264 EPOCHS IN THE HISTORY OF THE CONTEMPLATION OF 



of the Gulf stream, have reached Florida, and thence perhaps 

 have been carried to Cape Hatteras and Virginia ; a circum- 

 stance of immeasurable importance, since it might have given 

 the present United States of America a Roman Catholic Spanish 

 population, instead of a later arriving Protestant English one. 

 " It is," said Pinzon to the Admiral, " as if something whis- 

 pered to -my heart (el corazon me da) that we must change 

 our course." He even maintained in the celebrated lawsuit 

 (1513-1515), which he conducted against the heirs of 

 Columbus, that on this account the discovery of America 

 was due to him only. But Pinzon owed in fact this 

 suggestion, or what " his heart whispered to him," as an old 

 sailor from Moguer related in the same lawsuit, to the flight 

 of a flock of parrots which he saw flying in the evening 

 towards the southwest, for the purpose, as he might suppose, 

 of sleeping among trees or bushes on shore. Never had 

 the flight of birds more important consequences. It may 

 be said to have determined the first settlements on the new 

 Continent, and its distribution between the Latin and 

 Germanic races ( 4 1 1 ) . 



The march of great events, like the sequence of natural 

 phenomena, is regulated by laws of which a few only are 

 known to us. The fleet which King Emanuel of Portugal sent 

 under the command of Pedro Alvarez Cabral to India, by 

 the route discovered by Gama, was driven out of its course 

 to the coast of Brazil, on the twenty-second of April, 1500. 

 From the zeal which, from the time of the enterprise of 

 Diaz (1487), the Portuguese shewed for sailing round the 

 Cape of Good Hope, accidents similar to those which the 

 currents of the ocean occasioned to the ships of Cabral, 

 could hardly have failed to occur. Thus the African 



