Prince Henry the Navigator died; and in time his great-nephew, King John II., son of Alfonso V., “El Africano,” sat on the throne of Portugal, but the tide of maritime energy never slackened, and the west coast of Africa began to assume in maps something of its real shape. Bartholomew Columbus, brother of Christopher, was one of those who served in the famous expedition of Bartholomew Diaz in 1487, which, tempest-tossed and wholly at the mercy of the elements, unexpectedly doubled the “stormy cape,” later to be called with symbolic appropriateness the “Cape of Good Hope.” This, while Christopher drew maps and charts in Lisbon, was yet of the future; nor had ever-widening views on African discovery cast any light across the broad Atlantic, the “sea of darkness” as mariners named it, when, hugging the Portuguese and French shores, they journeyed northwards to England and the Baltic. According to a certain Arabian writer of mediæval times the ocean encircles the ultimate bounds of the inhabited earth, and all beyond it is unknown. No one has been able to verify anything concerning it, on account of its difficult and perilous navigation, its great obscurity, its profound depth and frequent tempests, through fear of its mighty fishes and its haughty winds. Yet imagination did not fail to fill in the blank left by lack of knowledge, and from the days of Plato, tradition had planted the Western Ocean with mysterious lands. Here, some maintained, the lost continent of Atlantis had sunk to rest, leaving on the surface of the water a sluggish mire impassable for ships; here, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, Ulysses had found his “Isles of the Blest,” the Irish Saint Brandan discovered an earthly Paradise, and Gothic bishops, flying before the Moors, built seven cities. Such tales stood on the ground of conjecture alone; but, where the mind is set on a project, conjecture will often assume a fictitious value. Columbus had decided, with that finality of purpose that is the hall-mark of genius, that he would sail to the west across the “sea of darkness”; and he gravely accepted all that would make his schemes less fearful in popular estimation. He himself had an underlying conviction that, the earth being round, a passage across its surface must be possible either from west to east or east to west. A study of the voyages of Marco Polo, the great Venetian traveller of the thirteenth century, had excited his fancy with its descriptions of the territories of the Great Khan and the island of Cipango, where gold and jewels, rich stuffs, spices, and perfumes, were the ordinary possession and barter of its inhabitants. To open up those lands of the Orient to easy commerce with Western Europe would be a task to bring the man who accomplished it not only wealth but that still more desirable reward, power.