CHAP. II.]
CHRISTOPHER
COLUMBUS.
133
sailing of the ship, so that the crews were kept in ignorance of the real distance they had advanced.* On the 11th of September, when about one hundred and fifty leagues west of Ferro, they fell in with part of a mast, which from its size appeared to have belonged to a vessel of about a hundred and twenty tons burthen, and which had evidently been a long time in the water.
The crews, tremblingly alive to every
thing that could excite their hopes or fears, looked with rueful eye upon this wreck of some unfortunate voyager, drifting omi nously at the entrance of those unknown seas. On the 13th of September, in the evening, being about two hundred leagues from the island of Ferro, Columbus for the first time noticed the variation of the needle; a phenomenon which had never before been remarked.
He perceived about nightfall
that the needle, instead of pointing to the north star, varied about half a point, or between five and six degrees, to the northwest, and still more on the following morning.
Struck with this cir
cumstance, he observed it attentively for three days, and found that the variation increased as he advanced.
He at first made
no mention of this phenomenon, knowing how ready his people were to take alarm, but it soon attracted the attention of the pilots, and filled them with consternation.
It seemed as if the
very laws of nature were changing as they advanced, and that they were entering another world, subject to unknown influ* It has been erroneously stated that Columbus kept two journals. merely in the reckoning, or log-book, that he deceived the crew.
It was
His journal
was entirely private, and intended for his own use and the perusal of the sovereigns.
In a letter written from Granada, in 1503, to Pope Alexander
VII, he says that he had kept an account of his voyages, in the style of the Commentaries of Cesar, which he intended to submit to his holiness.