d leaky. It was
suspected that the owners, from whom she had been forcibly taken, had
intentionally disabled her, or that possibly the crew had injured her.
But Columbus says in his journal that Martin Alonso Pinzon, captain of
the Pinta, was a man of capacity and courage, and that this quieted
his apprehensions. From the ninth of August to the second of September,
nearly four weeks were spent by the Pinta and her crew at the Grand
Canary island, and she was repaired. She proved afterwards a serviceable
vessel, the fastest of the fleet. At the Canaries they heard stories of
lands seen to the westward, to which Columbus refers in his journal. On
the sixth of September they sailed from Gomera and on the eighth they
lost sight of land. Nor did they see land again for thirty-three days.
Such was the length of the great voyage. All the time, most naturally,
they were wishing for signs, not of land perhaps, but which might show
whether this great ocean were really different from other seas. On the
whole the voyage was not a dangerous one.

According to the Admiral's reckoning--and in his own journal Columbus
always calls himself the Admiral--its length was one thousand and
eighty-nine leagues. This was not far from right, the real distance
being, in a direct line, three thousand one hundred and forty nautical
miles, or three thousand six hundred and twenty statute miles.(*) It
would not be considered a very long voyage for small vessels now. In
general the course was west. Sometimes, for special reasons, they sailed
south of west. If they had sailed precisely west they would have struck
the shore of the United States a little north of the spot where St.
Augustine now is, about the northern line of Florida.

(*) The computations from Santa Cruz, in the Canaries, to
San Salvador give this result, as kindly made for us by
Lieutenant Mozer, of the United States navy.

Had the coast of Asia been, indeed, as near as Toscanelli and Columbus
supposed, this latitude of the Canary islands would have been quite near
the mouth of the Yang-tse-Kiang river, in China, which was what Columbus
was seeking. For nearly a generation afterwards he and his followers
supposed that the coast of that region was what they had found.

It was on Saturday, the eighth of September, that they lost sight of
Teneriffe. On the eleventh they saw a large piece of the mast of a ship
afloat. On the fourteenth they saw a "tropic-bird," which the