We must not forget to mention that before the old pilot could get his project to stand, he had raised the price of eggs throughout Spain by placing so many on their own poor broken heads. For this destruction, however, he consoled himself with the maxim, “all’s well that ends well.” He carried his eggs and hopes to England, France, Portugal, and Navarre; but both were kept so long that they became addled.
A heavy fog prevented England at first from seeing the enterprise; but after the discovery of real land was made, she lost no time in procuring the advantages of it, and endeavored to secure them to herself, by allowing several vessels to be outfitted at Bristol.
These vessels were not built by Laird; but, sailing away on the blind side of the island, succeeded at last in boarding the continent, and exchanging some unprinted religious tracks for certain other tracts, afterwards well stamped by royal authority.
On their return, the promoters of this missionary enterprise built a handsome church, where prayers were daily offered for many years, for past success, and intercessions made for the interposition of the same kind Providence for new exchanges of a similar kind. These expeditions, it may be remarked, have been and are the foundation of England’s greatness,—her church and her trade; or rather to name them in juster order and according to her own estimate, her trade and her church. The Cabots, father and son, will ever be remembered by their addition to the world’s wealth by the discovery, in 1497, of Newfoundland. At the time it was thought to be a story somewhat fishy, but it is now swallowed without any bones.
Landing of Columbus.
(p. 68)
The Portuguese were less fortunate, their ships having got somehow entangled in the line in crossing it, they were obliged to cast anchor against a high wind, which as usual was not so ill as not to benefit their English rivals. What became of these ships is not positively known; a glimpse of only one of them having since been obtained in Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. The rest may have drifted northwards, and their masts made to serve to splice the north pole, the old one having become somewhat loose from being so much worked about by meddlesome navigators.
Among the discoveries in America which Columbus did not make we may enumerate the following:—
First, a name for the continent; an omission afterwards supplied by a shabby countryman of his, whose own name we will not perpetuate by mentioning in this history.
Second, iron-clads; although he did come across some very hard characters, whose scaly armor history has ever since been mercilessly denting and battering. Columbus himself, although at one time cased in iron, and sent home on a trial trip, while he learned the value and preciousness of metal at the Spanish court, failed to discover its property to float him across seas successfully. Nor do we find any warrant for believing that he was the discoverer of,