COLUMBUS AND BLACK BRARD. 301 
him in courage, in cruelty or in crime. Columbus, by simply 
skirting the shores and landing upon one of the summer isles, 
secured for the whole group an immortality of fame. Black 
Beard infected them with an infamy as enduring as the memory 
of his crimes. The foot-fall of one hallowed the coralline rocks, 
the presence of the other so polluted the air as to permanently 
give to it the shadowy gloom of alurking fear. The most charm- 
ing flower bed loses much of its fragrance-and beauty as soon as 
it is known that a serpent has nestled there. 
Death cannot wholly destroy men who are good and great. 
They are not dead when they die. They enter upon that journey 
where the travel is all one way, and yet do not wholly leave us. 
Their suns descend behind the hills, but a zodiacal light still 
lingers in the heavens. So when earth’s moral monsters pass 
away, shadows dark and chilly are for centuries projected into 
thesunlight. Hence we observed, that over the bright and beau- 
tiful waters, and along the shining shores of the emerald isles, 
the soft air is even now impregnated with a moral poison derived 
from pirates who have been dead more than a hundred years. 
In the Old World the traveler is often so occupied with the 
relics, monuments, history, traditions and legends of a past 
hoary and venerable with age, that he is inclined to overlook the 
present. In the new world the dark and impenetrable shadows 
extend to modern times, and leave but afew centuries for the 
historic period. But even contemporaneous history is not wholly 
reliable, because of the bad habit of covering with the gay robes 
and bright ribbons of fiction, the simplicity and nakedness of 
truth. 
It was upon Friday, (a day which superstition has branded as 
unlucky) August 3d, 1492, at eight o’clock a. m., that Columbus 
with his three caravals, two of which were only decked fore and 
aft, sailed from Palos upon what the world generally believed 
26 
