Columbus was of too active a disposition to indulge his well-earned repose; the old craving for adventure and exploration left him no peace. Under royal command a fleet worthy of his grand scheme of conquest and colonisation was prepared for him, consisting of three large galleons and fourteen caravels, carrying 1,500 men, and all things necessary for the establishment of a new colony. He was invested with supreme authority as admiral, viceroy, and captain-general of all islands and continents in the Western Ocean. Second in authority was Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, who accompanied the expedition bearing the royal commission of inspector-general of the West India Islands. By the end of September 1493 the fleet was speeding its way towards the Far West, and with favouring gales was wafted straight amongst the Windward Islands. Had some good genius guided their course across the deep in order to disclose to them the beauties of the new world, no fairer island could have been found than the one which, on that bright morning in January 1494 lay before the adventurers as the great master mariner steered his vessel into the safe harbour of Hayti—land of mountains. The climate was perfect; a perpetual summer was tempered by cool mountain breezes and periodical showers, which swept in from the Atlantic. By the banks of this beautiful harbour, on the north shore, Columbus planted the first Spanish settlement, and in grateful tribute to the Queen he named it Isabella. The country, which in all probability he believed to be the continent he was in search of, he named San Domingo, a name which soon disappears from the records, substituted by that of Hispaniola. From this island came to Europe the first written allusion to the use of tobacco by the natives. It is from Fra Ramono Pane, a Franciscan, whom Columbus had left at Hayti. In a letter to his friend Peter Martyr, Queen Isabel’s secretary, he tells him of a curious practice said to be common among the natives of rubbing the dried leaves of a herb into a powder, and then with a hollow forked tube, two prongs of which they put up their nostrils while holding the lower one in the powder, ‘they drew the powder into their noses, which purges them very much of humours.… The cane or tube is about half a cubit long.’ This description would seem to indicate snuffing rather than smoking. It seems clear that we have here come upon the origin of the practice of titillating the olfactories which towards the close of the sixteenth century, had become, says Molière, ‘la passion des honnetes gens.’ Catherine de Medici became one of the earliest devotees to the new indulgence; fashion led the _poudre à la Reine_ through the courts of Europe, where elegant dilettanti vied with each other in the display of jewelled snuff boxes filled with _odeur de Rome_, or other right puissant sternutatories, not always of a harmless kind. Prelates and abbés were enamoured of the delightfully-scented refresher, and in Spain they did