-tah.

III.

COLUMBUS, THE FINDER.

Columbus sailed from Palos, Spain, on Friday, August 3, 1492, at 8 A.
M., with one hundred and twenty Spaniards under his command. You know
how he and his brave comrade Pinzon held up the spirits of his weakening
crew; and how, on the morning of October 12, they sighted land at last.
It was not the mainland of America,--which Columbus never saw until
nearly eight years later,--but Watling's Island. The voyage had been the
longest west which man had yet made; and it was very characteristically
illustrative of the state of the world's knowledge then. When the
variations of the magnetic needle were noticed by the voyagers, they
decided that it was not the needle but the north star that varied.
Columbus was perhaps as well informed as any other geographer of his
day; but he came to the sober conclusion that the cause of certain
phenomena must be that he was sailing over _a bump on the globe_! This
was more strongly brought out in his subsequent voyage to the Orinoco,
when he detected even a worse earth-bump, and concluded that the world
must be pear-shaped! It is interesting to remember that but for an
accidental change of course, the voyagers would have struck the Gulf
Stream and been carried north,--in which case what is now the United
States would have become the first field of Spain's conquest.

The first white man who saw land in the New World was a common sailor
named Rodrigo de Triana, though Columbus himself had seen a light the
night before. Although it is probable--as you will see later on--that
Cabot saw the actual continent of America before Columbus (in 1497), it
was Columbus who found the New World, who took possession of it as its
ruler under Spain, and who even founded the first European colonies in
it,--building, and settling with forty-three men, a town which he named
La Navidad (the Nativity), on the island of San Domingo (Espanola, as he
called it), in December, 1492. Moreover, had it not been that Columbus
had already found the New World, Cabot never would have sailed.

The explorers cruised from island to island, finding many remarkable
things. In Cuba, which they reached October 26, they discovered tobacco,
which had never been known to civilization before, and the equally
unknown sweet potato. These two products, of the value of which no early
explorer dreamed, were to be far more important factors in the
money-markets and in the comforts of the world