8. Philippa's father had been one of Prince Henry's famous seamen and the governor of Porto Santo, one of the new-found islands; and after his marriage, Columbus lived sometimes at Porto Santo, sometimes at Lisbon, and much of the time on the sea. He sailed south along the African coast to Guinea; north he sailed to England, and farther on to Iceland. Wherever ships could go, there went he, intent on learning all there was to know of the world he lived in. He read eagerly all that was written about the earth's shape and size. The modern science of his time he well understood. He pored over the maps of the ancient geographer Ptolemy, over the maps of Cosmas, a later geographer, over Palestrello's charts, given him by Philippa's mother. 9. Ptolemy said the world is round, but Cosmas, whom good Christians were bound to believe, since he founded his science on the Bible, said it is flat, with a wall around it to hold up the sky--very probable, certainly. But that notion of the ancients that the world is "round like a ball" had been caught up and believed by a handful of men scattered sparsely down through the centuries, and of late lead gained, among advanced scientists, more of a following than ever. And Columbus, who, with all his enthusiasm for adventure and his reverence for religion and he church, had a clear, unbiased, scientific head, mentally turned his back upon Cosmas, and clasped hands with the ancients and the wisest scientists of his own day. 10. The north was known, the south was fast becoming so, the east had been penetrated, but the west was unexplored. Stretching along from Thule, the distant Iceland, to the southern part of the great African continent, thousands of miles, lay the "Sea of Darkness," as the people called it. What lay beyond? The question had been asked before, times enough; times enough answered for any reasonable man. "Hell was there," said one superstition, "Haven't you seen the flames at sunset-time?" "A sea thick like paste, in which no ships can sail," said another. "Darkness," said another, "thick darkness, the blackness of nothing, and the end of all created things!" 11. There _was_ a legend that over there beyond was Paradise, and St. Brandan, wandering about the seas, had reached it. The ancients told of an island Atlantis over there somewhere in the West, and one of them had said: "In the last days an age will come when ocean shall loose the chains of things; a wonderful country will be discovered, and Tiphis shall make known new worlds, nor shall Thule be the end of the earth."