THE BAHAMA INDIANS. 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 Fernandina, 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 envelope 
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—Wuat oF THE Past? ‘There 
is no response. Neither records nor ruins furnish even historic 
riddles for its solution. Let us, therefore, stand where Colum- 
bus and his companions stood in October, 1492, and listen while 
he gives to his sovereign a description of what he then saw. We 
copy from his epistolary journal under date of the 13th of Octo- 
ber, the day after his *‘ Land Fall:” 
«« All were young persons, asI said before, and of good stature, 
and withal handsome, who came totheshore. The hair of these 
islanders is not crisp or wooly, but long and straight like that of 
Asiatics. The forehead is wide, more so, indeed, than any peo- 
ple Ihave yet seen. ‘They have large handsome eyes, and are 
not black, but of the color of Canaries, as might be expected, 
since they are due west from the island of Hierro, one of that 
group. They are all well made, even to their hands; not pot- 
bellied, but exceedingly well formed. 
