THE BAHAMA INDIAlsrg. 305 



less than two or three thousands of years before another Colum- 

 bus will be born, and that like rank and noxious weeds in a good 

 garden, superstition and error had root and flourished by the side 

 of truth in the mind of the great discoverer of the New World. 



Mr. Moseley, in his Nassau Almanac, states that Columbus 

 visited New Providence and called the island Fcrnandina, in 

 honor of the king of Spain. This is very clearly a mistake. 

 The author of the Land Fall agrees with Washington Irving that 

 Exuma is the island which Columbus thus discovered and named. 

 If we remember rightly, Bruce makes the same mistake in his 

 Memoirs. 



The visitor at Nassau has ample time to muse and meditate. 

 He is not wholly satisfied with the present. Looking at the dark 

 murky shadows lying back of a few hundred years that cnveloj^e 

 human history upon these islands, he asks the tangled woods, 

 the coralline hills, the rude water-worn caverns, and the shell- 

 strewn and honey-combed shores — What OF the Past? There 

 is no response. Neither records nor ruins furnish even historic 

 riddles for its solution. Let us, therefore, stand where Colum- 

 l)us and his companions stood in October, 1402, and listen while 

 he gives to his sovereign a description of what ho then saw. We 

 copy from his epistolary journal under date of the 13th of Octo- 

 ber, the day after his ''Land Fall:" 



" All wei'c young persons, as I said before, and of good stature, 

 and withal handsome, who came to the shore. The hair of these 

 islanders is not crisp or wooly, but long and straiglit like that of 

 Asiatics. The forehead is wide, more so, indeed, than any peo- 

 ple I have yet seen. Tliey have large handsome eyes, and ai'c 

 not black, l)ut of the color of Canaries, as might be expected, 

 since they are due west from the island of Ilierro, one of that 

 group. They are all well made, even to their hands; not pot- 

 bellied, but exceedingly well formed. 



