From this time forward this is to be but a sad history, and the sadness, nay, the cruelty of the story, results largely from the composition of the body of men whom Columbus took with him on this occasion.  It is no longer coopers and blacksmiths and boatswains and sailmakers who surround him.  These were officers of court, whose titles even cannot be translated into modern language, so artificial were their habits and so conventional the duties to which they had been accustomed.  Such men it was, who made poor Columbus endless trouble.  Such men it was, who, at the last, dragged him down from his noble position, so that he died unhonored, dispirited and poor.  To the same misfortune, probably, do we owe it that, for a history of this voyage, we have no longer authority so charming as the simple, gossipy journal which Columbus kept through the first voyage, of which the greater part has happily been preserved.  It may be that he was too much pressed by his varied duties to keep up such a journal.  For it is alas! an unfortunate condition of human life, that men are most apt to write journals when they have nothing to tell, and that in the midst of high activity, the record of that activity is not made by the actor.  In the present case, a certain Doctor Chanca, a native of Seville, had been taken on board Columbus’s ship, perhaps with the wish that he should be the historian of the expedition.  It may be that in the fact that his journal was sent home is the reason why the Admiral’s, if he kept one, has never been preserved.  Doctor Chanca’s narrative is our principal contemporary account of the voyage.  From later authorities much can be added to it, but all of them put together are not, for the purposes of history, equal to the simple contemporaneous statement which we could have had, had Columbus’s own journal been preserved.

The great fleet sailed from Cadiz on the twenty-fifth day of September, in the year 1493, rather more than thirteen months after the sailing of the little fleet from Palos of the year before.  They touched at the Grand Canary as before, but at this time their vessels were in good condition and there was no dissatisfaction among the crews.  From this time the voyage across the ocean was short.  On the third day of November, 11 the Sunday after All Saints Day had dawned, a pilot on the ship cried out to the captain that he saw land.  “So great was the joy among the people, that it was marvellous to hear the shouts of pleasure on all hands.  And for this there was much reason because the people were so much fatigued by the hard life and by the water which they drank that they all hoped for land with much desire.”