“‘In the last years there will come an age in which Ocean shall loosen the bonds of things; and a great land will be accessible; and another Tiphys shall discover new worlds, and Thule shall no longer be the extremity of the earth.’[117] This prediction may be considered really fulfilled in the person of the admiral.... Marco Polo, the Venetian, and John Mandeville, in their travels say that they went much farther eastward than Ptolemy and Marinus mention, who, although they do not speak of the Eastern Sea, yet by the account they give of the East it may be assumed that India is not far distant from Africa and Spain.”[118] Ferdinand Columbus further says that his father expected to find, “before he came to India, a very convenient island or continent, from which he might pursue with more advantage his main design. This hope was grounded upon the statements of many wise men and philosophers, who believed that the greatest part of this terraqueous globe was land, or that there was more land than water, which, if true, he assumed that between the coast of Spain and the limits of India then known, there were many islands and a considerable extent of main-land.... A pilot of the king of Portugal, named Martin Vicente, told him that, being at one time four hundred and fifty leagues westward of Cape St. Vincent, he found and picked up in the sea a piece of wood ingeniously carved, but not with iron, which led him to believe, as the wind had been blowing from the west for several days, that the piece of wood had drifted from some island lying toward the west. Then one Pedro Correa, who had married the sister of the admiral’s wife, told him that at the island of Porto Santo[119] he had seen another piece of wood, brought by the same winds, as nicely carved as the piece already mentioned, and that canes had been found there so thick that each joint would hold more than four quarts of wine, which reports he said he communicated to the king of Portugal while talking to him about these matters. The pieces of cane were shown to him. There being no place in our parts where such cane grew, he inferred it to be true that the wind had brought the cane from some neighboring islands or else from India. For Ptolemy, in the first book of his geography, in the seventeenth chapter, says there is such cane in the eastern parts of India. And some of the people living on the islands, particularly on the Azores, told him that when the west wind blew for a long time the sea drifted some pieces of pine-wood upon those islands, particularly on the islands Gratiosa and Fayal, there being no pine-wood in all those parts, and that the sea cast upon the island of Flores, another of the Azores, the bodies of two dead men, who were very broad-faced and different in appearance from Christians. At Cape Verd and thereabouts they said that they once saw some covered canoes or boats which the people believed were driven