Porto Santo was on the edge of the Sea of Darkness and was full of the most terrible and mysterious tales concerning it. While a few learned men of the time began to think that the world was round, most of the sailors and even the scholars thought that it was flat and that by sailing westward on the Atlantic you would eventually fall off of the rim of the world. The west was also thought to be inhabited by fearful monsters. Sea serpents were there, of a size so great that they could easily crush a sailing vessel in their jaws; there were dragons and giant devil fish; in one place there was a burning belt, where the air was like molten flame and the sea a mass of fire; in another there lived evil spirits and demons, and a fate worse than death would befall any sailor that ventured there. If you sailed to the south, so the mariners believed, you would come to a land where the air was too hot to support life, while if you sailed to the north you would arrive at a clime so frigid that you would certainly freeze to death. The sailors believed these things because the air grew warmer as they ventured down the coast of Africa toward the equator, and colder when they sailed past England and the Scandinavian peninsula to the chill seas that border on the Arctic Circle.
While Columbus lived at Porto Santo, however, he heard other tales that interested him greatly and made him believe that the world was round and that all the legends of the Sea of Darkness were idle fancies--or at least that it would be possible to sail across this sea and come to the wonderful countries of India and China and Japan.
For the Governor of Porto Santo had told him of strange things that had been washed on shore when the wind had blown for many days from the west--of a cane so thick through that it would hold a gallon of wine, of a piece of wood carved in a manner that never had been seen before,--and once of a canoe, which had been made by hollowing out a giant tree, in which were the dead bodies of two strange men such as the European world had never seen,--yellow in color with flat, broad faces.
Columbus thought greatly about these things and studied again what little was known of the world's geography; and he became convinced that by sailing to the westward he would reach Japan and China, and determined to set out upon this marvelous and brave adventure.