[145] Historie del S. D. Fernando Colombo. cap. xx, xxii. The discovery of land was made on Friday morning, the twelfth of October, _old style_. According to the calendar of Julius Cæsar, every fourth year had three hundred and sixty-six days; the others three hundred and sixty-five. Pope Gregory XIII. changed this method of reckoning time by dropping ten days in October, 1582, in order to bring back the day of the vernal equinox to the same day, in the year 325, in which the council of Nice was convened. By an act of the parliament of Great Britain, in 1751, eleven days, in September, 1752, were dropped, and the third day of the month was reckoned the fourteenth of the _new style_. This mode of reckoning time is called the _new style_. [146] Bartolomé de las Casas was born at Seville, in 1474. In 1502 he made his first voyage to the New World, and quitted its shores for the last time in 1547. His history of the Indies,—Historia general de las Indias,—written between the years 1527 and 1562, was not printed until 1875-’76, when it was issued, in five volumes, at Madrid. Before his death, in 1566, he gave the manuscript of this work to the convent of San Gregorio, at Valladolid, with the request that it should not be published for forty years. A manuscript in Las Casas’s hand-writing, apparently an abridgment of Columbus’s journal of his first voyage, which the former evidently had made while obtaining material for his history of the Indies, was found by Martin Fernandez de Navarrete, the Spanish historian, in the archives of Spain, when making, about the year 1790, researches for information respecting the marine history of Spain. [147] This island is believed by Munoz to be Watling Island; by Navarrete, Grand Turk Island; by Humboldt and Irving, Cat Island. The Bahamas lie between the island of Hayti or San Domingo and the east coast of Florida, or between 21° and 27° 30´ north latitude and 70° 30´ and 79° 5´ west longitude. The principal islands of the group are the Grand Bahama, Great and Little Abaco, Andros, New Providence, San Salvador, Rum Cay, Great Exuma, Watling, Long, Crooked, Atwood’s Key, Great and Little Magua islands. The identity of the island is discussed at some length by Captain G. V. Fox, of the United States Navy, who remarks: “The study that I gave to the subject in the winter of 1878-’79 in the Bahamas, which had been familiar cruising-ground to me, has resulted in the selection of Samana or Atwood Cay for the first landing-place. It is a little island, 8.8 miles east and west, 1.6 extreme breadth, and averaging 1.2 north and south. It has 8.6 square miles. The east end is in latitude 23° 05´ N.; longitude, 73° 37´ west of Greenwich.... Turk is smaller than Samana, and Cat very much longer.”—An attempt to solve the problem of the first landing-place of Columbus in the New World. By Captain G. V. Fox, United States Coast and Geodetic Survey. Appendix No. 18. Report for 1880. Washington, 1882. pp. 43, 44.