Canaries, sank from sight on the eastern horizon, many of the
sailors loudly lamented their unseemly fate, and cried and sobbed like
children. Columbus well understood the difficulty of dealing with these
men. He provided against one chief source of discontent by keeping two
different reckonings, a true one for himself and a false one for his
officers and crews. He was shrewd enough not to overdo it and awaken
distrust. Thus after a twenty-four hours' run of 180 miles on September
10, he reported it as 144 miles; next day the run was 120 miles and he
announced it as 108, and so on. But for this prudent if somewhat
questionable device, it is not unlikely that the first week of October
would have witnessed a mutiny in which Columbus would have been either
thrown overboard or forced to turn back.

[Sidenote: Deflection of the needle.]

The weather was delicious, and but for the bug-a-boos that worried those
poor sailors it would have been a most pleasant voyage. Chief among the
imaginary terrors were three which deserve especial mention. At
nightfall on September 13 the ships had crossed the magnetic line of no
variation, and Columbus was astonished to see that the compass-needle,
instead of pointing a little to the right of the pole-star, began to
sway toward the left, and next day this deviation increased. It was
impossible to hide such a fact from the sharp eyes of the pilots, and
all were seized with alarm at the suspicion that this witch instrument
was beginning to play them some foul trick in punishment of their
temerity; but Columbus was ready with an ingenious astronomical
explanation, and their faith in the profundity of his knowledge
prevailed over their terrors.

[Sidenote: The Sargasso Sea.]

The second alarm came on September 16, when they struck into vast
meadows of floating seaweeds and grasses, abounding in tunny fish and
crabs. They had now come more than 800 miles from Ferro and were
entering the wonderful Sargasso Sea, that region of the Atlantic six
times as large as France, where vast tangles of vegetation grow upon the
surface of water that is more than 2,000 fathoms deep, and furnish
sustenance for an untold wealth of fishy life.[515] To the eye of the
mariner the Sargasso Sea presents somewhat the appearance of an endless
green prairie, but modern ships plough through it with ease and so did
the caravels of Columbus at first. After two or three days, however, the
wind being light, their progress