NO. I COLUMBUS S LANDFALL WOLPER 23 



logical order. If this could not be done, then our island would not 

 have been his San Salvador. 



What follows are the formal words of the Admiral in his P>ook 

 of the First Navigation and Discovery of these Indies. Columbus 

 wrote : 

 Friday, 12 October 



Later they came swimming to the ships' boats in which we were, and brought 

 us parrots and cotton thread in skeins and darts and many other things, and we 

 swopped them for other things that we gave to them, such as little glass beads 

 and hawks' bells . . . All that I saw were young men, none of them more than 

 30 years old, very well built, of very handsome bodies and very fine faces ; the 

 hair coarse, almost like the hair of a horse's tail, and short, the hair they wear 

 over their eyebrows, except for a hank behind that they wear long and never cut. 

 Some of them paint themselves black (and they are of the color of the Canary 

 Islanders, neither black nor white), and others paint themselves white, and some 

 red, and others with what they find. And some paint their faces, others the body. 

 Some the eyes only, others only the nose. They bear no arms, nor know thereof ; 

 for I showed them swords and they grasped them by the blade and cut them- 

 selves through ignorance ; they have no iron. Their darts are a kind of rod 

 without iron, and some have at the end a fish's tooth and others, other things . . . 



Although parrots 32 have not been found here, bone pendants repre- 

 senting a parrot have been found in an excavated Indian village. 

 It is said that parrots were here at one time, but because of low- 

 flying planes they had been frightened away, just as the flamingoes 

 had been. (In 1955, two flamingoes were seen by the writer on the 

 banks of Flamingo Pond.) 



Cotton 33 (Gossypium hirsutum var. punctatum) grows wild on 

 the island. This is the type that grew before the white man came. 



Darts could have been a spine or "whip," as the natives call that 

 part that grows out from the tail of a sting-ray, inserted into a reed. 

 Possible darts of stone and shell have been found in excavations. 



Was Columbus responsible for the rumor of the Fountain of 

 Youth 34 that was never found ? He is not the only one who thought 

 the people on San Salvador looked young. Curiously enough, there are 

 many who have unlined faces. For example, 80-year-old Paul Ward, 

 whose ancestors many generations ago, longer than his grandfather 

 could remember, were the Indians of Trinidad, has not one wrinkle. 



32 Hedley Edwards, owner of parrots and Ardastra Gardens in Nassau, states 

 that there were parrots on the island and they can be found now in certain 

 areas. 



33 Confirmed by Dr. Edward J. Alexander of the New York Botanical Gardens. 



34 Ponce de Leon could have heard about this on his second voyage with 

 Columbus or from Indians. 



