We owe the discovery of the trade winds to Columbus, and this would have been prominently connected with his name, had it not been supplanted by the glory of a greater achievement, the revelation of a new world to the knowledge of mankind. The ancients were entirely unacquainted with these permanent breezes, and though maritime adventure had been largely prosecuted by the Portuguese at the instigation of Prince Henry, they had not penetrated into the region of the trades. Proceeding cautiously along the shores of Barbary, they had explored the coasts of Africa to Cape de Verde, rescued the Azore Islands from the “oblivious empire of the ocean,” and afterward, under Vasco di Gama, doubled the Cape of Good Hope; but these voyages carried them clear of the district of the north and south-east trade winds. But soon after leaving the Canaries in the Santa Maria, Columbus fell in with the former, which in the summer extend to the latitude of those islands, and—for the first time—a sail from the Old World swelled before the steady breath of the northern tropic. This circumstance, favorable to the success of his expedition, speedily excited the apprehensions of his crew, who found themselves borne, day after day, by a permanent breeze, farther from their native shores, and inferred the impossibility of returning, as they observed no change in its direction. Fortunately for his fame, and for the world, the great navigator firmly held on his course, reached the bounds of the before-supposed illimitable ocean, and re-crossed it in the region of the variables, to the north of the northern trade wind. Now, in passing from the Canaries to Cumana, on the north coast of South America, it is scarcely ever necessary to touch the sails of a ship; and with equal facility the passage is made across the Pacific, from Acapulco, on the west coast of Mexico, to the Philippine Islands. If a channel were cut through the Isthmus of Panama, the voyage to China would be remarkably facilitated by the trade winds of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans; be more speedy, agreeable, and safe than the usual route by the Cape, the chief interruption to its uniformity occurring in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, where the trade wind blows impetuously, the sea is stormy, and the sky gray and cloudy.