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Updated: May 23, 2025
Aye, boarding the Santissima Trinidada, with the guns banging about them and the sulphurous gunpowder-smoke filling the air around, hiding everything beyond the ponderous hulls of the enemy's three-deckers between which, yard-arm to yard-arm, the old Victory lay!
Day after day the rest of the squadron pressed on, their gallant commander anticipating the realisation of his long-cherished hopes. We may picture him, as he stood on the forecastle of the Trinidada, leading the way, eagerly looking out ahead. How anxious he must have felt when the channel narrowed, and it became possible that some rocky barrier might impede his progress!
The actual accomplishment of any of these voyages by Americus has even been doubted . At all events, there are strong reasons for believing that all their dates have been industriously falsified, on purpose to ground a pretension for having discovered the continent or main-land of Paria, prior to the third voyage of Columbus, in 1498, when that country and the islands of Trinidada and Margarita certainly were discovered by Columbus.
We made the Island of Trinidada with its strange conical-topped pillar, the Ninepin Rock, but did not make a call, as the skipper was beginning to get fidgety at not seeing any whales, and anxious to get down to where he felt reasonably certain of falling in with them. Keeping, as we did, out of the ordinary track of ships, we hardly ever saw a sail.
Judge, then, of the surprise of everybody, when one forenoon watch, three days after we had lost sight of Trinidada, a most extraordinary sound was heard from the fore crow's-nest.
The tide differed considerably in this place from what it had been found at Trinidada; for whereas there it ebbed and flowed three fathoms, here, at forty-five leagues to the westward it only rose and fell one fathom. At Trinidada both during ebb and flow, the current always ran west, whereas here the flood made to the west, and the ebb returned to the east.
We passed its parallel 4° 30' to the westward of it, and had for several days kept a look out for an island, which the Portuguese call Ascencao, and is said to lie between Trinidada and the coast of Brazil; but the existence of which there is much reason to doubt.
So runs the tale, told some forty years since to M. Joseph, author of a clever little history of Trinidad, by an old half-caste Indian, Senor Trinidada by name, who was said then to be nigh one hundred years of age. Surely the people among whom such a myth could spring up, were worthy of a nobler fate.
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