It was Queen Isabel of Castile, wife of King Ferdinand of Aragon,[50] who after considerable hesitation, and against the advice of a council of leading bishops and statesmen, determined finally to pledge her sympathy, and tradition says her jewels if necessary, in the mariner’s cause. Part of the attraction of his project lay in its appeal to her Castilian imagination, for Castile had been ever haunted by the possibilities of the bleak grey ocean that rolled at the gates of Galicia; but still more potent than the thought of discovery was the desire of spreading the Catholic Faith. This hope also inspired Columbus, who regarded his enterprise as in the nature of a crusade, believing that he had been called to preach the Gospel to the millions of heathen inhabiting Cathay. When Columbus set forth on his first voyage to ‘the Indies’, as he roughly called the unknown territory he sought, those who sailed in his three ships were many of them ‘pressed’ men, that is, sailors ordered on board by their town, that having incurred royal displeasure was given this way of appeasing it. Thus they were without enthusiasm or any belief in what they thought their admiral’s mad and dangerous adventure, and from the time that they lost sight of land they never ceased to grumble and utter threats of mutiny. At one time it was the extraordinary variations in the compass that brought them trembling to complain; at another the steadiness of the wind blowing from the East that they believed would never change and allow them to return home; finally it was the sluggish waters of the Sargassa Sea, amid whose weeds they saw themselves destined to drift until they died of starvation and thirst. To every suggestion of setting the sails eastward Columbus turned a deaf ear: but for the rest he threatened, cajoled, or argued, as the occasion seemed to demand, his own heart sinking each time the cry of ‘Land!’ was raised and the ardently desired vision proved only to be some bank of clouds lying low upon the horizon. At length came the news that a moving light had been seen in the darkness. ‘It appeared like a candle that went up and down,’ says Columbus in his diary, and all waited eagerly for dawn that revealed at last a wooded island, later called the Bahamas, but then believed to be part of the mainland of Asia. Clad in armour, and carrying the royal banner of Spain, the great discoverer of the West stepped ashore, and there, humbly kneeling, he and his crews raised to Heaven a _Te Deum_ of thankfulness and joy.