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 there are trees of a thousand species, each having its particular fruit, and all of marvellous flavour." These pictures may have been in some respects over-coloured by Columbus and his crew, after their arduous and weary voyage: but contemporary writers confirm the original beauty of the West India Islands; nor are there to this day many islands which look more beautiful from the sea than those which were first made known to the world by Christopher Columbus. But even if the descriptions of the happiness of the natives is in some respects overdrawn, their position, under the patriarchal rule of their native caciques, with few wants and little of fear or care, compares favourably with the state of these islands at any period since they came under the rule of the highly civilized nations of Europe. Nor were these poor people, though living in a state of nature, without some of the consolations of religion. "They confess," remarks Peter Martyr, "the soul to be immortal, and having put off the bodily clothing, they imagine it goeth forth to the woods and the mountains, and that it liveth there perpetually in caves."

Throughout the whole time Columbus was engaged in discovering and surveying these islands, he was under the conviction—a conviction which he carried to his grave—that they formed part of Asia, or rather of India, the name by which the greater part of that continent was then known, and that they were the islands spoken of by Marco Polo, as lying opposite Cathay in the Chinese Sea. Indeed, the great navigator construed everything he saw in harmony