much use, however, and slavery was started in the new world.
And from that act of Columbus came much sorrow and trouble for the land
he found. Even the great war between the northern and southern sections
of our own United States, upon one side or the other of which your
fathers, or your grandfathers perhaps, fought with gun and sword, was
brought about by this act of the great Admiral Columbus hundreds of
years before.

So the twelve ships sailed back to Spain, and Columbus, with his five
remaining ships, his soldiers and his colonists, remained in the new
city of Isabella to keep up the hunt for gold or to become farmers in
the new world.

CHAPTER IX. HOW THE TROUBLES OF THE ADMIRAL BEGAN.

Both the farmers and the gold hunters had a hard time of it in the land
they had come to so hopefully. The farmers did not like to farm when
they thought they could do so much better at gold hunting; the gold
hunters found that it was the hardest kind of work to get from the water
or pick from the rocks the yellow metal they were so anxious to obtain.

Columbus himself was not satisfied with the small amount of gold he got
from the streams and mines of Hayti; he was tired of the wrangling and
grumbling of his men. So, one day, he hoisted sail on his five ships
and started away on a hunt for richer gold mines, or, perhaps, for those
wonderful cities of Cathay he was still determined to find.

He sailed to the south and discovered the island of Jamaica. Then he
coasted along the shores of Cuba. The great island stretched away so
many miles that Columbus was certain it was the mainland of Asia. There
was some excuse for this mistake. The great number of small islands he
had sailed by all seemed to lie just as the books about Cathay that
he had read said they did; the trees and fruits that he found in these
islands seemed to be just the same that travelers said grew in Cathay.

To be sure the marble temples, the golden-roofed palaces, the gorgeous
cities had not yet appeared; but Columbus was so certain that he had
found Asia that he made all his men sign a paper in which they declared
that the land they had found (which was, as you know, the island of
Cuba) was really and truly the coast of Asia.

This did not make it so, of course; but it made the people of Spain, and
the king and queen, think it was so. And this was most important. So,
to keep the sailors from going back on their word and the statement they
had signed, C