Amazing the consequences that hung upon the flight of those "multitudes of birds" that wheeled Bahama-ward on that October day! The Admiral's landfall on the coast even of Florida would have made all temperate America Spanish, for it would have focused the might of Ferdinand and Isabella upon our shores. We know that the islands which lay immediately to the southward of his "Salvador," in the Bahamas, beckoned Columbus in that direction, and that the Indians were able by signs to make it clear to him that a greater land, which was Cuba, and which he called "Cipango," lay in this southerly direction. That way he laid his course, "in order," as he wrote in his journal, "to go to this other island which is very large and where all these men whom I am bringing from the island of San Salvador make signs that there is a great deal of gold and that they wear bracelets of it on their arms and legs and in their ears and in their noses and on their breasts." Reason enough! Only it meant that Spain's energy in this hemisphere was to be directed to the West Indies, and South America, and Mexico, for as long a time as it was destined to endure, and that the vast continental North was to be left as the heritage of another race. It is true that Florida afterward became Spanish. But it was not a question of what Florida, merely, was to be. If Columbus had landed upon the mainland, the northeastward trend of the coast, reaching back toward Spain by just so much, would have beckoned him northward, not southward. Even if he had explored southwardly, by some chance, he must have returned northward when he had reached the point of the Florida peninsula; and in the northerly direction he would have cruised, returning Europe-ward. And he would have annexed the land step by step, as he annexed Cuba, Hispaniola, and all the southern lands as fast as he touched them. The Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, would have been the scenes of the Spaniards' settlement for a hundred years. Though afterward they took Florida, that was as a mere side issue; it was unconsidered, neglected, after Cuba and Mexico; and was passed on at length to the race that came to the mainland more than a hundred years after the landfall at San Salvador.