Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/103

Rh while new beauties rose up and unfolded themselves before me as the islands I had passed dropped down toward the horizon behind me and faded away, until there stole over me the feeling that the whole might be some fairy landscape traced by fancy in the summer clouds, and that if I closed my eyes for a minute I might find it all dissolving into air.

As I passed the little inlets, with their lines of white breakers, and beyond them the deep blue of the open ocean fading in the distance into the lighter blue of the sky; or, as I leaned over the rail while the vessel slipped on as if it were hung in mid-air; as I watched the gaudy fishes darting over the white sand many fathoms below, or caught glimpses into the deep dark caves between the great, dome-like coral-heads which swept up in smooth curves from the depths almost to the surface, and overhung cool grottoes hung with gorgeous anemones and sea-fans and sea-feathers, among which innumerable animals in an endless diversity of strange forms could be dimly seen as the vessel slipped by; as I drifted on day after day, and passed one charming spot after another, only to find still more beauty beyond, I could not escape the thought that in this enchanted land of beauty which no brush could paint, where every prospect pleases, man has been unutterably vile, and this not the heathen in his blindness, but the conqueror who, as old Bernal Diaz quaintly but frankly puts it, "Took his life in his hand that he might give light to them who sit in darkness, and satisfy the thirst for gold which all men feel."

Less than fifteen years after the discovery the forty thousand Ceboynas were gone, and the Lucayas were left desolate. For nearly two hundred years every one of these thousands of lovely islands was abandoned to the parrots and lizards, and, except for the visits of Ponce de Leon, in his search for the magic fountain, and an occasional English sailor, no boat moved through these quiet sounds; until at last the peaceful islanders who, as Coumbus writes to Queen Isabella, were the best people on earth, and loved their neighbors as themselves, were replaced by a new population, and the banner of the Jolly Rodger gathered here, from the ports of Europe, the worst human scum which civilization has ever produced. Who could cruise through this earthly paradise without meditating upon the fruit of our civilization as it has here developed itself?

While Columbus had none of the vices of lesser men, he felt bound to fulfill his promise to enrich those who had aided him; and on his first Sunday, October 14th, only two days after his landing, the gentle influences of the Sabbath in this strange and beautiful land moved him to commit his impressions to writing, and, while his pen overflows with the delights of the New World and the loveliness of the people, he enters in his log that he is