Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 7, 2025
At last the end came. On the second of January, 1492, the Moorish king gave up the keys of his beloved city, and the great Spanish banner was hoisted on the highest tower of the Alhambra the handsomest building in Granada and one of the most beautiful in the world. The Moors were driven out of Spain and Columbus's chance had come.
Columbus's little fleet, finding shelter denied them, had moved a little way along the coast, the Admiral standing close in shore, the others working to the south for sea-room; and although they survived the hurricane they were scattered, and only met several days later, in an extremely battered condition, at the westerly end of the island. But the large home-going fleet had not survived.
He said he held the fortress for the king by the command of the Admiral, and would not deliver it until he should arrive. Bobadilla, however, "assailed the portal;" that is to say, he broke open the gate. No one offered any opposition, and the commander and his first-lieutenant were taken prisoners. He went farther, taking up his residence in Columbus's house, and seizing his papers.
One can only assume that Columbus's pertinacity in petitioning the King and Queen to undertake the expedition, when he could with comparative ease have got the money from some of his noble acquaintance, was due to three things his faith and belief in his Idea, his personal ambition, and his personal greed.
As he still moved westerly the magnetic line was found to move farther and farther away from the pole as it had before the 13th approached it. To an observer of Columbus's quick perceptions, there was a ready guess to possess his mind.
Yet, in comparison with the times which our narrative has here reached, those of three decades earlier would seem almost as remote as Columbus's own, so swiftly did the wheels of progress turn. Everything declared that a new age had opened. In addition to the signs of this which have been set down in the preceding chapters, we have only space for the bare mention of a few others.
Had it succeeded, he would have undoubtedly been deprived of the credit which should have been his by right; since it failed, the venture was considered to have proved the fallacy of Columbus's theories.
When, a few years after his death, Balboa first saw the Pacific stretching far, far off to Asia, and when in another few years the whole globe had been circumnavigated, from Spain back again to Spain, only then did the vastness of Columbus's discovery begin to be appreciated.
The sailors said that on the shores of one of the islands two dead men of strange appearance had been washed in from the west. The sailors said they had picked up curiously-carved sticks drifting from the west. Pedro Correa himself, Columbus's brother-in-law, and a man to be trusted, had found one floating from the west.
Of late years the impression has generally been that the island thus discovered is that now known as Watling's island. In 1860 Admiral Fox, of the United States navy, visited all these islands, and studied the whole question anew, visiting the islands himself and working backwards to the account of Columbus's subsequent voyage, so as to fix the spot from which that voyage began.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking