By the closing years of the fifteenth century, not only were the mercantile classes of western Europe thoroughly awake to the possibilities of world trade, but a good number of other people were beginning to think for themselves about the world around them. If one could cross by land to China, which itself faced on the sea, there must be ways to reach that fabulous country by skirting the land masses of the world. In that manner the Portuguese had discovered an all-water route to India and Malaya. Or, was there the possibility of an even more direct passage to both China and the Indies by sailing straight west across the ocean? The ancients had said the world was a globe. Hundreds of years before Christ, Greek philosophers were sure the world was round. One of them, Eratosthenes, calculated the earth’s circumference to be 40,000 kilometers (amazingly enough today, within 9 kilometers of the meridional figure!) And Strabo, a geographer who lived in the first century, recorded that if it were not for lack of sailing equipment to negotiate the immensity of the Atlantic Ocean one could travel from Spain to India by keeping to the same parallel. Of course this did not agree with the teachings of the scriptures which spoke of the “four corners of the earth.” All during the dark ages ignorant clerics of the Church preferred to think of the world as a flat platter and pretended to forbid a contrary conception because it did not conform with the Bible. The low level of western culture had blindly accepted the thesis that the inner edges of this platter-like world were inhabited by monstrous creatures, and beyond the edges--a bottomless gulf! On such grounds most people of the western world still resisted any notion that the world was round. But there was a question in the minds of many. The Phoenicians, the Greeks and the Arabs had navigated the waters of the Atlantic--so had the Irish and the Vikings who long since discovered and colonized “islands” across the western sea--all without falling off the edges of the world. The Arabs, even now, were making the globes they had made for centuries for their sailors and traders. Many learned men in the west, geographers and scientists, were confident that the world was round; only recently at scholarly Nuremberg a fine globe had been completed showing Asia right across from Spain. If there were “islands” they could be skirted, large though some of them might be according to the legends and the sagas of ancient mariners. Christopher Columbus, the Genoese sailor, must have heard about these western islands at Iceland when he visited that old Irish-Norse settlement in 1477. Certainly he must have heard much about Greenland.