. The storied West Indies . l details per-taining to his personality. My aim is to make appearreal and vivid the scenes not only of his cruisings andadventures, but those of others who followed afterhim—in their way equally interesting. With a fleet of fourteen caravels and three largecaracks containing nearly twelve hundred sailors,soldiers, cavaliers, priests, monks, and everythingnecessary for successfully planting a colony in theislands he had found, he left the harbor of Cadizand embarked on the waters of the deep. Sailing acourse more southerly than on the first voyage, hefinally sighted
. The storied West Indies . l details per-taining to his personality. My aim is to make appearreal and vivid the scenes not only of his cruisings andadventures, but those of others who followed afterhim—in their way equally interesting. With a fleet of fourteen caravels and three largecaracks containing nearly twelve hundred sailors,soldiers, cavaliers, priests, monks, and everythingnecessary for successfully planting a colony in theislands he had found, he left the harbor of Cadizand embarked on the waters of the deep. Sailing acourse more southerly than on the first voyage, hefinally sighted land, the second day of November,about midway the chain of islands now known as the6 59 60 THE STORIED WEST INDIES Lesser Antilles. This crescent-shaped archipelago ex-tends from Puerto Rico to the north coast of SouthAmerica, describing the arc of a circle, and has beenfancifully called the Bow of Ulysses. The indi-vidual isles and islets composing this chain are in p= 60 SECOND VOYAGEINWEST INDIAN WATERS SCALE OF MILES. The second voyage, 1493. striking contrast with those of the Bahamas, beingfor the most part detached mountain masses, isolatedpeaks, and volcanic cones thrust up from the depthsof old Ocean. In fact, it has been conjectured thatthey present the remains of a submerged continent,sunk in some great cataclysm—all but the summitsof its highest mountains—and perhaps of that lostAtlantis respecting which the early philosophersspeculated and the poets often wrote and or no they at one time united the two con-tinents of North and South America is a questionas yet undetermined. Scientific investigations, suchas deep-sea soundings and a study of their flora and THE CANNIBAL CARIBS 61 fauna, seem to confirm this theory; but (as some ofmy own contributions toward the solution of thisproblem have shown) if they were at one time inunion with the continents, it was long ages ago—perhaps seons. For one thing, each island has itsown species of plant and a
Size: 2169px × 1152px
Photo credit: © Reading Room 2020 / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookauthoroberfrederickafrederi, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900
