part 11

100 But for another two thousand years most people went on thinking that the earth was flat like a large plate with the sun and stars journeying round it. How was the idea that the earth is not flat but round like a ball proved true in the end? Sailing men went out in their ships to find a way by water from Europe to India and China. Though some ships from the north of Europe had sailed west to parts of America in the tenth century, most of Europe had no knowledge of the land across the Atlantic. Men like Marco Polo had gone east to India and China, much of the way by land, long before Columbus, in 1492, went sailing west with the idea that he could get round to the Far East by water.

101 Christopher Columbus has gone down in history as the man who discovered America. He was looking for a way of getting to the East by sailing west. It was hard for him to get help for this journey. He was laughed at by most people when he said he could go this way to India because the earth was round. This is the sort of ship Columbus sailed in. He made use of a half-hour sand glass for measuring time at sea. Through all the long months the glasses on Columbus's three ships had to be turned every half-hour as the sand ran out.

102 People living in America were named Indians by Columbus because he thought he had got to India when he discovered America. He went back to Spain without knowing that he had found a new continent. He knew nothing of the life that had been going on in North and South America for thousands of years or of the two great peoples, the Aztecs and the Incas, who had been living there—the one in Mexico, the other in Peru—for centuries. It is now thought that in 1500 the population of the Americas was about 30 million, and that the first of these "Indians" had come from Asia themselves. There may have been a land bridge between Asia and Alaska across which they could have come.

103 Thirty years after Columbus discovered America, the ship of Magellan, a sailor of Portugal, was the first to make its way south of South America and on round the world through the Indian Ocean and past the Cape of Good Hope back to Europe. Magellan himself died on one of the Philippine Islands on April 27 (in) 1521. When a ship sailed out to the west and came back home from the east three years later people could see that the earth must be round. This proved that the earth was round. It was proof enough for most people.

104 But it was harder to take in the idea that the earth might be moving round the sun, as Copernicus of Poland, 1473–1543, said it was. Very few people had made any sense of the writings of Copernicus by the time he died in 1543, twenty-one years before Galileo and Shakespeare were born. Few people could read or write in those days. It was Galileo who made the first telescope, through which he could watch the stars and look into the ideas that Copernicus and others had been working upon. Through his telescope the stars seemed more than thirty times as near, and he could see not only the mountains of the moon but spots on the face of the sun, and the motion of the moons moving round the planet Jupiter.

105 Galileo could let people look through his telescope but he could not make most of them see the picture of the universe that was becoming clear in his mind. He could not do that any more than Copernicus had been able to do it. People's ideas were changing, but not as quickly as his. Galileo was put in prison for saying that the ideas written down by Ptolemy fifteen hundred years before did not make sense to him.