[Sidenote: Sailing directions from the Crown.]
The directions of the Crown also provided that Columbus should avoid the Guinea coast and all other possessions of the Portuguese, which seems to be little more than a striking manifestation of a certain kind of incredulity respecting what Columbus, after all, meant by sailing west. Indeed, there was necessarily more or less vagueness in everybody's mind as to what a western passage would reveal, or how far a westerly course might of necessity be swung one way or the other.
The _Historie_ tells us distinctly that Columbus hoped to find some intermediate land before reaching India, to be used, as the modern phrase goes, as a sort of base of operations. This hope rested on the belief, then common, that there was more land than sea on the earth, and consequently that no wide stretch of ocean could exist without interlying lands.
There was, moreover, no confidence that such things as floating islands might not be encountered. Pliny and Seneca had described them, and Columbus was inclined to believe that St. Brandan and the Seven Cities, and such isles as the dwellers at the Azores had claimed to see in the offing, might be of this character.
There seems, in fact, to be ground for believing that Columbus thought his course to the Asiatic shores could hardly fail to bring him in view of other regions or islands lying in the western ocean. Muñoz holds that "the glory of such discoveries inflamed him still more, perhaps, than his chief design."
That a vast archipelago would, be the first land encountered was not without confident believers. The Catalan map of 1374 had shown such islands in vast numbers, amounting to 7,548 in all; Marco Polo had made them 12,700, or was thought to do so; and Behaim was yet to cite the latter on his globe.
It was, indeed, at this very season that Behaim, having returned from Lisbon to his home in Nuremberg, had imparted to the burghers of that inland town those great cosmographical conceptions, which he was accustomed to hear discussed in the Atlantic seaports. Such views were exemplified in a large globe which Behaim had spent the summer in constructing in Nuremberg. It was made of pasteboard covered with parchment, and is twenty-one inches in diameter.