Perhaps, he said, you can find all those splendid things that I know are in Cathay--the great cities with marble bridges, the houses of marble covered with gold, the jewels and the spices and the precious stones, and all the other wonderful and magnificent things.
I do not wonder you wish to try, he said, for if you find Cathay it will be a wonderful thing for you and for Portugal.
That settled it with Columbus.

If this wise old scholar said he was right, he must be right.

So he left his home in the Azores and went to Portugal.

This was in 1475, and from that time on, for seventeen long years he was trying to get some king or prince to help him sail to the West to find Cathay.
But not one of the people who could have helped him, if they had really wished to, believed in Columbus.

As I told you, they said that he was crazy.