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Columbus, calm as usual, ordered the pilot to carry out an anchor astern. Instead of so doing, in his fright, he rowed off to the other caravel, about half a league to windward. Her commander instantly went to the assistance of his chief. The ship had meantime been drifting more and more on the reef, the shock having opened several of her seams.
The Santa Maria, which Columbus himself commanded, was the only one of the three that was decked throughout. The official persons and the crew on board her were sixteen in number. The two other vessels were of the class called caravels, and were decked fore and aft, but not amidships, the stem and the stern being built so as to rise high out of the water.
Poor men! already the strangers began to tear them from their country; it would not be long before they began to sell them! At last the caravels lost sight of San Salvador, and were again upon the wide ocean. Fortune had favoured Columbus in thus guiding him into the centre of one of the most beautiful archipelagos which the world contains.
Columbus likewise reduced Cuba into order, and took measures for its colonization, where he placed one Diego Velasques as his lieutenant, who had accompanied his father in his second voyage of discovery.
Strangely enough, too, no well-authenticated portrait of the great discoverer exists. Ferdinand Columbus, who would be a good authority, fails to give us, in describing his father, any of those little touches which make up a good literary photograph.
And it is quite possible that, long before even the civilisation that produced Columbus was in its dawn, men from the Old World had journeyed there. There are two very old fragments of knowledge which indicate at least the possibility of a Western World of which the ancients had knowledge.
It is possible that some motives may have also influenced Columbus kindred to this, a renewed crusade against Saracen infidels, which he might undertake from the wealth he was so confident of securing.
Time will dispose of your rivals. Just believe in yourself, and work and wait and dare and keep on working, waiting, daring. Never let up; and never doubt your ultimate success. Think of Columbus, Drake, Magellan the story of every master-mariner has in it food for your necessary egotism. Do not underestimate your strength. There are things you would like to do; very well, sail in and do them.
It was here that Columbus made his first landing, but in which of the islands I am not exactly certain; though I am very sure he did not find them quite so agreeable as I did, for he very soon quitted them, and steered away for St. Domingo.
Now ask yourself whether there could even be a Yankee if ideas like yours had occurred to Columbus?" This was beyond me; for I never could argue, and strove to the utmost not to do so. "You understand those things, and I do not," said I, with a smile, which pleased him. "My dear aunt Mary always says that you are the cleverest man in the world; and she must know most about it."
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