is canoe placed on the ship and had everything which he
was carrying guarded and I ordered that bread and honey be given him
to eat and something to drink. And I will go to Fernandina thus and
will give him everything, which belongs to him, that he may give
good reports of us. So that, when your Highnesses send here, our
Lord pleasing, those who come may receive honour and the Indians
will give them of everything which they have."

This hurried gabbling about gold and the aid of our Lord, interlarded
with fragments of natural and geographical observation, sounds strangely
across the gulf of time and impresses one with a disagreeable sense of
bewildered greed--like that of a dog gulping at the delicacies in his
platter and unwilling to do justice to one for fear the others should
escape him; and yet it is a natural bewilderment, and one with which we
must do our best to sympathise.

Fernandina was the name which Columbus had already given to Long Island
when he sighted it from Santa Maria; and he reached it in the evening of
Tuesday, October 16th. The man in the canoe had arrived before him; and
the astute Admiral had the satisfaction of finding that once more his
cleverness had been rewarded, and that the man in the canoe had given
such glowing accounts of his generosity that there was no difficulty
about his getting water and supplies. While the barrels of water were
being filled he landed and strolled about in the pleasant groves,
observing the islanders and their customs, and finding them on the whole
a little more sophisticated than those of San Salvador. The women wore
mantillas on their heads and "little pieces of cotton" round their
loins-a sufficiently odd costume; and they appeared to Columbus to be a
little more astute than the other islanders, for though they brought
cotton in quantities to the ships they exacted payment of beads for it.
In the charm and wonder of his walk in this enchanted land he was able
for a moment to forget his hunger for gold and to admire the great
branching palm-trees, and the fish that

"are here so different from ours that it is wonderful. There are
some formed like cocks of the finest colours in the world, blue,
yellow, red and of all colours, and others tinted in a thousand
manners: and the colours are so fine, that there is not a man who
does not wonder at them, and who does not take great pleasure in
seeing the