nd
odoriferous as it is at Seville in the month of April. But the people
were now so eager to see land and had been so often disappointed that
they ceased to give faith to these continual indications; insomuch that
on Wednesday, the 10th, although abundance of birds were continually
passing both by day and night, they never ceased to complain. The admiral
upbraided their want of resolution, and declared that they must persist
in their endeavors to discover the Indies, for which he and they had been
sent out by their Catholic majesties.

It would have been impossible for the admiral to have much longer
withstood the numbers which now opposed him; but it pleased God that, in
the afternoon of Thursday, October 11th, such manifest tokens of being
near the land appeared that the men took courage and rejoiced at their
good-fortune as much as they had been before distressed. From the
admiral's ship a green rush was seen to float past, and one of those
green fish which never go far from the rocks. The people in the Pinta saw
a cane and a staff in the water, and took up another staff very curiously
carved, and a small board, and great plenty of weeds were seen which
seemed to have been recently torn from the rocks. Those of the Nina,
besides similar signs of land, saw a branch of a thorn full of red
berries, which seemed to have been newly torn from the tree.

From all these indications the admiral was convinced that he now drew
near to the land, and after the evening prayers he made a speech to the
men, in which he reminded them of the mercy of God in having brought them
so long a voyage with such favorable weather, and in comforting them with
so many tokens of a successful issue to their enterprise, which were now
every day becoming plainer and less equivocal. He besought them to be
exceedingly watchful during the night, as they well knew that in the
first article of the instructions, which he had given to all the three
ships before leaving the Canaries, they were enjoined, when they should
have sailed seven hundred leagues west without discovering land, to lay
to every night from midnight till daybreak. And, as he had very confident
hopes of discovering land that night, he required every one to keep watch
at their quarters; and, besides the gratuity of thirty crowns a year for
life, which had been graciously promised by their sovereigns to him that
first saw the land, he engaged to give the fortunate discoverer a velvet
doub