Our familiarity with maps and atlases makes it difficult for us to think of the world in other terms than those of map and diagram; knowledge and science have focussed things for us, and our imagination has in consequence shrunk.  It is almost impossible, when thinking of the earth as a whole, to think about it except as a picture drawn, or as a small globe with maps traced upon it.  I am sure that our imagination has a far narrower angle—­to borrow a term from the science of lenses—­than the imagination of men who lived in the fifteenth century.  They thought of the world in its actual terms—­seas, islands, continents, gulfs, rivers, oceans.  Columbus had seen maps and charts—­among them the famous ‘portolani’ of Benincasa at Genoa; but I think it unlikely that he was so familiar with them as to have adopted their terms in his thoughts about the earth.  He had seen the Mediterranean and sailed upon it before he had seen a chart of it; he knew a good deal of the world itself before he had seen a map of it.  He had more knowledge of the actual earth and sea than he had of pictures or drawings of them; and therefore, if we are to keep in sympathetic touch with him, we must not think too closely of maps, but of land and sea themselves.

The world that Columbus had heard about as being within the knowledge of men extended on the north to Iceland and Scandinavia, on the south to a cape one hundred miles south of the Equator, and to the east as far as China and Japan.  North and South were not important to the spirit of that time; it was East and West that men thought of when they thought of the expansion and the discovery of the world.  And although they admitted that the earth was a sphere, I think it likely that they imagined (although the imagination was contrary to their knowledge) that the line of West and East was far longer, and full of vaster possibilities, than that of North and South.  North was familiar ground to them—­one voyage to England, another to Iceland, another to Scandinavia; there was nothing impossible about that.  Southward was another matter; but even here there was no ambition to discover the limit of the world.  It is an error continually made by the biographers of Columbus that the purpose of Prince Henry’s explorations down the coast of Africa was to find a sea road to the West Indies by way of the East.  It was nothing of the kind.  There was no idea in the minds of the Portuguese of the land which Columbus discovered, and which we now know as the West Indies.  Mr. Vignaud contends that the confusion arose from the very loose way in which the term India was applied in the Middle Ages.  Several Indias were recognised.  There was an India beyond the Ganges; a Middle India between the Ganges and the Indus; and a Lesser India, in which were included Arabia, Abyssinia, and the countries about the Red Sea.  These divisions were, however, quite vague, and varied in different periods.  In the time of Columbus the word India