Conspiracy among the men.

Accordingly, he was not to be diverted from the main design by any partial success, though by this time he knew well the fears of his men, some of whom had already come to the conclusion, “that it would be their best plan to throw him quietly into the sea, and say he unfortunately fell in, while he stood absorbed in looking at the stars.”  Indeed, three days after he had resolved to pass on to the Indies, we find him saying, for Las Casas gives his words, “Very needful for me was this contrary wind, for the people were very much tormented with the idea that there were no winds on these seas that could take them back to Spain.”

  His determination to proceed.

On they go, having signs occasionally in the presence of birds and grass and fish that land must be near; but land does not come.  Once, too, they are all convinced that they see land:  they sing the “Gloria in excelsis;” and even the admiral goes out of his course towards this land, which turns out to be no land.  They are like men listening to a dreadful discourse or oration, that seems to have many endings which end not:  so that the hearer listens at last in grim despair, thinking that all things have lost their meaning, and that ending is but another form of beginning.

These mariners were stout-hearted, too; but what a daring thing it was to plunge, down-hill as it were, into

  A world of waves, a sea without a shore,
  Trackless, and vast, and wild, [Rogers]

mocked day by day with signs of land that neared not.  And these men had left at home all that is dearest to man, and did not bring out any great idea to uphold them, and had already done enough to make them important men in their towns, and to furnish ample talk for the evenings of their lives.  Still we find Columbus, as late as the 3rd of October, saying, “that he did not choose to stop beating about last week during those days that they had such signs of land, although he had knowledge of there being certain islands in that neighbourhood, because he would not suffer any detention, since his object was to go to the Indies; and if he should stop on the way, it would show a want of mind.”

  Signs of land again.

Meanwhile, he had a hard task to keep his men in any order.  Peter Martyr, who knew Columbus well, and had probably been favoured with a special account from him of these perilous days, describes his way of dealing with the refractory mariners, and how he contrived to win them onwards from day to day; now soothing them with soft words, now carrying their minds from thought of the present danger by spreading out large hopes before them, not forgetting to let them know what their princes would say to them if they attempted aught against him, or would not obey his orders.  With this untutored crowd of wild, frightened men around him, with mocking hopes, not knowing what each day would bring to him, on went Columbus.  At last came the 11th of October, and with it indubitable signs of land.  The diary mentions their finding on that day a table-board and a carved stick, the carving apparently wrought by some iron instrument.  Moreover, the men in one of the vessels saw a branch of a haw tree with fruit on it.