6 FOUNDERS OF OCEANOGRAPHY 



pleted the circuit of Africa and reached India by the Cape. 

 Columbus, seeking the treasures of the East, landed on the 

 Antilles in the New World in October, 1492, and believed he 

 had reached Asia, from which he was now farther off than 

 when he left Spain. He is said to have had with him on his 

 first voyage the map of the learned Florentine, Toscanelli ^ 

 (1474), which shows Japan and other islands off the coast 

 of Cathay in the position really occupied by the North 

 American continent. A century later, the map of the world 

 according toOrtelius (1570) shows in contrast the enormous 

 changes in knowledge of land and sea effected by these 

 and other exploring voyages of the late fifteenth and early 

 sixteenth centuries. 



Magellan, finally, sailed from Spain with five ships in 

 September, 1519, passed through the straits that bear 

 his name in November, 1520, crossed the Pacific, and, 

 although he and some of his companions were killed by the 

 natives of Zebu in the Philippines in April, 1521, the sur- 

 vivors of his expedition reached Spain in their one remaining 

 ship the following year (September 1522), having circum- 

 navigated the globe in three years — in which enterprise he 

 was followed by our English circumnavigator, Sir Francis 

 Drake, who rounded Cape Horn fifty- seven years later. In 

 his passage through the Pacific, Magellan attempted to 

 determine the depth, and failing to reach bottom with the 

 ship's sounding lines of a few hundred fathoms, concluded 

 that he had reached the deepest part of the ocean. As a 

 matter of fact, the depth at that spot is about 2,000 fathoms, 

 or nearly three English miles. This is supposed to be the 

 first attempt at sounding in the open sea, and no further 

 attempt is recorded for centuries after. 



As Sir John Murray points out : " The memorable dis- 



^ This is disputed by H. Vignaud {Toscanelli and Columbus, 

 London, 1902), who declares that the ToscaneUi map is a forgery, 

 and that Columbus really got his sailing directions from an obscure 

 pilot he met at Madeira about 1484. 



