Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/102

92 so different; nor can it be said that they have been grafted, because these trees grow wild in the field and nobody cares for them.

"The fishes here are so different from ours that it is a wonder. Some look like cocks of the finest colors in the world, blue, yellow, red, and all colors, and others variegated in a thousand fashions; their different hues being so exquisite that nobody can contemplate them without wondering, and feeling great delight in seeing them. There are also whales here; but on shore I saw no beasts whatever, save parrots and lizards."

Columbus found all these islands much more thickly inhabited than they are to-day, by a race of people who called themselves Ceboynas, although his misconception as to the nature of his discovery led him to bestow on them the name by which all the aboriginal inhabitants of this continent are now known.

As they had very few artificial wants, and were able to live without forethought or care in a land which knows no change of sea ms, where the harvest ripens without attention, and a tempting fish for the day's dinner can be picked out and speared as if it floated in the clear water of an aquarium, they were totally ignorant of much that the Spaniards regarded as essential for man, and Columbus, mistaking simplicity for destitution, makes the entry in his log-book that he "thought them to be a very poor people." It is true that, except for the "one who wore in his nose a piece of gold of the size of half a castellano, on which were letters," he found no indications of the wealth of India; but before he had been a week in the New World he discovered three luxuries which have been warmly welcomed by the whole civilized world.

On the third day he enters in his log that "the men I sent for water told me that the houses were well swept and perfectly clean, and that their beds and coverings looked like cotton nets, which they called hamacas"; and within a few days, as he extended his explorations to the neighboring Antilles, he met with cigars and chocolate. Poor the Ceboynas might be in the matter of useless clothing and arms, but a race which could doze idly in hammocks, under the blue sky, in the warm sea-breeze, idly puffing their Havana cigars, as they gazed out on to the flashing water and waited for their crops to ripen, were not completely destitute and squalid. Civilized man might well covet even a harder life than that of the natives of the lovely Lucayan Islands before the discovery, but every school-boy knows the rude awakening which the peaceful Ceboynas soon received.

Two years ago I enjoyed the delights of a long cruise, in the schooner which carries the mails, through the calm, landlocked sounds which thread in all directions the mazes of the archipelago, and the gentle but unfailing breeze bore me on day after day,