88 CONCEPTIONS OF COLUMBUS 



continent, and he called it Novus Orbis or Mundus 

 Novus. He knew that the New World lay not in the 

 India of the Old World, but between it and the marts of 

 Europe. He himself had estimated a degree to contain 

 fifty-six and two-thirds miles, and he knew that he must 

 multiply this by three hundred and sixty to circum- 

 navigate the globe. He knew the distance to the ex- 

 tremity of India extra Gangem, as measured eastwardly 

 from the Canaries, on the map of Ptolemy, four editions 

 of whose geography were then already printed and com- 

 mon in the world, and he also knew the distance he had 

 travelled westwardly from the Canaries. He knew that 

 Marco Polo, with whose book he was familiar, since his 

 copy was annotated and marked on many a margin, told 

 of the coast lines of the lands of the Great Khan and of 

 the islands and of powerful peoples out in the China Sea. 

 If he knew all this, he knew that between the country 

 of the Great Khan and the shores of Europe lay great 

 continental lands, and that he — Christopher Columbus 

 — and none other was their discoverer. It is time 

 history erased from its pages that humiliating sentence, 

 "Columbus died believing, not that he had found a new 

 world, but that he had reached the shores of Asia." 



In making this statement, Thacher not only ignores 

 the fact that medieval geographers were not agreed 

 on the distance to the extremity of India extra Gan- 

 gem, but he rejects, apparently, a note of Columbus 

 that he himself has quoted. ^^ On the margin of his 

 copy of the ''Imago mundi," in the handwriting of 

 Columbus, we read:*^- "A fine Occidentis usque ad 



" Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 568, note 2. 



62 Raccolta, Part I, Vol. 2, p. 406, No. 486. 



