Certainly, whether he had the idea of reaching the Indies by a westward voyage before or not, he adopted Toscanelli’s views with enthusiasm, and devoted his whole life henceforth to trying to carry them into operation.

He gathered together all the information he could get about the fabled islands of the Atlantic—­the Island of St. Brandan, where that Irish saint found happy mortals; and the Island of Antilla, imagined by others, with its seven cities.  He gathered together all the gossip he could hear—­of mysterious corpses cast ashore on the Canaries, and resembling no race of men known to Europe; of huge canes, found on the shores of the same islands, evidently carved by man’s skill.  Curiously enough, these pieces of evidence were logically rather against the existence of a westward route to the Indies than not, since they indicated an unknown race, but, to an enthusiastic mind like Columbus’s, anything helped to confirm him in his fixed idea, and besides, he could always reply that these material signs were from the unknown island of Zipangu, which Marco Polo had described as at some distance from the shores of Cathay.

He first approached, as was natural, the King of Portugal, in whose land he was living, and whose traditional policy was directed to maritime exploration.  But the Portuguese had for half a century been pursuing another method of reaching India, and were not inclined to take up the novel idea of a stranger, which would traverse their long-continued policy of coasting down Africa.  A hearing, however, was given to him, but the report was unfavourable, and Columbus had to turn his eyes elsewhere.  There is a tradition that the Portuguese monarch and his advisers thought rather more of Columbus’s ideas at first; and attempted secretly to put them into execution; but the pilot to whom they entrusted the proposed voyage lost heart as soon as he lost sight of land, and returned with an adverse verdict on the scheme.  It is not known whether Columbus heard of this mean attempt to forestall him, but we find him in 1487 being assisted by the Spanish Court, and from that time for the next five years he was occupied in attempting to induce the Catholic monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, to allow him to try his novel plan of reaching the Indies.  The final operations in expelling the Moors from Spain just then engrossed all their attention and all their capital, and Columbus was reduced to despair, and was about to give up all hopes of succeeding in Spain, when one of the great financiers, a converted Jew named Luis de Santaguel, offered to find means for the voyage, and Columbus was recalled.

[Illustration:  BEHAIM’S GLOBE. 1492.]