The naked and paiuted natives, when they had recovered from their fright, regarded the white men, by whose confidence they were soon won, as visitors from the skies which bounded their horizon ; they received from them with transport toys and trinkets, fragments of glas., and earthenware, as celestial presents possessing a supernatural virtue. They brought in exchange cotton.yarn and cassava bread, which, as it keeps looser than wheaten bread, was highly acceptable to the Spaniards.
On the 24th Columbus set out In quest of gold and Cipango. After discoveries Concepcion, Exuma, and Isla Lnrga, Cuba broke upon him like an clysium; he no longer doubled that this beautiful land was the real Cipango. When this delusion was over, he fancied Cuba to be not far from Mango and Cathay, so brilliantly depicted in his great oracle, Marco Polo. To the time of his death Columbus believed Cuba to be a part of the mainland of India, and it was owing to this mistake that the appellation of Indians was extended to all the Aborigines of the Americas. He next took Hayti, or Santo Domingo, for the ancient Ophir, the sources of the riches of Solo moo, but he gave it the Latin diminutive of Hispaniola, from its resembling the fairest tracts of Spain. Leaving here the germ of a future colony, he set sail homeward the 4th of January 1493. A dreadful storm overtook him on the 12th of February. Columbus fearing the loss of his discovery more than the loss of life, retired to write two copies of a short account of it. He wrapped them in wax, inclosed them in two separate casks, one of which be threw into the sea, and the other he placed on the poop of his vessel, that it might float in case she should sink. Happily the storm subsided, but another drove him off the mouth of the Tagus on the 4th of March ; and although distrustful of the Portuguese, he was obliged to take shelter there. At last he landed triumphantly at Palos, the 15th of March 1493. In his journey through Spain, he received princely honours all his way to Barcelona, where the court had gone. His entrance here, with some of the natives, and with the arms and utensils of the discovered islands, was a trinuiph as striking and more glorious than that of a conqueror. Ferdinand and Isabella received him seated in state, rose as he approached, raised him as he kneeled to kiss their hands, and ordered him to be seated in their presence.
On the 25th of September 1493, Columbus left Cadiz on a second expedition, with 17 ships and 1500 men. He discovered the Caribbee Islands, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica; and after repeated mutinies of hie colonists, and great hardships, he returned against the tradewinds to Cadiz, June 11, 1496. Having dispelled all the calumnies that had
been accumulated upon him, Columbus embarked the 30th of May 1493 at ban Lucar de Barrameda, on a third expedition, with only six vessels. In this voyage he discovered La Trinidad, the mouths of the Orinoco (which river he imagined to proceed from the tree of life in the midst of Paradise, the situation of which was then supposed to be in the remotest parts of the east), the coast of Paris, and the Margarita and Cubagua Islands. On the 14th of August he bore away for Hispaniola to recruit hie health. The dissensions which arose here, the calumnies of miscreants who had been shipped off to Spain, countenanced as they were by envious courtiers at home, the nuproductiveness of the new settlement, and regret at having vested such high powers in a subject and a foreigner, who could now be dispensed with, induced Ferdivaud, iu July 1500, to despatch Fran cisco Bovadilla to supersede Columbus, and bring him back in chains. Vallejo, the officer who had him in charge, and Martin, the master of the caravel, would have taken his chains off; but Columbus proudly said, " I will wear them till the king orders otherwise, and will pre serve them as memorials of his gratitude." He hung them up in his cabinet, and requested they should be buried in his grave. The general burst of indignation at Cadiz, which was echoed throughout Spain, ou the arrival of Columbus in fetters, compelled Ferdinand himself to disclaim all knowledge of tho shameful trausaction. But still the king kept Columbus in attendance for nine months, wasting his time in fruitless solicitations for redress ; and at last appointed Nicholas Ovando governor of Hispaniola iu his place.
With restricted powers and a broken frame, but with his ever-soaring and irrepressible enthusiasm, Columbus sailed from Cadiz again on the 9th of May 1502, with fuur caravels and 150 men, in search of a passage to the East Indies near the Isthmus of Darien, which should supersede that of Vasco de Gams Being denied relief and even shelter at Santo Domingo, he was swept, away by the currents to the north-west; he however missed Yucatan and Mexico, and at last reached Truxillo, whence be coasted Honduras, the Mosquito shore, Costa Rica, Veragua, as far as the point which he called El Retrete, where the recent westward coasting of Bastide, had terminated. But here; on the 5th of December, he gave up his splendid vision, and yielded to the clamours of his crews to return in search of gold to Veragua, a country which he himself mistook for the Aurea Cher. sonesus of the ancients.