On the 10th of August 1498 a party landed on this coast and formally took possession of it in the name of the Sovereigns of Spain.  By an unlucky chance Columbus himself did not land.  His eyes were troubling him so much that he was obliged to lie down in his cabin, and the formal act of possession was performed by a deputy.  If he had only known!  If he could but have guessed that this was indeed the mainland of a New World that did not exist even in his dreams, what agonies he would have suffered rather than permit any one else to pronounce the words of annexation!  But he lay there in pain and suffering, his curious mystical mind occupied with a conception very remote indeed from the truth.

For in that fertile hotbed of imagination, the Admiral’s brain, a new and staggering theory had gradually been taking shape.  As his ships had been wafted into this delicious region, as the airs had become sweeter, the vegetation more luxuriant, and the water of the sea fresher,—­he had solemnly arrived at the conclusion that he was approaching the region of the true terrestrial Paradise:  the Garden of Eden that some of the Fathers had declared to be situated in the extreme east of the Old World, and in a region so high that the flood had not overwhelmed it.  Columbus, thinking hard in his cabin, blood and brain a little fevered, comes to the conclusion that the world is not round but pear-shaped.  He knows that all this fresh water in the sea must come from a great distance and from no ordinary river; and he decides that its volume and direction have been acquired in its fall from the apex of the pear, from the very top of the world, from the Garden of Eden itself.  It was a most beautiful conception; a theory worthy to be fitted to all the sweet sights and sounds in the world about him; but it led him farther and farther away from the truth, and blinded him to knowledge and understanding of what he had actually accomplished.

He had thought the coast of Cuba the mainland, and he now began to consider it at least possible that the peninsula of Paria was mainland also—­another part of the same continent.  That was the truth—­Paria was the mainland—­and if he had not been so bemused by his dreams and theories he might have had some inkling of the real wonder and significance of his discovery.  But no; in his profoundly unscientific mind there was little of that patience which holds men back from theorising and keeps them ready to receive the truth.  He was patient enough in doing, but in thinking he was not patient at all.  No sooner had he observed a fact than he must find a theory which would bring it into relation with the whole of his knowledge; and if the facts would not harmonise of themselves he invented a scheme of things by which they were forced into harmony.  He was indeed a Darwinian before his time, an adept in the art of inventing causes to fit facts, and then proving that the facts sprang from the causes; but his origins