TRANSITION 241 believed the wildest legends, but placed little trust in the veracious reports of travellers like Marco Polo. The way to India was blocked by land, but in the fifteenth century men were beginning to think that it might be possible to get there by sea. Portuguese sailors gradually Columbus, creeping along the east coast of Africa began to 1492 - dream of a sea passage round the continent. The Genoese, Christopher Columbus, conceived the idea of sailing westwards round the world until the coast of India should be reached. He tried, and failed to obtain help for such an expedition from Portugal ; then even while his brother was making a similar attempt with Henry vn. in England, he got the needed aid from Isabella of Castile, at the moment when Spain was freed from more pressing claims at home by her conquest of Granada. At the end of 1492 an expedition under Columbus sailed out to the unknown west, and reached the islands called the West Indies, under the impression, which still prevailed when he died, that it was India he had reached. It was a later voyager, Amerigo Vespucci, who gave his name to the vast continent in the west. On the strength of the doctrine that the unknown heathen world was the property of the pope, Alexander vi. issued a bull under which he bestowed on Spain all lands that might be discovered west of a line drawn from north to south, and east of that line on Portugal. Thus it was that Brazil, being east of the line, fell to Portugal, and the rest of America to Spain. Even before the great voyage of Columbus, the Portuguese, Bartholomew Diaz, reached the Cape of Good Hope which was doubled in 1497 by Vasco da Gama, who sailed up vasco da the east coast of Africa, and striking across the Gama » 1497 - Indian Ocean reached Calicut at the south of India in 1498. It was in 15 19, the year when Charles v. became emperor, that the Portuguese Magelhaens sailed on the great voyage on which he passed through the Straits of Magellan at the south of America; and in 1522 his ships got home, the first which had circumnavigated the world, though their captain had died on the voyage. The Portuguese secured to themselves, by grace of the native rulers, stations on the west coast of India, and on the mouth of Q
