Speaking of his navigation during the third voyage, he tells us that “at the end of these eight days it pleased our Lord to give me a favourable east wind, and I steered to the west, but did not venture to move lower down towards the south, because I discovered a very great change in the sky and stars.... I resolved, therefore, to keep on the direct westward course in a line from Sierra Leone, and not to change it until I reached the point where I had thought I should find land.” On the return journey he writes: “As to the Polar Star, I watched it with great wonder, and devoted many nights to a careful examination of it with the quadrant, and I always found that the lead and line fell to the same point!” And as he sailed he wondered in his mind. Where never a ship, never a man had voyaged before Columbus had gone. What, after all, was the shape of this earth? “I have always read,” he says, “that the world comprising the land and water was spherical, and the recorded experiences of Ptolemy and all others have proved this by the eclipses of the moon, and other observations made from east to west, as well as by the elevation of the pole from north to south. But ... I have come to another conclusion ... namely, that it is not round as they describe, but of the form of a pear.” [Illustration: THREE-MASTED FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CARAVEL. Drawn from a woodcut after a delineation by Columbus in the Latin translation of his letter dated March 1, 1493, to Don Raphael de Sanxis (Treasurer of the King of Spain), in the Library at Milano.] [Illustration: SIXTEENTH-CENTURY CARAVEL AT SEA. After the woodcut of Hansen Burgmair, in the History of Emperor Maximilian the First, compiled by Marx Freithsauerwein in the year 1514.]