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How Columbus Sought for the Strait
37

first Pharaoh ruled in Egypt. Do you know why they have the same fairy stories and folk-lore in Ireland that they have in Japan? Because they passed from lip to lip, from camp-fire to camp-fire along this old trade-route, no one knows how many thousand years ago.

STATUE OF COLUMBUS AT MADRID.


But in the fifteenth century the Turks captured Constantinople and closed the overland road. This threw the whole world out of gear. The Portuguese were the first to look for a new way to India, by sailing round Africa. And in 1487, the brave captain, Bartholomew Diaz, succeeded in rounding the "Cape of Storms," and came back with the news that he had entered the Indian Ocean, and that there was good hope of reaching India by that route. So the King of Portugal commanded the "Cape of Storms" to be rechristened the "Cape of Good Hope," and so it is called to this day.

Bartholomew Columbus was on this voyage and talked it over with his brother Christopher, who pointed out how much easier and shorter it would be to sail twenty-five hundred or perhaps three thousand miles straight across the Atlantic to Asia, than to make the long trip