The True Story of Christopher Columbus by Elbridge Streeter Brooks

Author:Elbridge Streeter Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history of, america, american, us, usa, explorer, explorers, exploration, learn
ISBN: 9781781669433
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2012
Published: 2012-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER IX. HOW THE TROUBLES OF THE ADMIRAL BEGAN.

Both the farmers and the gold hunters had a hard time of it in the land they had come to so hopefully. The farmers did not like to farm when they thought they could do so much better at gold hunting; the gold hunters found that it was the hardest kind of work to get from the water or pick from the rocks the yellow metal they were so anxious to obtain.

Columbus himself was not satisfied with the small amount of gold he got from the streams and mines of Hayti; he was tired of the wrangling and grumbling of his men. So, one day, he hoisted sail on his five ships and started away on a hunt for richer gold mines, or, perhaps, for those wonderful cities of Cathay he was still determined to find.

He sailed to the south and discovered the island of Jamaica. Then he coasted along the shores of Cuba. The great island stretched away so many miles that Columbus was certain it was the mainland of Asia. There was some excuse for this mistake. The great number of small islands he had sailed by all seemed to lie just as the books about Cathay that he had read said they did; the trees and fruits that he found in these islands seemed to be just the same that travelers said grew in Cathay.

To be sure the marble temples, the golden-roofed palaces, the gorgeous cities had not yet appeared; but Columbus was so certain that he had found Asia that he made all his men sign a paper in which they declared that the land they had found (which was, as you know, the island of Cuba) was really and truly the coast of Asia.

This did not make it so, of course; but it made the people of Spain, and the king and queen, think it was so. And this was most important. So, to keep the sailors from going back on their word and the statement they had signed, Columbus ordered that if any officer should afterward say he had been mistaken, he should be fined one hundred dollars; and if any sailor should say so, he should receive one hundred lashes with a whip and have his tongue pulled out. That was a curious way to discover Cathay, was it not?

Then Columbus, fearing another shipwreck or another mutiny, sailed back again to the city of Isabella. His men were discontented, his ships were battered and leaky, his hunt for gold and palaces had again proved a failure. He sailed around Jamaica; he got as far as the eastern end of Hayti, and then, just as he was about to run into the harbor of Isabella, all his strength gave out. The strain and the disappointment were too much for him; he fell very, very sick, and on the twenty-ninth of September, 1494, after just about five months of sailing and wandering and hunting, the Nina ran

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