Christopher Columbus

His father ran a weaving business and expected Columbus to join him. But his son had other ideas. He meant to travel the world. When he was 14, he joined a merchant ship that carried goods to sell in ports all over Mediterranean. Columbus wanted to learn all he could about sea. When he wasn't scrambling up ropes or scrubbing decks, he was teaching himself to read and looking at great charts of the ocean. He experimented with using a compass and learned to plot the ship's position.