es of Asia. Yet from his first experiences in Cuba down
to his latest voyage upon the coasts of Honduras and Veragua, he was
more or less puzzled at finding things so different from what he had
anticipated. If he had really known anything with accuracy about the
eastern coast of Asia, he would doubtless soon have detected his
fundamental error, but no European in his day had any such knowledge. In
his four voyages Columbus was finding what he supposed to be parts of
Asia, what we now know to have been parts of America, but what were
really to him and his contemporaries neither more nor less than Strange
Coasts. We have now to consider briefly his further experiences upon
these strange coasts.

* * * * *

The second voyage of Columbus was begun in a very different mood and
under very different auspices from either his former or his two
subsequent voyages. On his first departure from Palos, in 1492, all
save a few devoted friends regarded him as a madman rushing upon his
doom; and outside the Spanish peninsula the expedition seems to have
attracted no notice. But on the second start, in 1493, all hands
supposed that they were going straight to golden Cathay and to boundless
riches. It was not now with groans but with paeans that they flocked on
board the ships; and the occasion was observed, with more or less
interest, by some people in other countries of Europe,--as in Italy, and
for the moment in France and England.

[Sidenote: The letter to Sanchez.]

At the same time with his letter to Santangel, the Admiral had
despatched another account, substantially the same,[532] to Gabriel
Sanchez,[533] another officer of the royal treasury. Several copies of a
Latin translation of this letter were published at Rome, at Paris, and
elsewhere, in the course of the year 1493.[534] The story which it
contained was at once paraphrased in Italian verse by Giuliano Dati, one
of the most popular poets of the age, and perhaps in the autumn of 1493
the amazing news that the Indies had been found by sailing west[535] was
sung by street urchins in Florence. We are also informed, in an
ill-vouched but not improbable clause in Ramusio, that not far from that
same time the news was heard with admiration in London, where it was
pronounced "a thing more divine than human to sail by the West unto the
East, where spices grow, by a way that was never known before;"[536] and
it seems altogether likely that it was t