[Sidenote: 1492, August 3, Columbus sails.]
So, everything being ready, on the third of August, 1492, a half hour before sunrise, he unmoored his little fleet in the stream and, spreading his sails, the vessels passed out of the little river roadstead of Palos, gazed after, perhaps, in the increasing light, as the little crafts reached the ocean, by the friar of Rabida, from its distant promontory of rock.
(From Medina's _Arte de Navegar_, 1545.)]
The day was Friday, and the advocates of Columbus's canonization have not failed to see a purpose in its choice, as the day of our Redemption, and as that of the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre by Geoffrey de Bouillon, and of the rendition of Granada, with the fall of the Moslem power in Spain. We must resort to the books of such advocates, if we would enliven the picture with a multitude of rites and devotional feelings that they gather in the meshes of the story of the departure. They supply to the embarkation a variety of detail that their holy purposes readily imagine, and place Columbus at last on his poop, with the standard of the Cross, the image of the Saviour nailed to the holy wood, waving in the early breezes that heralded the day. The embellishments may be pleasing, but they are not of the strictest authenticity.
In order that his performance of an embassy to the princes of the East might be duly chronicled, Columbus determined, as his journal says, to keep an account of the voyage by the west, "by which course," he says, "unto the present time, we do not know, _for certain_, that any one has passed." It was his purpose to write down, as he proceeded, everything he saw and all that he did, and to make a chart of his discoveries, and to show the directions of his track.
[Illustration: [From Bethencourt's _Canarian_, London, 1872.]]
Nothing occurred during those early August days to mar his run to the Canaries, except the apprehension which he felt that an accident, happening to the rudder of the "Pinta,"--a steering gear now for some time in use, in place of the old lateral paddles,--was a trick of two men, her owners, Gomez Rascon and Christopher Quintero, to impede a voyage in which they had no heart. The Admiral knew the disposition of these men well enough not to be surprised at the mishap, but he tried to feel secure in the prompt energy of Pinzon, who commanded the "Pinta."