cts already an old man. He had entered,
although happily he did not know it, on the last decade of his life; and
was already beginning to suffer from the two diseases, gout and
ophthalmia, which were soon to undermine his strength and endurance.
Religion of a mystical fifteenth-century sort was deepening in him;
he had undertaken this voyage in the name of the Holy Trinity; and to
that theological entity he had resolved to dedicate the first new land
that he should sight.

For ten days light baffling winds impeded his progress; but at the end of
that time the winds fell away altogether, and the voyagers found
themselves in that flat equatorial calm known to mariners as the
Doldrums. The vertical rays of the sun shone blisteringly down upon
them, making the seams of the ships gape and causing the unhappy crews
mental as well as bodily distress, for they began to fear that they had
reached that zone of fire which had always been said to exist in the
southern ocean.

Day after day the three ships lay motionless on the glassy water, with
wood-work so hot as to burn the hands that touched it, with the meat
putrefying in the casks below, and the water running from the loosened
casks, and no one with courage and endurance enough to venture into the
stifling hold even to save the provisions. And through all this the
Admiral, racked with gout, had to keep a cheerful face and assure his
prostrate crew that they would soon be out of it.

There were showers of rain sometimes, but the moisture in that baking
atmosphere only added to its stifling and enervating effects. All the
while, however, the great slow current of the Atlantic was moving
westward, and there came a day when a heavenly breeze, stirred in the
torrid air and the musical talk of ripples began to rise again from the
weedy stems of the ships. They sailed due west, always into a cooler and
fresher atmosphere; but still no land was sighted, although pelicans
and smaller birds were continually seen passing from south-west to
north-east. As provisions were beginning to run low, Columbus decided
on the 31st July to alter his course to north-by-east, in the hope of
reaching the island of Dominica. But at mid-day his servant Alonso
Perez, happening to go to the masthead, cried out that there was land in
sight; and sure enough to the westward there rose three peaks of land
united at the base. Here was the kind of coincidence which staggers
even the unbeliever. Colu