He reached Aden, and from
there, travelling through the waters of the Persian Gulf which
few white men had seen since the days of Alexander the Great,
eighteen centuries before, he visited Goa and Calicut on the
coast of India where he got a great deal of news about the
island of the Moon (Madagascar) which was supposed to lie
halfway between Africa and India. Then he returned, paid
a secret visit to Mecca and to Medina, crossed the Red Sea
once more and in the year 1490 he discovered the realm of
Prester John, who was no one less than the Black Negus (or
King) of Abyssinia, whose ancestors had adopted Christianity
in the fourth century, seven hundred years before the Christian
missionaries had found their way to Scandinavia.
These many voyages had convinced the Portuguese geographers
and cartographers that while the voyage to the Indies
by an eastern sea-route was possible, it was by no means easy.
Then there arose a great debate. Some people wanted to continue
the explorations east of the Cape of Good Hope. Others
said, ``No, we must sail west across the Atlantic and then we
shall reach Cathay.''
Let us state right here that most intelligent people of that
day were firmly convinced that the earth was not as flat as a
pancake but was round. The Ptolemean system of the universe,
invented and duly described by Claudius Ptolemy, the great
Egyptian geographer, who had lived in the second century of
our era, which had served the simple needs of the men of the
Middle Ages, had long been discarded by the scientists of the
Renaissance.
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