s of turtles covered the waters, black butterflies circled in the
mist; and the fever that was beginning to work in the Admiral's blood
mounted to his brain, so that in this land of bad dreams his fixed ideas
began to dominate all his other faculties, and he decided that he must
certainly be on the coast of Cathay, in the magic land described by Marco
Polo.

There is nothing which illustrates the arbitrary and despotic government
of sea life so well as the nautical phrase "make it so." The very hours
of the day, slipping westward under the keel of an east-going ship, are
"made" by rigid decree; the captain takes his observation of sun or
stars, and announces the position of the ship to be at a certain spot on
the surface of the globe; any errors of judgment or deficiencies of
method are covered by the words "make it so." And in all the elusive
phenomena surrounding him the fevered brain of the Admiral discerned
evidence that he was really upon the coast of Asia, although there was no
method by which he could place the matter beyond a doubt. The word Asia
was not printed upon the sands of Cuba, as it might be upon a map; the
lines of longitude did not lie visibly across the surface of the sea;
there was nothing but sea and land, the Admiral's charts, and his own
conviction. Therefore Columbus decided to "make it so." If there was no
other way of being sure that this was the coast of Cathay, he would
decree it to be the coast of Cathay by a legal document and by oaths and
affidavits. He would force upon the members of his expedition a
conviction at least equal to his own; and instead of pursuing any further
the coast that stretched interminably west and south-west, he decided to
say, in effect, and once and for all, "Let this be the mainland of Asia."

He called his secretary to him and made him draw up a form of oath or
testament, to which every member of the expedition was required to
subscribe, affirming that the land off which they were then lying (12th
June 1494), was the mainland of the Indies and that it was possible to
return to Spain by land from that place; and every officer who should
ever deny it in the future was laid under a penalty of ten thousand
maravedis, and every ship's boy or seaman under a penalty of one hundred
lashes; and in addition, any member of the expedition denying it in the
future was to have his tongue cut out.

No one will pretend that this was the action of a sane man; neither wi