Had the heart of the great theorist, sailing obstinately straight west in obedience to the call of the land whose presence there he had reasoned out, misgiven him at last? Had the discouragement and incredulity of his men affected him? We do not know. But we do know that finally he heeded Pinzon's oft-repeated demand that the course be altered. It looked like common sense to follow the birds. Really it was not. The theory was his true guide. Columbus betrayed his faith; he resolved, as his journal recorded, "to turn his prow to the west-southwest, with the determination of pursuing that course _for two days_." He never resumed the westward course. He had weakened in his devotion to his own idea--and had lost a continent for Spain and the Roman Catholic Church. For in spite of the conclusion reached by John Boyd Thacher, in his monumental work on Columbus, that even if the Admiral had held the westward course his fleet would not have passed the northernmost tip of the Bahamas, there is sufficient ground for the generally accepted conclusion that his landfall in that case would have been on the coast of Florida or South Carolina, or even North Carolina. After the alteration of his course, Columbus continued to sail for four days in a general southwesterly direction, before, on the 12th of October, he fell upon Watling's Island. In that time he had sailed, according to his own reckoning, one hundred and forty-one leagues. This distance, if persisted in due to the westward, would have brought him in contact with drift and real bird-flight indications of the continent. Let us see toward what point his course had been laid. Setting sail from Gomera, in the Canary Islands, Columbus purposed to go straight to the west until he reached land. Gomera lies in about the latitude of Cape Canaveral, or the Indian River, Florida. A line drawn from Gomera to Cape Canaveral passes to the northward of the Bahamas altogether. No land lay in the Admiral's path to Florida. But any supposition that Columbus would not have gone to the northward of the Indian River ignores the northward drift that the Gulf Stream would have caused his ships. He had yet, of course, to reach the axis of that powerful current, which is here comparatively narrow, and runs very swiftly at the point where the due westward course from Gomera would have struck it. It is a fair chance that this drift would have carried Columbus so far north as to land him in the neighborhood of what is now Charleston, S. C., or even further to the northward, if he had followed the path he had laid out for himself.