Strabo had already expressed his opinion (following the judgments of Homer and of Poseidonius) that an ocean surrounded the earth;[1] and Marco Polo,[2] 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.[3]
"It is singular," remarks Washington Irving in his interesting history of the Life and Correspondence of Columbus,[4] "how much the success of this great
- ↑ Strabo, i. c. 3-5; ii. c. 5.
- ↑ The celebrated travels of Marco Polo have been recently edited by Colonel Yule, C.B., an accomplished Oriental scholar, who has shown much ability in arranging the mass of new material for their illustration which has been discovered during the fifty years since Marsden's edition. Colonel Yule completely confirms the general truthfulness of Polo's narrative, and shows that the occasional credulity of the traveller (like that of Herodotus) is mainly due to the period in which he journeyed. The date of Marco Polo's absence from Venice is from 1271 to 1295 (Yule, Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, 2 vols. 8vo. 1871).
- ↑ It seems probable that Columbus was more influenced by what he heard from Toscanelli of the discoveries of Marco Polo than by anything else. Martin Behaim, in 1492, constructed a map in which Zipango (supposed to be Japan) is placed according to Polo's description, and it is believed that Columbus had a similar map with him on his first voyage. A copy of this map, which was nearly, if not quite, the same as Toscanelli's, is given in W. Irving, p. 16 (Murray).
- ↑ W. Irving, p. 60.
