inly submitting his plan to John
II of Portugal, to the Genoese Government, and to Henry VII of England,
he appealed--at first without success--to Ferdinand and Isabella of
Castile. But at the end of their war with Granada, 1492, he obtained a
better hearing, and gained the favor of Isabella, who joined the Pinzons,
merchants of Palos, in fitting out for him three small vessels, the Nina,
the Santa Maria, and the Pinta. With the concurrence of Ferdinand, she
made Columbus, for himself and his heirs, admiral in all the regions that
he should discover, and viceroy in any lands acquired by him for Spain.

When the bold mariner sailed from Saltes, an island near Palos, a small
town in the province of Huelva, Spain, he had complete confidence in his
theory of finding new lands to the west. And his unshakable faith in his
idea and in his purpose constitutes the most heroic aspect of his first
voyage.

Of recent years great interest and much historical discussion have been
aroused in connection with real or imagined pre-Columbian discoveries of
America, especially with the discovery by the Northmen. But all attempts
to diminish the glory of Columbus' achievement, by proving that the
results of previous discoveries were known to him, have, as Hubert
Howe Bancroft declares, signally failed. Columbus was not the first
to conceive the possibility of reaching the East by sailing west.
Toscanelli, the Italian astronomer, who made the map which Columbus used,
and others among his contemporaries entertained the theory; but the
Genoese sailor was the first to act upon this belief.

Supposing, as he did to his latest day, that he had found the eastern
coast of India, and not another continent, Columbus gave the name of
Indies to the islands he discovered, whose inhabitants he also called
Indians; yet he did not have the honor of giving his own name to the New
World which he made known to mankind.

In the following pages his own unstudied account of the first voyage and
discovery, and the narrative from the biography of Columbus by his son,
furnish a very complete history of the enterprise from which so large a
part of the world's later development has followed. It should be noted,
however, that both of the accounts manifest the not unnatural desire to
give full prominence to the part taken by Columbus himself. His able
coadjutors, the Pinzons, scarce receive such adequate mention as they are
given by more modern narrators.

The let