Claudius Ptolemy had calculated the equatorial girth of the earth to be 20,400 miles. Making allowance for latitude, the circumference at the Canaries would be about 18,000 miles and the diameter about one-third of that, or 6,000 miles. Columbus was a student of everything accessible concerning geography and navigation and a devout Roman Catholic. He credited the statement in the Apochrypha of the Bible, Second Esdras, chapter 6, verse 42, which says: “Upon the third day Thou didst command that the _waters_ should be gathered in the _seventh part of the earth_, six parts has Thou dried up and kept them,” etc., etc. If Ptolemy’s calculation had been correct and Esdras’s statement reliable, 18,000 miles divided by 7, giving a quotient of 2,571 miles, would have been the distance Columbus would have had to sail from the Azores to Japan. He estimated he might have to sail 4,000 miles (to reach the west coast of India facing Europe) by being deflected from a straight course. The real distance from the Canaries to Japan is 12,000 miles, and the relative proportion of salt water on the surface of the earth to the land is _three-quarters_. Columbus, believing that he was inspired and commissioned by God to convert the heathen, sailed and thought he had reached India, called the natives Indians (so they have been called ever since) and he died so thinking. If the magnitude of the earth—its diameter had been ascertained and the relative proportion of land to water with the known longitude and latitude of India, then the problem was easily solved that an all-water route to India from Europe, whether by sailing westward or northward, would greatly diminish the distance (about 8,000 miles) covered by sailing around Cape Good Hope. That was a great desideratum—the aim of individuals and nations, which would seem to warrant the belief of speedy accomplishment. Let us not forget that we must consider the conditions of the past and not of the twentieth or nineteenth centuries. Notwithstanding “Henry, the Navigator” applied the inventions and equipments so indispensable to scientific navigation, and did all he could to inspire his sailors to sail around South Africa, it was forty years before that was an accomplished fact. So inferior, so inadequate, for ocean navigation, were the vessels then, and so little was known about ocean currents and the trade winds, that we can easily imagine that long sea voyages were discouraging. There is no other class of men so superstitious as were the sailors, nor as are the sailors now. Everything that they see or hear of, that is unusual or they don’t understand, frightens them as foreboding evil. It is an experience reported by so many of the famous navigators. You will recall Columbus’s experience in his first voyage across the Atlantic, and not only the evasive answers he gave when the sailors noticed a variation of the needle and his threats to enforce his orders, that he might continue his voyage.