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Updated: June 24, 2025
He told of the struggle to cross the Guinea Deep instead of hugging the shore; of blue idle days of calm when magic fish flew aboard and Leviathan wallowed so near that the caravels were all but overwhelmed by the wave of him; of a storm which swept the decks and washed away the Virgin on the bows of the Admiral's ship; of landfall at last in a place where the forests were knee deep in a muddy sea, strange forests where the branches twined like snakes; of a going ashore at a river mouth full of toothed serpents and giant apes, and of a fight with Behemoth among the reeds.
I was a wee bit impatient after we had made our landfall, while the old Sonoma poked her way along. But she would not be hurried by my impatience. And at last we came to the Sydney Heads the famous Harbor Heads. If you have never seen it I do not know how better to tell you of it than to say that it makes me think of the entrance to a great cave that has no roof.
The evidence of this letter seems to show that the mainland of North America was really first discovered by Cabot. The discussion, however, does not in the least detract from the merit due to Columbus for the great discovery. Whether he saw an island or whether he saw the mainland, was a mere matter of what has been called landfall by the seamen.
Later, off Capri, he asked: "When you advised me to let George make a test case of it, to which of our fellow passengers did you refer?" In the morning the Adriaticus picked up the landfall of Messina, but, instead of making fast to the quay, anchored her length from it. This appeared to be a port regulation.
Ever since the sun rose I had been looking ahead. The ship glided gently in smooth water. After a sixty days' passage I was anxious to make my landfall, a fertile and beautiful island of the tropics. The more enthusiastic of its inhabitants delight in describing it as the "Pearl of the Ocean." Well, let us call it the "Pearl." It's a good name. A pearl distilling much sweetness upon the world.
It seems, moreover, on a cursory consideration of the maps, probable that a vessel on a westerly course passing south of Ireland should strike somewhere on the coast of Newfoundland about Cape Bonavista, and, Cabot being an Italian, that very place suggests itself by its name as his probable landfall.
Here we left the men to make camp, and ourselves climbed a big mountain on the other side. It gave us a look abroad over a wilderness of hills, forested heavily, and a glimpse of the landfall far away where no white man had ever been. This was as far south as we were destined to get, though at the time we did not know it. Our plan was to push on two days more.
To these questions, so typical of navigation in that range of isles, I have no answer. Such were at least the facts; Tikei our island turned out to be; and it was our first experience of the dangerous archipelago, to make our landfall thirty miles out.
Incidentally, we read that the Snark and all hands had been lost at sea, and that she had been a very unseaworthy craft anyway. And while we read this information a wireless message was being received by the congressional party on the summit of Haleakala announcing the safe arrival of the Snark. It was the Snark's first landfall and such a landfall!
It was erected in no sentimental spirit, but for very practical purposes, and at a date when Watling's Island had not been identified with the Guanahani of Columbus's landfall; and yet of all the monuments that have been raised to him I can think of nothing more appropriate than this lonely tower that stands by day amid the bright sunshine in the track of the trade wind, and by night throws its powerful double flash every half-minute across the dark lonely sea.
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