162 



HISTORY OF THE SEA. 



At sunset on the 25th, Alonzo Pinzon, rushing excitedly upon 

 the quarter-deck of the Pinta, shouted, "Land! land! My lord, 

 I was the first to see it!" The sailors of the Nina clambered 

 joyfully into the tops, and Columbus fell upon his knees in 

 thanksgiving. But the morn dissipated the illusion, and the 

 ocean stretched forth its illimitable expanse as before. On the 

 1st of October, one of the lieutenants declared with anguish that 

 they were seventeen hundred miles from the Canaries, intelli- 

 gence which terribly alarmed the crew, though they had really 

 made a much greater distance, being actually twenty-one hun- 

 dred miles from Teneriffe, according to Columbus' private reck- 

 oning. 



The indications of the vicinity of land had been so often de- 

 ceitful, that the crew no longer put faith in them, and fell from 

 discouragement into taciturnity, and from taciturnity into insub- 

 ordination. The discontent was general, and no eiforts were 

 made to conceal it. In their mutinous conversations, they spoke 

 contemptuously of Columbus as u the Genoese," as a charlatan 

 and a rogue. Was it just, they said, that one hundred and 

 twenty men should perish by the caprice and obstinacy of one 

 single man, and that man a foreigner and an impostor? If he 

 persisted in proceeding "towards his everlasting west, which went 

 on and on, and never came to an end," he ought to be thrown 

 into the sea and left there. On their return they could easily 

 say that he had fallen into the waves while gazing at the stars. 

 A revolt was agreed upon between the crews of the three ships, 



counts for its existence in the following manner: — "Patches of this weed are 

 always to be seen floating along the Gulf Stream. Now, if bits of cork, or 

 chaff, or any floating substance, be put in a basin, and a circular motion be 

 given to the water, all the light substances will be found crowding together near 

 the centre of the pool, where there is the least motion. Just such a basin is 

 the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf Stream, and the Sargasso Sea is the centre of 

 the whirl. Columbus found this weedy sea in his voyage of discovery, and 

 there it has remained to this day." 



