and a notable map in the Sloane
MSS. in the British Museum, dated 1530, do, it is true, indicate Cuba to
be an island, but they also make India Superior and Tibet contiguous
with Mexico at the northwest, with the latter country fronting directly
upon the Indian Ocean. We know, of course, that during his second
voyage, in 1494, while off the southern coast of Cuba, Columbus required
his companions to sign with him a formal declaration that they were off
the coast of Asia. Such, then, was the Admiral's estimate of Cuba, in
which there is no reason to doubt he persisted to the end of his life.
He had achieved the object of his great adventure: He had reached the
country of the Great Khan.

Despite these delusions and vagaries, however, the facts remain that he
did discover and partly explore Cuba, and that it was the first land in
the Western Hemisphere of which that can confidently be said. Cuba is
therefore the starting point of the history of the Columbian discovery
and exploration and the subsequent colonization and civilization of
America. With Cuba the history of the New World begins.

Similarly, and with equal truth, we may say that the history of Cuba
begins with the Columbian discovery of America. That is not true of all
parts of the American continents. Some of them had already had important
histories. The northeastern coast of North America had been visited and
temporarily colonized by the Norsemen, and the northwestern coast by the
Chinese; and both of those peoples had left enduring traces of their
enterprise. The Iroquois and Algonquins had for centuries enjoyed a
degree of social, political and industrial development, the records of
which still survive. The Toltecs, the Mayas and the Incas had risen to a
height of culture not unworthy to be compared with that of Egypt,
Persia, Greece and Rome, the remains of which to this day command the
wonder and admiration of the world. But not so Cuba. Carlyle might well
have had this island in mind when he said, "Happy the people whose
annals are blank in history books."

The physical history of Cuba indicates that in some remote period the
two mountainous ends of the island were two separate and distinctly
different islands, separated by a considerable stretch of sea, and that
they were afterward united by a rising of the bottom of the sea, to form
the central plain of Cuba. It is observed that the two ends are unlike
each other on geological structure and compositi