World's Fair, and was in honor of a wonderful event that took place four hundred years before.
Some of you may think that white men have always lived in this country. I hope you do not all think so, for this is not the case. A little more than four hundred years ago no white man had ever seen this country, and none knew that there was such a country on the face of the earth.
It was in the year 1492, that a daring sailor, named Christopher Columbus, crossed a wide ocean and came to this new and wonderful land. Since then men have come here by the millions, and the mighty nation of the United States has grown up with its hundreds of towns and cities. In one of these, which bears the name of Chicago, the grand Columbian World's Fair was held, in honor of the finding of America by the great navigator four hundred years before.
This is what I have set out to tell you about. I am sure you will all be glad to know how this broad and noble land, once the home of the wild red men, was found and made a home for the white people of Europe.
Some of you may have been told that America was really discovered more than four hundred years before Columbus was born. So it was. At that time some of the bold sailors of the northern countries of Europe, who made the stormy ocean their home, and loved the roll of the waves, had come to the frozen island of Iceland. And a ship from Iceland had been driven by the winds to a land in the far west which no man had ever seen before. Was this not America?
Soon after, in the year 1000, one of these Northmen, named Leif Ericson, also known as Leif the Lucky, set sail for this new land. There he found wild grapes growing, and from them he named it Vinland. This in our language would be called Wineland.
After him came others, and there was fighting with the red men, whom they called Skrellings. In the end the Northmen left the country, and before many years all was forgotten about it. Only lately the story has been found again in some old writings. And so time went on for nearly five hundred years more, and nothing was known in Europe about the land beyond the seas.
Now let us go from the north to the south of Europe. Here there is a kingdom called Italy, which runs down into the Mediterranean Sea almost in the shape of a boot. On the western shore of this kingdom is a famous old city named Genoa, in which many daring sailors have dwelt; and here, long ago, lived a man named Columbus, a poor man, who made his living by carding wool.
This poor wool-carder had four children, one of whom (born about 1436) he named Christopher. Almost everybody who has been at school in the world knows the name of this little Italian boy, for he became one of the most famous of men.
Many a boy in our times has to help his father in his shop. The great Benjamin Franklin began work by pouring melted tallow into moulds to make candles. In the same way little Columbus had to comb wool for his father, and very likely he got as tired of wool as Franklin did of candles.
The city he lived in was full of sailors, and no doubt he talked to many of them about life on the wild waters, and heard so many stories of danger and adventure that he took the fancy to go to sea himself.
At any rate we are told that he became a sailor when only fourteen years old, and made long and daring voyages while he was still young. Some of those were in Portuguese ships down the coast of Africa, of which continent very little was known at that time. He went north, too; some think as far as Iceland. Who knows but that he was told there of what the Northmen had done?
Columbus spent some time in the island of Madeira, far out in the Atlantic ocean, and there the people told him of strange things they had seen. These had come over the seas before the west winds and floated on their island shores. Among them were pieces of carved wood, and canes so long that they would hold four quarts of wine between their joints. And the dead bodies of two men had also come ashore, whose skins were the color of bronze or copper.
These stories set Columbus thinking. He was now a man, and had read many books of travel, and had studied all that was then known of geography. For a time he lived by making maps and charts for ship captains. This was in the city of Lisbon, in Portugal, where he married and settled down and had little boys of his own.
At that time some of the most learned people had odd notions about the earth. You may have seen globes as round as an orange, with the countries laid out on them. But the people then had never seen such a globe, and the most of them thought that the earth was as flat as a table, and that any one who sailed too far over the ocean would come to the edge of the earth and fall off.
This seems very absurd, does it not? But you must remember that people then knew very little about the earth they lived on, and could not understand how people could keep on a round globe like flies on a ball of glass.
But there were some who thought the earth to be round, and Columbus was one of these.
At that time silk and spices and other rich goods were brought from China and India, thousands of miles to the east, by caravans that traveled overland. Columbus thought that by sailing west, over the broad Atlantic, he would come to these far countries, just as a fly may walk around the surface of an orange, and come to the place it started from.
The more Columbus thought about this, the more certain he became that he was right. He was so sure of it that he set out to try and make other people think the same way. He wanted ships with which to sail across the unknown seas to the west, but he had no money of his own to buy them with.
Ah! what a task poor Columbus now had. For years and years he wandered about among the kings and princes of Europe, but no one would believe his story, and many laughed at him and mocked him.
First he tried Genoa, the city where he was born, but the people there told him he was a fool or had lost his senses.
Then he went to the king of Portugal. This king was a rascal, and tried to cheat him. He got his plans from him, and sent out a vessel in secret, hoping to get the honor of the discovery for himself. But the captain he sent was a coward and was scared by the rolling waves. He soon came back, and told the king that there was nothing to be found but water and storm. King John, of Portugal, was very sorry afterward that he had tried to rob Columbus of his honor.
Columbus was very angry when he heard what the king had done. He left Portugal for Spain, and tried to get the king and queen of that country to let him have ships and sailors. But they were at war with a people called the Moors, and had no money to spare for anything but fighting and killing.
Columbus stayed there for seven long years. He talked to the wise men, but they made sport of him. "If the earth is round," they said, "and you sail west, your ships will go down hill, and they will have to sail up hill to come back. No ship that was ever made can do that. And you may come to places where the waters boil with the great heat of the sun; and frightful monsters may rise out of the sea and swallow your ships and your men." Even the boys in the street got to laughing at him and mocking him as a man who had lost his wits.
After these many years Columbus got tired of trying in Spain. He now set out for France, to see what the king of that country would do. He sent one of his brothers to England to see its king and ask him for aid.
He was now so poor that he had to travel along the dusty roads on foot, his little son going with him. One day he stopped at a convent called La Rabida, to beg some bread for his son, who was very hungry.
The good monks gave bread to the boy, and while he was eating it the prior of the convent came out and talked with Columbus, asking him his business. Columbus told him his story. He told it so well that the prior believed in it. He asked him to stay there with his son, and said he would write to Isabella, the queen of Spain, whom he knew very well.
So
