went out to meet and welcome him, and to escort him in honourable triumph to the royal presence.  Their Catholic majesties sat in public with great state on rich chairs under a canopy of cloth of gold to receive him; and when he advanced to kiss their hands, they stood up as if to receive a great lord, even making a difficulty in giving him their hands to kiss, and then caused him to sit down in their presence.  Having given a brief account of his voyage, they gave him leave to retire to his apartment, whither he was attended by the whole court; and so great was the favour and honour shewn him, that when the king rode about Barcelona, the admiral rode on one side of him and the Infante Fortuna on the other; whereas before no one rode along-side of the king except the Infante, who was his near kinsman.

[1] Rabo de junco is explained to signify Rush-tailed:  Rabo being a tail
    and Junco a rush in the Spanish language.—­E.

[2] Don Ferdinand compliments his father too largely in this place by
    supposing Cipango and Hispaniola the same.  The original design of
    Columbus to sail westwards to India, which he erroneously supposed to
    be vastly nearer in that direction, led him accidentally almost to
    discover Hispaniola on the supposed route to Cipango or Japan.—­E

[3] The dates of the voyage may be here recapitulated.  Columbus sailed
    from Palos on the third of August 1492, and reached the island of
    Gomera, one of the Canary islands, on the ninth of August, or in six
    days.  He remained there and at Gran Canaria, refitting and
    replenishing his stores, till the sixth of September, when he began
    his passage due west across the Atlantic; and the first land of
    America was discovered on Friday the twelfth of October at two in the
    morning:  thirty-six days after leaving Gran Canaria, and seventy days
    after leaving Palos in Spain.—­E.

[4] This would seem to be a great exaggeration, perhaps an error of the
    press; but now impossible to be rectified.—­E

[5] Nothing can be more ambiguous than the interpretation of signs between
    people who are utterly ignorant of each others language:  But the signs
    on this occasion seem rather to imply that the cacique requested the
    Spaniards to declare themselves his friends, by participating in
    hostile demonstrations against the people from Tortuga.—­E.

[6] This term evidently expresses a person unused to the sea, as
    contradistinguished from an experienced seaman.—­E.

[7] Cazabi seems to have been what is now called casada in the British
    West Indies, or prepared manioc root; and axi in some other parts of
    this voyage is mentioned as the spice of the West Indies; probably
    either pimento or capsicum, and used as a condiment to relish the
    insipidity of the casada.—­E.