LIFE
308
tipped with sharp bones.
A N D
VOYAGES
OF
[BOOK V I .
Provisions seemed to abound.
There
were many domesticated geese like those of Europe, and parrots as large as household fowls, with blue, green, white, and scarlet plumage, being the splendid species called guacamayos.
Here
also the Spaniards first met with the anana, or pine-apple, the flavor and fragrance of which astonished and delighted them. In one of the houses they were surprised to find a pan or other utensil of iron, not having ever met with that metal in the New World. Fernando Colon supposes that it was formed of a certain kind of heavy stone found among those islands, which, when burnt, has the appearance of shining iron; or it might have been some utensil brought by the Indians from Hispaniola.
Certain it is,
that no native iron was ever found among the people of these islands. In another house was the stern-post of a vessel.
How had it
reached these shores, which appeared never to have been visited by the ships of civilized man ?
Was it the wreck of some vessel
from the more enlightened countries of Asia, which they supposed to lie somewhere in this direction ?
Or a part of the caravel
which Columbus had lost at the island of Hispaniola during his first voyage ?
Or a fragment of some European ship which had
drifted across the Atlantic ? case.
The latter was most probably the
The constant current which sets over from the coast of
Africa, produced by the steady prevalence of the trade-winds, must occasionally bring wrecks from the Old World to the N e w ; and long before the discovery of Columbus, the savages of the islands and the coasts may have gazed with wonder at fragments of European barks which have floated to their shores. What struck the Spaniards with horror was the sight of human bones, vestiges, as they supposed, of unnatural repasts;