Page:The Ifs of History (1907).pdf/46

 reach the axis of that powerful current, which is here comparatively narrow, and runs very swiftly at the point where the due westward course from Gomera would have struck it. It is a fair chance that this drift would have carried Columbus so far north as to land him in the neighborhood of what is now Charleston, S. C., or even further to the northward, if he had followed the path he had laid out for himself.

Amazing the consequences that hung upon the flight of those "multitudes of birds" that wheeled Bahama-ward on that October day! The Admiral's landfall on the coast even of Florida would have made all temperate America Spanish, for it would have focused the might of Ferdinand and Isabella upon our shores. We know that the islands which lay immediately to the southward of his "Salvador," in the Bahamas, beckoned Columbus in that direction, and that the Indians were able by signs