CHAP. V . ]
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS.
51
Under the third head, are enumerated various indications of land in the west, which had floated to the shores of the known world.
It is curious to observe, how, when once the mind of
Columbus had become heated in the inquiry, it attracted to it every corroborating circumstance, however vague and trivial. He appears to have been particularly attentive to the gleams of information derived from veteran mariners, who had been em ployed in the recent voyages to the African coasts; and also from the inhabitants of lately discovered islands, placed, in a manner, on the frontier posts of geographical knowledge. All these are carefully noted down among his memorandums, to be collocated with the facts and opinions already stored up in his mind. Such, for instance, is the circumstance related to him by Martin Vicenti, a pilot in the service of the king of Portugal; that, after sailing four hundred and fifty leagues to the west of Cape St. Vincent, he had taken from the water a piece of carved wood, which evidently had not been labored with an iron instru ment.
As the winds had drifted it from the west, it might have
come from some unknown land in that direction. Pedro Correa, brother-in-law of Columbus, is likewise cited, as having seen, on the island of Porto Santo, a similar piece of wood, which had drifted from the same quarter.
He had heard
also from the king of Portugal, that reeds of an immense size had floated to some of those islands from the west, in the descrip tion of which, Columbus thought he recognized the immense reeds said by Ptolemy to grow in India. Information is likewise noted, given him by the inhabitants of the Azores, of trunks of huge pine trees, of a kind that did not grow upon any of the islands, wafted to their shores by the wes terly winds; but especially of the bodies of two dead men, cast
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