est Indies.

The _third_ and last motive by which the admiral was incited to the
discovery of the West Indies, was the hope of finding in his way to India
some very beneficial island or continent, from whence he might the better
be enabled to pursue his main design. This hope was founded upon the
authority and opinion of many wise and learned men, who believed that the
greatest part of the surface of the terraqueous globe was composed of land,
or that there certainly was more earth than sea. If that were the case, he
concluded that, between the coast of Spain and the then known bounds of
India, there must be many islands and a great extent of continent
interposed, which experience has since demonstrated to be true. In this
opinion he was confirmed by many fabulous stories which he had heard from
sailors and others who had sailed to the islands and western coast of
Africa, and to Madeira; and as these testimonies, though false, tended to
confirm the purpose he had so long and ardently cherished, they the more
readily gained his assent; and, to satisfy the curiosity of such as are
curious in these matters, I shall here relate them.

One Martin Vicente, a pilot in the service of the king of Portugal,
related to the admiral, that, being once 450 leagues to the westward of
Cape St Vincent, he had found a piece of wood most curiously curved, but
not with iron; and seeing that the winds had blown for many days
previously from the west, he conjectured that the carved wood must have
been drifted from some island in that direction. One Peter Correa, who had
married a sister of the admirals wife, told him of having seen another
piece of wood which had been brought to the island of Porto Sancto by the
same westerly wind, and of certain drifted canes, so thick that every
joint was large enough to contain four quarts of wine. These he alleged to
have shewn to the king of Portugal, and as there were no such canes in our
parts of the world, he believed that the winds must have wafted them from
some distant islands in the west, or else from India: More especially as
Ptolemy, in the first book of his cosmography, and chapter 17. says, that
such canes grow in the eastern parts of India; and some of the islanders,
particularly those in the Azores, informed Correa that when the west wind
blew long together, the sea sometimes drove pine trees on the islands
Gratioso and Fayal, where no such trees were otherwise to be found. He was
likewise t