Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/101

Rh should have been most profoundly impressed by its beauty, for nowhere on earth can we find a fairer land than these Isles of June. The exciting occupations incident upon his arrival left him little time for writing, but he faithfully jotted down day by day in his log-book in short, crisp sentences which even now are full of graphic interest, the impressions which were still fresh upon him. The United States Coast Survey has recently done good service to history by the publication of an English translation of this rare and almost unknown document, and the extracts in this paper are from this translation. After he set sail on the second day, he says that he saw so many islands that he could not decide to which one he should go first, and the men he had taken told him by signs that they were innumerable. On the fifth day he writes of the island which he named Isabella: "There was in it twelve leagues, as far as a cape which I called Cape Beautiful, which is in the west, and so it is beautiful, round, and very deep and free from shoals; at first it is rocky and low, but farther in it is a sandy beach, as it is along most of our coast. The island is the most beautiful thing I have seen; if the others are very beautiful, this is still more so; it has many trees, very green and Very large, and this land is higher than that of the other islands I have discovered, although it can not be called mountainous. Yet gentle hills enhance with their contrasts the beauty of the plain, and there appears to be much water in the middle of the island. Northeast of this cape there is an extensive promontory, and there are many groves very thick and very large. I wished to anchor off it in order to land, and visit so handsome a spot, but it was shallow and I could not anchor, except far from land, and the wind was very favorable to come to this cape, where I am now anchored, and which I have called the Cape Beautiful because it is so; and so I did not anchor off that promontory, because I saw this cape so green and so beautiful, as are all the other things and lands of these islands, so that I do not know to which to go first, nor do my eyes grow tired with looking at such beautiful verdure; and when I reached this cape the odor came so good and sweet from flowers or trees on the land, that it was the sweetest thing in the world."

Of the Island of Fernandina, he says (October 16th): "The island is very green and level, and exceedingly fertile. . . . I saw many trees whose shape was very different from ours, and many of them which had branches of many kinds, although all growing from one trunk, and one branch of one kind and another of another kind, and so different that the diversity of the kinds is the greatest wonder of the world for instance, one branch had leaves like those of cane, and another like those of a mastic; and thus on a single tree there were five or six of these kinds, and all