Gerry Deaton, age 14, of Asheville. N:C., for her question:

Why did Columbus think the world was round?

There is a rumor that redheads are fiery people who make up their minds and stick to it. Of course, that does not always hold true because hair color has nothing whatever to do with character. Christopher Columbus, however, did nothing to disprove the old rumor about redheads, He was a redhead and when it came to his ideas he was just about the most mulish man who ever lived. It so happens that his ideas were good ones and fairly accurate. But Andy believes that Columbus would have stuck to them in any case,

Christoforo Columbo as he was baptized, believed that 'the world was round. The idea was not new.  It had been suggested that the world was a great big ball hundreds of years before, It was a pleasant subject to debate but no one took it very seriously. Certainly few people of Colombo's day believed it to be really so,

But Columbo lived at a time when people hoped and wished that the world was round. They had a reason. For 200 years the peoples of Europe had been trading with the peoples of China, India and Japan. The road to the Orient was overland, long, tiresome and full of hazards. If only there were a sea route they could carry far bigger loads with less danger. Columbo was sure there was a sea route to the Orient and he was determined to find it. The traders had been reaching the Orient by going east. If the world was round, then he could reach it by sailing westward.

His ideas began when he was still a young sailor. At 22 he was corresponding with an Italian scholar who shared his views., He read every travel book that came to hand. He especially studied the works of Marco Polo.. He studied old maps and charts and listened to rumors and the strange yarns; of returning sailors, He claimed to find some support for his theory in the Bible.

We cannot say that Columbo gave a full report on all he studied. He tended to skip over the parts that disagreed with him and accept only the parts that lent strength to his arguments. Sailors claimed to have found carved wood drifting from the west into the mid Atlantic. They also reported finding strange cane plants floating in the water. Two strange natives were said to have washed up from the west alive onto a mid‑Atlantic island, These were the items Columbo stressed in his arguments.

He also had his maps, pieced together from old sea charts, some of which he inherited from his sailor father‑in‑law. He tried to show that the world was round and that the vast land mass of Asia reached to but a few thousand miles off Europe across the Atlantic. He was right about the world being round; of course. But he underestimated its size and he never imagined that there was the continent of America stretched down the watery wastes between Europe and Asia. These facts he was never to learn. He died believing that he had reached the orient by sailing west from Europe.