, and thought they were in shallow water and would be wrecked on banks of mud. Then the compass, to which they trusted, ceased to point due north and they were more frightened than ever. Soon there was hardly a stout heart in the fleet except that of Columbus.
The time came when the sailors grew half mad with fear. Some of them made a plot to throw Columbus overboard and sail home again. They would tell the people there that he had fallen into the sea and been drowned.
It was a terrible thing to do, was it not? But desperate men will do dreadful things. They thought one man had better die than all of them. Only good fortune saved the life of the great