e regency of her father; and when he
united Castile with Aragon, and conquered and annexed Navarre and
Granada, and thus became the first King of Spain, Cuba was renamed in
his honor and known no longer as Juana but as Ferdinandina, or
Fernandina. Still later it was called San Diego, or Santiago; and again
Ave Maria Alfa y Omega. But these names were transitory. The natives
never accepted one of them, but clung to the old name of Cuba, and there
was a fine touch of poetic justice in the fact that that name survived
the extinction of the race that had cherished it. Under the ruthless
rule of the Conquistadores the aboriginal population of the island
almost entirely vanished, and with them practically all traces of their
existence save four. These were the name and use of tobacco, the name
and use of hammocks, the name and use of canoes, and the name of the
island itself.

It would not have been surprising, and it would have been quite
pardonable, had Columbus seen everything in the New World through
glasses of _couleur de rose_. Naturally of a romantic and imaginative
temperament, he experienced in the realization of his long-cherished
ambition such a degree of spiritual and mental exaltation as seldom has
come to mortal man. Yet quite apart from this, the native beauty of
Cuba, as seen to our eyes to-day, abundantly justifies the rhapsodies in
which he indulged in describing it. On that first memorable Sunday he
wrote in his diary, "This is the most beautiful land ever beheld by
human eyes." From the quarter-deck of the _Santa Maria_ he gazed with
rapture upon the profuse verdure of the shore and of the hills which
rose in the back-ground, observing with admiration and surprise that the
trees grew down to the very water's edge, as did also the herbage, as he
had never seen it elsewhere. The palms and other trees were largely of
different kinds from those which he had seen in Spain, in Guinea, and
elsewhere, and they bore flowers and fruit in great profusion, while
among them were innumerable birds, beautiful to the eye and with songs
entrancing to the ear.

Two canoes, containing each several natives, put out from a recess in
the harbor shore to meet the Spanish ships, but when a boat was lowered
from one of the latter, to proceed ahead and take soundings, they
incontinently fled. Columbus himself then entered a small boat and went
ashore, where he found two houses, which he assumed to belong to the
owners of the two