[335] This appears from his letter to the Pope, February, 1502, in which he says, he had counted upon furnishing, in twelve years, 10,000 horse and 100,000 foot soldiers for the conquest of the Holy City, and that his undertaking to discover new countries was with the view of spending the means he might there acquire in this sacred service. Navarrete, Coleccion, Tom. II. p. 282. Gradually these and other kindred ideas took firm possession of his mind, and are found occasionally in his later journals, letters, and speculations, giving to his otherwise quiet and dignified style a tone elevated and impassioned like that of prophecy. It is true, that his adventurous spirit, when the mighty mission of his life was upon him, rose above all this, and, with a purged vision and through a clearer atmosphere, saw, from the outset, what he at last so gloriously accomplished; but still, as he presses onward, there not unfrequently break from him words which leave no doubt, that, in his secret heart, the foundations of his great hopes and purposes were laid in some of the most magnificent illusions that are ever permitted to fill the human mind. He believed himself to be, in some degree at least, inspired; and to be chosen of Heaven to fulfil certain of the solemn and grand prophecies of the Old Testament.[336] He wrote to his sovereigns in 1501, that he had been induced to undertake his voyages to the Indies, not by virtue of human knowledge, but by a Divine impulse, and by the force of Scriptural prediction.[337] He declared, that the world could not continue to exist more than a hundred and fifty-five years longer, and that, many a year before that period, he counted the recovery of the Holy City to be sure.[338] He expressed his belief, that the terrestrial paradise, about which he cites the fanciful speculations of Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustin, would be found in the southern regions of those newly discovered lands, which he describes with so charming an amenity, and that the Orinoco was one of the mystical rivers issuing from it; intimating, at the same time, that, perchance, he alone of mortal men would, by the Divine will, be enabled to reach and enjoy it.[339] In a remarkable letter of sixteen pages, addressed to his sovereigns from Jamaica in 1503, and written with a force of style hardly to be found in any thing similar at the same period, he gives a moving account of a miraculous vision, which he believed had been vouchsafed to him for his consolation, when at Veragua, a few months before, a body of his men, sent to obtain salt and water, had been cut off by the natives, thus leaving him outside the mouth of the river in great peril.