Zanzibar as two great islands lying off it, Zanzibar being south of Madagascar. He also modified, but still retained, the Ptolemaic idea of the non-peninsular form of India and the exaggerated size of Ceylon. He gave a gross representation of the Malay Peninsula, and in general ignored Marco Polo’s results, and those of other Asiatic travellers. His representation of Scandinavia was indifferent, and even that of the Mediterranean was below the level of the Portolano maps. As regards the width of the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and Asia, he appears to have followed Toscanelli; and he showed the mythical island of Antillia and also that of St. Brandon (the existence of which on maps was an outcome of the fabled wanderings of a holy man of Ireland in the sixth century) in mid-ocean between the Euro-African and the Asiatic coasts. Such was the view of the ocean barrier which lay between Columbus and the attainment of his ideal. It serves as a reminder, which, in view of the results he obtained, is sometimes necessary, that that ideal was the discovery, not of new lands, but of a new route to lands already known. CHAPTER VI. THE NEW WORLD The period which witnessed, among other great achievements, the discovery of a new hemisphere, and included the voyages of Columbus, Gama, and Magellan, besides many of an importance only secondary to these, has been called the most brilliant in human history. The exaggeration, if such it be, is excusable; certainly in the department of geographical history no other period shares the peculiar lustre of this. Christopher Columbus (1446–1506) was born of humble parentage at Genoa. He went early to sea, and was attracted to Lisbon no doubt by the reputation of the Portuguese as navigators. He had voyaged to the eastern Mediterranean, to the Guinea Coast, and in the north as far, perhaps, as Iceland. It is not until 1484 that we find his great scheme of the crossing of the Atlantic to Asia matured and laid before the King of Portugal. It was refused by him; it was rejected also in Genoa, Venice, England, and France. Then he presented it at Madrid, and it was examined by a quasi-expert committee, which pronounced against it; but at last it came under the notice of Queen Isabella, and by her was taken up. Columbus obtained three ships, and sailed on August 3, 1492, from Palos, himself in command of one vessel, the others under Martin Alonzo and Vicente Yañez Pinzon. The expedition touched at the Canaries in September, and the story of its subsequent progress is well known--how difficulties were encountered in the Sargasso Sea, how the hearts of the crew failed them, how Columbus was driven to give them false reckonings of the position of the ships, but was at last enabled to point out to them signs of neighbouring land in the flotsam of the waters, and how at length land was actually sighted on October 11, and on the following day a landing in state was effected on an