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 that way, as both the shortest and the surest, and he had the good fortune to convince Isabella of Castile of the probability of his project. He sailed from the port of Palos in August, 1492, near five years before the expedition of Yasco de Gama set out from Portugal, and, after a voyage of between two and three months discovered first some of the small Bahama or Lucayan Islands, and afterward the great Island of San Domingo.

But the countries which Columbus discovered either in this or in any of his subsequent voyages, had no resemblance to those which he had gone in quest of. Instead of the wealth, cultivation and populousness of China and Hindustan, he found in San Domingo, and in all the other parts of the New World which he ever visited, nothing but a country quite covered with wood, uncultivated, and inhabited only by some tribes of naked and miserable savages. He was not very willing, however, to believe that they were not the same with some of the countries described by Marco Polo, the first European who had visited, or at least had left behind him any description of China or the East Indies; and a very slight resemblance, such as that which he found between the name of Cibao, a mountain in San Domingo, and that of Cipango, mentioned by Marco Polo, was frequently sufficient to make him return to this favorite prepossession, though contrary to the clearest evidence. In his letters to Ferdinand and Isabella he called the countries which he had discovered the Indies. He entertained no doubt but that they were the extremity of those which had been described by Marco Polo, and that they were not very distant from the Ganges, or from the countries which had been conquered by Alexander. Even when at last convinced that they were different,