ildren seek thee now.

* * * * * * * * *

"What though thy native harps be silent?
The chord they struck shall ours prolong;
We claim thee kindred, call thee mother,
O land of saga, steel and song!"

THE SANTA MARIA, NINA AND PINTA

(_Evening of October 11, 1492_)

[Decoration]

THE DEBARKATION OF COLUMBUS

(_Morning of October 12, 1492_)

[Illustration: Copyright, 1898, by Edward Moran.]

[Illustration: Copyright, 1898, by Edward Moran.]

III.

THE SANTA MARIA, NINA AND PINTA (EVENING OF OCTOBER 11, 1492)[E]

AND

IV.

THE DEBARKATION OF COLUMBUS (MORNING OF OCTOBER 12, 1492).[F]

The landing of Columbus was an historical event of such importance in
its consequences that the artist wisely celebrates it in both of these
pictures.

We little realize what it meant to brave the perils of the unexplored
ocean in the year 1492. We marvel when some adventurous navigator, even
now, when every current and wind of the ocean have been observed for
five hundred years, and are accurately known and precisely charted,
undertakes to cross it in a somewhat diminutive vessel. What, then, must
have been the courage of Columbus, when, at the advanced age of
fifty-seven, he ventured with his crew upon this perilous undertaking in
three frail barks or caravels, the largest of them equipped with a
single deck and a single bridge, with an awkward one-story compartment
at the prow and a two-story compartment at the stern, and the two others
without any deck at all, with their little masts carrying awkward,
unwieldy, partly square and partly lateen sails!

The three crews consisted of only one hundred and four men combined, of
which fifty were on the little "Santa Maria," which was only about
sixty-three feet over all in length, with a fifty-one foot keel, twenty
foot beam, and a depth of ten and one-half feet, under the command of
the "Admiral" himself, as he was pompously called, and thirty on the
still smaller "Pinta," under the command of "Captain" Martin Alonso
Pinzon, while the still more diminutive cockle-shell "Nina" contained
the formidable crew of twenty-four under the command of the brother of
Martin Alonso, the redoubtable "Captain" Vincente Yanez Pinzon. And then
to think that, instead of being encouraged and lauded for his
enterprise, the prelude consisted of discouragement, derision and
persecution of the foolhardy seaman who d