discoveries of Columbus, the innocent cetacean called the manatee became a half-mythological monster covered with knobbed scales, and with a head like an ox; it could carry a dozen men on its back, and was kind and gentle to all but Christians, to whom it had an especial aversion. Philo

ponus has delineated the manatee, and De Bry has pictured the imaginary beings that Columbus saw.

The old maps peopled the ocean depths with yet more frightful and mysterious figures; and the Arab geographers, prohibited by their religion from portraying animals real or imaginary, supplied their place by images even more terrific, as that of the black and clinched hand of Satan rising above

the waves in the guise of an overhanging rock, and ready to grasp the daring sailors who profaned the Sea of Darkness with their presence. When we think how superstition, gradually retiring from the world, still keeps its grasp upon the sailors of to-day, we can imagine how it must have ruled the ignorant seamen of Columbus. The thoughtful, lonely ways of their admiral made him only an object of terror; they yielded to him with wonderful submission, but it was the homage of fear. The terror reached its climax when they entered the vast "Sargasso Sea," a region of Gulf-weed-a tract of ocean as large as France, Humboldt says-through which they sailed. Here at last, they thought, was the home of all the monsters depicted in the charts, who might at any moment rear their distorted forms from the snaky sea-weed,

"Like demons' endlong tresses, they sailed through."

At the very best, they said, it was an inundated land (tierras anegadas)—probably the fabled sunken island Atlantis, of which they had heard; whose slime, tradition said, made it impossible to explore that sea, and on whose submerged shallows they might at any time be hopelessly swamped or entangled. "Are there no graves at home," they asked each other, according to Herrera, "that we should be brought here to die?" The trade-winds, afterwards called by the friars "winds of mercy," because they aided in the discovery of the New World, were only winds of despair to the sailors. They believed that the ships were sailing down an inclined slope, and that to return would be impossible, since it blew always from home. There was little to do in the way of trimming sails, for they sailed almost on a parallel of latitude from the Canaries to the Bahamas. Their severest labor was in pumping out the leaky ships. The young adventurers remained listlessly on deck, or played the then fashionable game of primero,

and heard incredulously the daily reports told by Columbus of the rate of sailing. They would have been still more incredulous had they known the truth. "They sighed and wept," Herrera says, "and every hour seemed like a year.”

The same Spanish annalist compares Columbus to St. Christopher in the legend bearing the infant Christ across the stream on his shoulders; and the explorer was often painted in that character in those days. But the weight that Columbus had to bear up was a wearisome and unworthy load. Sometimes they plotted to throw him overboard by a manouvre (con disimulacion, Herrera says), intending to say that he fell in while star-gazing. But he, according to Peter Martyr, dealt with them now by winning words, now by encouraging their hopes (blandis modo verbis, ampla spe modo). If they thought they saw land, he encouraged them to sing an anthem; when it proved to be but cloud, he held out the hope of land to-morrow. They had sailed August 3, 1492, and when they had been out two months (October 3d), he refused to beat about in search of land, though he thought they were near it, but he would press straight through to the Indies. Sometimes there came a contrary wind, and Columbus was cheered by it, for it would convince his men that the wind did not always blow one way, and that by patient waiting they could yet return to Spain.

As the days went on, the signs of land increased, but very slowly. When we think of the intense impatience of the passengers on an ocean steamer after they have been ten long days on the water, even though they know precisely where they are, and where they are going, and that they are driven by mechanical forces stronger than winds or waves, we can imagine something of the feelings of Columbus and his crew as the third month wore on. Still there was no sign of hope but a pelican to-day and a crab to-morrow; or a drizzling rain without wind-a combination which was supposed to in

dicate nearness to the shore. There has scarcely been a moment in the history of the race more full of solemn consequences than that evening hour when, after finding a carved stick and a hawthorn branch, Columbus watched from the deck in the momentary expectation of some glimpse of land. The first shore light is a signal of success and triumph to sailors who cross the Atlantic every three weeks. What then was it to the patient commander who was looking for the first gleam from an unknown world?

The picturesque old tale can never be told in better words than those in which the chronicler Herrera narrates it: "And Christopher Columbus, being now sure that he was not far off, as the night came on, after singing the Salve Regina,' as is usual with mariners, addressed them all and said that since God had given them grace to make so long a voyage in safety, and since the signs of land were becoming steadily more frequent, he would beg them to keep watch all night. And they knew well that the first chapter of the orders that he had issued to them on leaving Castile provided that after sailing seven hundred leagues without making land, they should only sail thenceforth from the following midnight to the next day; and that they should pass that time in prayer, because he trusted in God that during that. night they should discover land. And that besides the ten thousand maravedis that their Highnesses had promised to him who should make the first discovery, he would give, for his part, a velvet jerkin.”

It seems like putting some confusion into men's minds to set them thinking at one and the same time of a new world and a velvet jerkin; but, after all, the prize was never awarded, for Columbus himself was the victor. The vessels of those days had often a high structure like a castle at bow and stern --whence our word forecastle for the forward part of the ship -and we can fancy the sailors and young adventurers watchng from one of these while Columbus watched from the other.

The admiral had the sharpest eyes or the highest outlook, and that night he saw a light which seemed to move on the dim horizon. He called to him Pedro Gutierrez, who saw it at once; he called Roderigo Sanchez, who could not see it for some time; but at last all three perceived it beyond doubt. "It appeared like a candle that was raised and lowered. The

admiral did not doubt its being a real light or its being on land; and so it was: it was borne by people who were going from one cottage to another." "He saw that light in the midst of darkness," adds the devout Herrera, "which symbolized the spirit and light which were to be introduced among these savages." This sight was seen at about ten o'clock in the evening; and at two o'clock in the morning land was actually seen from the Pinta, the foremost vessel, by a sailor,