[The Life of Columbus by Arthur Helps]@TWC D-Link bookThe Life of Columbus CHAPTER III 1/24
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First Voyage. At length all the preparations were complete, and on a Friday (not inauspicious in this case), the 3rd of August, 1492, after they had all confessed and received the sacrament, they set sail from the Bar of Saltes, making for the Canary Islands.
One can fancy how the men and the women of Palos watched the specks of white sails vanishing in the west, and how, as each frail bark in turn disappeared in the great ocean, mothers and sisters turned weepingly away as if from a last farewell at the grave of their sailor kinsmen. Columbus was now fairly afloat, and we may say with Milton, that-- The world was all before him, where to choose. And Providence his guide. His choice was made, however; and his Guide did not fail him. CANARY ISLANDS REACHED. He was about to change the long-continued, weary, dismal life of a suitor, for the sharp intense anxiety of a struggle in which there was no alternative to success but deplorable, ridiculous, fatal failure.
Speaking afterwards of the time he spent as a suitor at court, he says, "Eight years I was torn with disputes, and in a word, my proposition was a thing for mockery." It was now to be seen what mockery was in it.
The following account of the voyage is mainly taken from an abridgment of Columbus's own diary made by Las Casas, who in some places gives the admiral's own words. The little squadron reached the Canary Islands in a few days, with no event worth recording, except that the caravel "Pinta," commanded Martin Alonzo Pinzon, unshipped her rudder.
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