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Updated: June 24, 2025
'All my life' said he, 'I have been sailing the seas, yet never saw landfall like yonder. That which we look upon is cloud and not land. 'But who, I asked, 'ever saw a fixed cloud? 'Marry, I for one, he answered, 'and every seaman who has sailed beside Sicily!
For that matter, there is little that can be said on a subject that he does not put before his readers, as plainly as Beachy Head lies before the navigator of the British Channel. With Bowditch and Vattel, a man might sail round the globe, and little fear of a bad landfall, or a mistake in principles.
He had come to us from the land, and not from the uninhabited deep. He had presaged the landfall. He was the messenger of the land. Twenty-seven days out from San Francisco we arrived at the island of Oahu, Territory of Hawaii. In the early morning we drifted around Diamond Head into full view of Honolulu; and then the ocean burst suddenly into life.
Had not His Holiness divided all Heathendom between the crowns of Spain and Portugal, to Spain the West and to Portugal the East; and was not this landfall within what the modern world would call the Spanish sphere of influence? The ambassador protested to Henry VII and reported home to Ferdinand and Isabella.
I was holding the schooner straight down for the Gulf of Honduras, and, by my reckoning, within a few hours of making a landfall, wondering all the while that they took the courses I laid without grumbling though by this time our course was past all explaining when the quarrel broke out.
The tides of history and of life avoided it; only now and then some terrified mariner, blown far out of his course, came back with tales of sea monsters and enchanted disappearing islands, and shores that receded, and coasts upon which no one could make a landfall.
It will be observed that the FIRST course, beginning according to the letter at the landfall, in latitude 34 N., commences on the map a little north of C. Trafalgar as there laid down, now Cape Fear, and proceeds southerly fifty leagues to C. de S. Roman.
That he should have made an exact landfall and sailed into the Bay of Isabella, never having been there before, was a certificate of the highest skill in navigation. Unfortunately it was James who was in charge of the colony; Bartholomew had no authority, for once his ships had arrived in port his mission was accomplished until Christopher should return and find him employment.
Sou'sou'west went Drake's flotilla and made its landfall 'towards the Pole Antartick' off the 'Land of Devils' in 31° 40' south, northeast of Montevideo. Frightful storms had buffeted the little ships about for weary weeks together, and all hands thought they were the victims of some magician on board, perhaps the 'Italianate' Doughty, or else of native witchcraft from the shore.
But he signaled to two passing steamships for Greenwich time, and set his watch, obtaining its rate of correction by the second favor; and with this, and his surely correct latitude by meridian observation, he hoped to make an accurate landfall in home waters.
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