on the very threshold, perhaps, of attaining the reward for which he had long struggled; or, owing to some particular bias, is led from the goal, instead of towards it, when it is almost within reach, while those who follow, profiting by experience, with comparative ease achieve the victory and reap the fame.
There is no more remarkable illustration of this truth, than the failure of Columbus to reach the golden shore which was the vision of his whole existence. Impressed with a belief that a passage was to be found which should lead him into the great Indian Ocean, he steered in the contrary direction to that in which lay, not the channel he was in search of, but the land where more than Indian wealth abounded.
It was on the 27th of July, in the year 1502, on his fourth and last voyage, that Columbus took his departure from the southern coast of Cuba, and, sailing in a south-westerly direction, arrived on the evening of the third day at the island of Guanaja, now called Bonacca, the easternmost of the group of which Ruatan is the principal, and ten leagues distant from the mainland of America. From this island, which offered nothing to detain him, he could descry, to the south, a high range of mountains, beyond which he trusted to find the longdesired region of Cathay, and, turning his face from the track which, if pursued, would have made him the discoverer of Yucatan and Mexico, he bent his course to the continent where disappointment alone awaited him.
It forms no part of the present plan to follow the route taken by the great Genoese, further than to indicate certain places at which he touched on the Mosquito shore, an account of the occupation of that coast being a part of the task which it is proposed to accomplish in