nd and more
courtiers who have left the presence of the king and queen in the hope
of personal advancement or of romantic adventure. Those dainty people,
who would have been soldiers if there were no gunpowder, are not men to
found states; and the men who have lived in the ante-chambers of courts
are not people who co-operate sympathetically with an experienced man of
affairs like Columbus.

From this time forward this is to be but a sad history, and the sadness,
nay, the cruelty of the story, results largely from the composition of
the body of men whom Columbus took with him on this occasion. It is
no longer coopers and blacksmiths and boatswains and sailmakers who
surround him. These were officers of court, whose titles even cannot be
translated into modern language, so artificial were their habits and so
conventional the duties to which they had been accustomed. Such men it
was, who made poor Columbus endless trouble. Such men it was, who, at
the last, dragged him down from his noble position, so that he died
unhonored, dispirited and poor. To the same misfortune, probably, do we
owe it that, for a history of this voyage, we have no longer authority
so charming as the simple, gossipy journal which Columbus kept through
the first voyage, of which the greater part has happily been preserved.
It may be that he was too much pressed by his varied duties to keep up
such a journal. For it is alas! an unfortunate condition of human life,
that men are most apt to write journals when they have nothing to tell,
and that in the midst of high activity, the record of that activity is
not made by the actor. In the present case, a certain Doctor Chanca, a
native of Seville, had been taken on board Columbus's ship, perhaps with
the wish that he should be the historian of the expedition. It may be
that in the fact that his journal was sent home is the reason why the
Admiral's, if he kept one, has never been preserved. Doctor Chanca's
narrative is our principal contemporary account of the voyage. From
later authorities much can be added to it, but all of them put
together are not, for the purposes of history, equal to the simple
contemporaneous statement which we could have had, had Columbus's own
journal been preserved.

The great fleet sailed from Cadiz on the twenty-fifth day of September,
in the year 1493, rather more than thirteen months after the sailing
of the little fleet from Palos of the year before. They touched at the
Gra