[3] The dates of the voyage may be here recapitulated. Columbus sailed from Palos on the third of August 1492, and reached the island of Gomera, one of the Canary islands, on the ninth of August, or in six days. He remained there and at Gran Canaria, refitting and replenishing his stores, till the sixth of September, when he began his passage due west across the Atlantic; and the first land of America was discovered on Friday the twelfth of October at two in the morning: thirty-six days after leaving Gran Canaria, and seventy days after leaving Palos in Spain.--E. [4] This would seem to be a great exaggeration, perhaps an error of the press; but now impossible to be rectified.--E [5] Nothing can be more ambiguous than the interpretation of signs between people who are utterly ignorant of each others language: But the signs on this occasion seem rather to imply that the cacique requested the Spaniards to declare themselves his friends, by participating in hostile demonstrations against the people from Tortuga.--E. [6] This term evidently expresses a person unused to the sea, as contradistinguished from an experienced seaman.--E. [7] Cazabi seems to have been what is now called casada in the British West Indies, or prepared manioc root; and axi in some other parts of this voyage is mentioned as the spice of the West Indies; probably either pimento or capsicum, and used as a condiment to relish the insipidity of the casada.--E. [8] The meaning of this term is nowhere explained in this voyage: but in the account of the discovery of America by Herrera, it is said to signify pale gold. From its application in the text, it is probably the Indian name of gold, the perpetual object of inquiry by the Spaniards.--E. [9] Such absurd fables have in all ages been the consequence of credulous intercourse of ill-informed men, ignorant of the languages of newly discovered nations. The Amazons of antiquity are here supposed to be rediscovered; but were afterwards transferred to the interior marshy plains of South America.--E. [10] The author probably alludes here to the various-shaped pods of different species or varieties of capsicum.--E. SECTION VI. _Second Voyage of Columbus to the West Indies_.