l line. But although there was not a breath of wind, the
powerful equatorial current was quietly driving the ships, much faster
than the Admiral could have suspected, to the northwest and toward land.
By the end of that stifling week they were in latitude 7 deg. N., and caught
the trade-wind on the starboard quarter. Thence after a brisk run of ten
days, in sorry plight, with ugly leaks and scarcely a cask of fresh
water left, they arrived within sight of land. Three mountain peaks
loomed up in the offing before them, and as they drew nearer it appeared
that those peaks belonged to one great mountain; wherefore the pious
Admiral named the island Trinidad.

[Sidenote: Trinidad and the Orinoco.]

Here some surprises were in store for Columbus. Instead of finding black
and woolly-haired natives, he found men of cinnamon hue, like those in
Hispaniola, only--strange to say--lighter in colour. Then in coasting
Trinidad he caught a glimpse of land at the delta of the Orinoco, and
called it Isla Santa, or Holy Island.[594] But, on passing into the
gulf of Paria, through the strait which he named Serpent's Mouth, his
ships were in sore danger of being swamped by the raging surge that
poured from three or four of the lesser mouths of that stupendous river.
Presently, finding that the water in the gulf was fresh to the taste, he
gradually reasoned his way to the correct conclusion, that the billows
which had so nearly overwhelmed him must have come out from a river
greater than any he had ever known or dreamed of, and that so vast a
stream of running water could be produced only upon land of continental
dimensions.[595] This coast to the south of him was, therefore, the
coast of a continent, with indefinite extension toward the south, a land
not laid down upon Toscanelli's or any other map, and of which no one
had until that time known anything.[596]

[Footnote 594: He "gave it the name of Isla Santa," says Irving
(vol. ii. p. 140), "little imagining that he now, for the first
time, beheld that continent, that Terra Firma, which had been
the object of his earnest search." The reader of this passage
should bear in mind that the continent of South America, which
nobody had ever heard of, was _not_ the object of Columbus's
search. The Terra Firma which was the object of his search was
the mainland of Asia, and that he never beheld, though he felt
posit