TO THE INDIES WESTWARD--THE SPANISH ROUTE--COLUMBUS AND MAGELLAN While the Portuguese had, with slow persistency, devoted nearly a century to carrying out Prince Henry's idea of reaching the Indies by the eastward route, a bold yet simple idea had seized upon a Genoese sailor, which was intended to achieve the same purpose by sailing westward.

The ancients, as we have seen, had recognised the rotundity of the earth, and Eratosthenes had even recognised the possibility of reaching India by sailing westward.

Certain traditions of the Greeks and the Irish had placed mysterious islands far out to the west in the Atlantic, and the great philosopher Plato had imagined a country named Atlantis, far out in the Indian Ocean, where men were provided with all the gifts of nature.

These views of the ancients came once more to the attention of the learned, owing to the invention of printing and the revival of learning, when the Greek masterpieces began to be made accessible in Latin, chiefly by fugitive Greeks from Constantinople, which had been taken by the Turks in 1453.

Ptolemy's geography was printed at Rome in 1462, and with maps in 1478.