ther Indians he had visited. The cacique and his people,
too, were dressed in clothes and had sharp swords and spears. He thought
of the great galleys of Venice and Genoa; he remembered the stories that
had come to him of the people of Cathay; he believed that, at last, he
had come to the right place. The shores ahead of him were, he was sure,
the coasts of the Cathay he was hunting for, and these people in "the
galley of the cacique" were much nearer the kind of people he was
expecting to meet than were the poor naked Indians of Hayti and Cuba.

In a certain way he was right. These people in the big canoe were,
probably, some of the trading Indians of Yucatan, and beyond them, in
what we know to-day as Mexico, was a race of Indians, known as Aztecs,
who were what is called half-civilized; for they had cities and temples
and stone houses and almost as much gold and treasure as Columbus hoped
to find in his fairyland of Cathay. But Columbus was not to find Mexico.
Another daring and cruel Spanish captain, named Cortez, discovered the
land, conquered it for Spain, stripped it of its gold and treasure, and
killed or enslaved its brave and intelligent people.

After meeting this canoe, Columbus steered for the distant shore. He
coasted up and down looking for a good harbor, and on the seventeenth of
August, 1502, he landed as has been told you, near what is now the town
of Truxillo, in Honduras. There, setting up the banner of Castile, he
took possession of the country in the name of the king and queen of
Spain.

For the first time in his life Columbus stood on the real soil of the
New World. All the islands he had before discovered and colonized were
but outlying pieces of America. Now he was really upon the American
Continent.

But he did not know it. To him it was but a part of Asia. And as the
main purpose of this fourth voyage was to find a way to sail straight to
India--which he supposed lay somewhere to the south--he set off on his
search. The Indians told him of "a narrow place" that he could find by
sailing farther south, and of a "great water." beyond it. This "narrow
place" was the Isthmus of Panama, and the "great water" beyond it was,
of course, the Pacific Ocean. But Columbus thought that by a "narrow
place" they meant a strait instead of an isthmus. If he could but find
that strait, he could sail through it into the great Bay of Bengal
which, as you know and as he had heard, washes the eastern shore of
In