And so Columbus sailed away toward the sun setting. In about a month he reached and passed the Canary Islands, the farthest known land. This was on Sunday, September 6, 1492. And then the voyage really began. The day passed, and, as the sky and the sea grew dark, the sailors became terrified, and when at last night fell, and they lost sight of the land which bordered the great sea of darkness, they wept from fear, and said they should never return to their homes. Columbus had a hard time to quiet their fears, but finally they grew calm and listened to his descriptions of the beautiful country toward which they were sailing. And so they went on, sometimes hopeful and sometimes despairing, and once they made a plot to throw Columbus overboard and then turn the ships about and go home, but happily this was not carried out. As they advanced, the oldest sailors were deceived by frequent signs of land. On the 26th they entered into a region where the air was soft and balmy, and fields of sea-weed began to appear. "This day and the day after," said Columbus, "the air was so mild that it wanted but the song of the nightingales, to make it like the month of April in Andalusia." One evening, just as the sun was going down there came a cry of "_Land!_" from the Pinta, which was leading the other ships. Columbus had promised a reward to him who should first see land, and Martin Alonzo Pinzon, who was ahead in the Pinta, now claimed the reward. He said that he saw land in the west; they all looked and saw a dark, cloudy mass about twenty-five leagues away. Columbus and the sailors knelt and sang _Gloria in Excelsis Deo_; but in the morning, when they looked again for the hoped-for land, they saw nothing but the wide sea stretching away as far as the eye could see. The land which Martin Pinzon had seen from the stern of the Pinta had been but a cloud, which had disappeared in the night.