Had the coast of Asia been, indeed, as near as Toscanelli and Columbus supposed, this latitude of the Canary islands would have been quite near the mouth of the Yang-tse-Kiang river, in China, which was what Columbus was seeking.  For nearly a generation afterwards he and his followers supposed that the coast of that region was what they had found.

It was on Saturday, the eighth of September, that they lost sight of Teneriffe.  On the eleventh they saw a large piece of the mast of a ship afloat.  On the fourteenth they saw a “tropic-bird,” which the sailors thought was never seen more than twenty-five leagues from land; but it must be remembered, that, outside of the Mediterranean, few of the sailors had ever been farther themselves.  On the sixteenth they began to meet “large patches of weeds, very green, which appeared to have been recently washed away from land.”  This was their first knowledge of the “Sargasso sea,” a curious tract in mid-Atlantic which is always green with floating seaweeds.  “The continent we shall find farther on,” wrote the confident Admiral.

An observation of the sun on the seventeenth proved what had been suspected before, that the needles of the compasses were not pointing precisely to the north.  The variation of the needle, since that time, has been a recognized fact.  But this observation at so critical a time first disclosed it.  The crew were naturally alarmed.  Here was evidence that, in the great ocean, common laws were not to be relied upon.  But they had great respect for Columbus’s knowledge of such subjects.  He told them that it was not the north which had changed, nor the needle, which was true to the north, but the polar star revolved, like other stars, and for the time they were satisfied.

The same day they saw weeds which he was sure were land weeds.  From them he took a living crab, whose unintentional voyage eastward was a great encouragement to the bolder adventurer westward.  Columbus kept the crab, saying that such were never found eighty leagues from land.  In fact this poor crab was at least nine hundred and seventy leagues from the Bahamas, as this same journal proves.  On the eighteenth the Pinta ran ahead of the other vessels, Martin Alonso was so sure that he should reach land that night.  But it was not to come so soon.

Columbus every day announced to his crew a less distance as the result of the day than they had really sailed.  For he was afraid of their distrust, and did not dare let them know how far they were from home.  The private journal, therefore, has such entries as this, “Sailed more than fifty-five leagues, wrote down only forty-eight.”  That is, he wrote on the daily log, which was open to inspection, a distance some leagues less than they had really made.

On the twentieth pelicans are spoken of, on the twenty-first “such abundance of weeds that the ocean seemed covered with them,” “the sea smooth as a river, and the finest air in the world.  Saw a whale, an indication of land, as they always keep near the coast.”  To later times, this note, also, shows how ignorant Columbus then was of mid-ocean.