Day after day the so-called signs of land were seen. A large reward was offered to the first person who should see the sought-for continent, and consequently everybody was constantly pretending that a distant cloud or fog-bank was land, and then finding fault with the Admiral because he would not change his course. One day a pair of boobies--a bird singularly misnamed, in view of the fact that it rarely flies out of sight of land--rested in the rigging. Another day three birds of a kind--which, every one knows, were even better than two pairs--came on board one of the ships in the morning, and flew away again at night, and it was the universal opinion that they sang altogether too sweetly for sea-birds; the voices of the gull, the stormy petrel, and the albatross being notoriously far from musical. After a time these signs ceased to give the crews any comfort. As they forcibly observed, “What is the use of all your signs of land, so long as you don’t fetch on your land?” They became convinced that the sea was gradually becoming choked up with sea-weed, and that the fact that the surface of the water remained unruffled, although there was a steady breeze from the east, was proof that something was seriously wrong. We now know that the expedition was in the Sargasso Sea, a region of sea-weed and calms, and that in point of fact Columbus was lucky in not being becalmed for a year or two without any means of bringing his vessels to a more breezy region. This, however, he did not know, and he explained the quiet of the sea by asserting that the fleet was already in the lee of the unseen land. The men nevertheless continued to be discontented, and declined any longer to believe that land was near. Even the sight of a whale--which, as every one knows, is a land animal--failed to raise their spirits, although Columbus told them that, now that he had seen a whale, he knew they must be very near the shore. The sailors would not listen to his argument, and openly insulted his whale. They said he had brought them to a region where the wind either blew steadily from the east or scarcely blew at all; in either case opposing an insuperable obstacle to sailing back to Spain, for which reason, with the charming consistency of sailors, they wanted to turn back immediately and steer for Palos. Still, they did not break into open mutiny, but confined themselves to discussing the propriety of seizing the vessels, throwing Columbus overboard, and returning to Spain, where they could account for the disappearance of the Admiral by asserting that he had been pushed overboard by the cat, or had been waylaid, robbed, and murdered by the James boys; or by inventing some other equally plausible story. Happily, the wind finally sprang up again, and the sailors, becoming more cheerful, postponed their mutiny.