The vessel that lay at anchor in the beautiful land-locked harbor of Nuevitas was the screw steamer _Yarmouth_, a steel ship which, if not as fast and elegant as the ocean greyhounds that cross the Atlantic, was large and fine enough to have easily commanded the unbounded admiration and amazement of Christopher Columbus had he beheld her when he landed from the _Santa Maria_ on the coast of Cuba near this point more than four centuries ago. Great changes have been wrought since the days of Columbus in the manner of craft that sail the seas, but less progress has been made by the city of Nuevitas in those four hundred long years. The _Yarmouth_, substantial if not handsome, and safe if not swift, had brought the colonists to this port without mishap, thus redeeming one of the many promises of the Cuban Land and Steamship Company. Since early morning the vessel had been slowly steaming along the palm-fringed coast of the "Pearl of the Antilles," daybreak having revealed the fact that the boat was too far to the eastward, and late in the forenoon we entered the picturesque bay of Nuevitas, took on a swarthy Cuban pilot, and, gliding quietly past straggling palm-thatched native shacks and tiny green-clad isles, came to anchor in plain view of the city that Velasquez founded in 1514. We had passed two or three small circular forts, any one of which would have been demolished by a single well-directed shot from a thirteen-inch gun. These defenses were unoccupied, and there was naught else to threaten the established peace. [Illustration: CITY OF NUEVITAS, CUBA.]