ninety men, sailed out from Palos on the grandest voyage the world has ever known.
The shore was lined with people weeping and wringing their hands for the relatives and friends whom they were sure they should never see again, and most of the sailors were certain that they were bidding farewell forever to their native land. Even at the present day, few men would care to undertake such a voyage in such ships. The two little caravels, Niña and Pinta, were decked only at stern and prow. The Santa Maria was but little larger, her length being only about sixty feet, and all three of the vessels were old, leaky, and in need of frequent repairs.
The map which Toscanelli had given Columbus years before showed Japan lying directly west of the Canaries, so to the Canaries Columbus steered his fleet, and then set forth westward into the unknown. By a fortunate chance, it was the very best route he could have chosen, for he came at once into the region of the trade winds, which, blowing steadily from the east, drove the vessels westward day after day over a smooth sea. But this very thing, favorable as it was, added greatly to the terror of the men. How were they to get back to Spain, with the wind always against them? What was the meaning of a sea as smooth as their own Guadalquiver? They implored Columbus to turn back; but to turn back was the last thing in his thoughts. An opportune storm helped to reassure his men by proving that the wind did not always blow from the east and that the sea was not always calm.
But there were soon other causes of alarm. The compass varied strangely, and what hope for them was there if this, their only guide, proved faithless? They ran into vast meadows of floating seaweed, the Sargasso Sea, and it seemed certain that the ships would soon be so entangled that they could move neither backward nor forward. Still Columbus pushed steadily on, and his men's terror and angry discontent deepened until they were on the verge of mutiny; various plots were hatched and it was evident that affairs would soon reach a crisis.
One can guess the Admiral's thoughts as he paced the poop of his ship on that last night, pausing from time to time to strain his eyes into the darkness. Picture him to yourself—a tall and imposing figure, clad in that gray habit of the Franciscan missionary he liked to wear; the face stern and lined with care, the eyes gray and piercing, the high nose and long chin telling of a mighty will, the cheeks ruddy and freckled from life in the open, the white hair falling about his shoulders. Picture him standing there, a memorable figure, whose hour of triumph was at hand. He knew the desperate condition of things—none better; he knew that his men were for the most part criminals and cowards; at any moment they might rise and make him prisoner or throw him overboard. Well, until that moment, he would hold his ship's prow to the west! For twenty years he had labored to get this chance; he would rather die than fail.
And then, suddenly, far ahead, he saw a light moving low along the horizon. It disappeared, reappeared, and then vanished altogether. The lookout had also seen it, and soon after, as the moon rose, a gun from the Pinta, which was in the lead, announced that land had been sighted. It was soon plainly visible to everyone, a low beach gleaming white in the moonlight, and the ships hove-to until daybreak.
In the early dawn of the twelfth day of October, 1492, the boats were lowered, and Columbus and a large part of his company went ashore, wild with exultation. They found themselves on a small island, and Columbus named it San Salvador. It was one of the Bahamas, but which one is not certainly known. Columbus, of course, believed himself near the coast of Asia, and spent two months in searching for Japan, discovering a number of islands, but no trace of the land of gold and spices which he sought. One of his ships was wrecked and the captain of the third sailed away to search for gold on his own account, so that it was in the little Niña alone that Columbus at last set sail for Spain.
It was no longer a summer sea through which the tiny vessel ploughed her way, but a sea swept by savage hurricanes. More than once it seemed that the ship must founder, but by some miracle it kept afloat, and on March 15, 1493, sailed again into the port of Palos. The great navigator was received with triumphal honors by Ferdinand and Isabella, and invited to sit in their presence while he told the wonderful story of his discoveries.
Wonderful indeed! Yet what a dizziness would have seized that audience could they have guessed the truth! Could they have guessed that the proud kingdom of Spain was but an insignificant patch compared with the vast continent Columbus had discovered and upon which a score of nations were to dwell.
The life-work of the great navigator practically ended on the day he told his story to the court of Spain, for, though he led three other expeditions across the ocean, the discoveries they made were of no great importance. Not a trace did he find of that golden country, which he sought so eagerly, and at last, broken in health and fortune, in disfavor at court, stripped of the rewards and dignities which had been promised him, he died in a little house at Valladolid on the twentieth of May, 1506. He believed to the last that it was the Indies he had discovered, never dreaming that he had given a new continent to the world.
Yet is his fame secure, for the task which he accomplished was unique, never to be repeated. He had robbed the Sea of Darkness of its terrors, and while those who followed him had need of courage and resolution, it was no longer into the unknown that they sailed forth. They knew that there was no danger of sailing over the edge and dropping off into space; they knew that there were no dragons, nor monsters, nor other blood-curdling terrors to be encountered, but that the other side of the world was much like the side they lived on. That was Columbus's great achievement. To cross the Atlantic, perilous as the voyage was, was after all a little thing; but actually to start—to surmount the wall of bigotry and ignorance which, for centuries, had shut the west away from the east, to surmount that wall and throw it down by a faith which rose superior to human belief and incredulity and terror of the unknown—there was the miracle!
Many there were to follow, each contributing his mite toward the task of defining the new continent. Perhaps you have seen a photographic negative slowly take shape in the acid bath—the sharp out-lines first, then, bit by bit, the detail. Just so did America grow beneath the gaze of Europe, though two centuries and more were to elapse before it stood out upon the map clean-cut and definite from border to border.
First to follow Columbus, and the first white men since the vikings to set foot on the North American continent, which Columbus himself had never seen, were John and Sebastian Cabot, Italians like their predecessor, but in the service of the King of England and with an English ship and an English crew prophetic of the race which was, in time, to wrest the supremacy of the continent from the other nations of Europe. They explored the coast from Newfoundland as far south, perhaps, as Chesapeake Bay, and upon their discoveries rested the English claim to North America, though they themselves are little more than faint and ill-defined shadows upon the page of history, so little do we know of them.
And just as the New World was eventually to be dominated by a nation other than that which first took possession of it, so was it to be named after a man other than its discoverer: an inconsiderable adventurer named Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine, who accompanied three or four Spanish expeditions as astronomer or pilot, but who had no part in any real discovery in the New World. He wrote a number of letters describing the voyages which he claimed to have made, and one of these was printed in a pamphlet which had a wide circulation, so that Vespucci's name came to be connected in the public mind with the new land in the west much more prominently than that of any other man. In 1502, in a little book dealing with the new discoveries, the suggestion was made that there was nothing "rightly to hinder us from calling it [the New World] Amerige or America, i.e., the land of Americus," and America it was thenceforward—one of the great injustices of history. Since it had to be so, let us be thankful that it was Vespucci's first name which was selected, and not his last one.
Meanwhile, the Spaniards had pushed their way across the Caribbean and explored the shores of the gulf, finding at last in Mexico a land
