Besides, a Cape of Good Hope had no place in the geographic imaginings of that time.
The “Wealth of Ind” seemed far off, and beyond the reach of those whose cupidity had been so thoroughly aroused by the remarkable stories of Marco Polo.
Then Christopher Columbus, a college bred Genoese, who had been 1492, deeply stirred by the stories of Marco Polo, and who was filled with the spirit of adventure, evolved a great idea. He believed but the world to be round, thought it was much smaller than it is. He also thought the world stood motionless; but that didn’t matter so much. A round world was all that was necessary to his plan. He had studied with painstaking care the account given by Marco Polo of his journey to and from the Far East. It is known that Columbus possessed a printed copy of the Latin version of Polo’s book made by Pipino, and that on more than seventy pages of this book, there were notes in the handwriting of Columbus.
Columbus was a great cosmographer and an experienced navigator. He believed the world was round, and that the ocean Polo saw, looking eastward from India, was the Atlantic. It never occurred to him that there might be an entire continent, as yet undiscovered, lying between the westward coast of Europe and the eastern
