THE BOOK OF
EXPLORERS
Columbus gets the ball rolling
Chapter 9
And so it happened that the first Explorer who discovered something really important was jColumbus,
2Who was an Italian,
3And therefore sailed west into the kAtlantic,
4Under the flag of lSpain,
5mWhich is how history works sometimes,
6nAnd explains why life is so confusing,
7oAnd so often seems like some big accident,
8pWhich is exactly how Columbus discovered America.
9It turned out that Columbus had been trying to discover a shorter route to qIndia,
10Where they keep all the rsalt and pepper and other spices,
11sBecause he thought that the earth wasn’t flat,
12But round,
13Like an orange,
14Which meant that he could get to the east by going west.t
15As it happened, Columbus was mostly right.
16The earth was round,
17Though not like an orange,
18As much as, say, a basketball,
19Which is to say that it was bigger than he thought,
20Big enough, in fact, to have a couple of other continents on it that nobody had known about.
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Chapter 9 / 17