Skip to content
🇭🇹   BETA  ·  9,776 entries published  ·  90,224 entries away from the 100k milestone.       🇭🇹   BETA  ·  9,776 entries published  ·  90,224 entries away from the 100k milestone.       
You are offline — some content may not be available
1492-12-05

Columbus sends the Niña ahead to sound a harbor at nightfall

Haitian

… afterward he went 10 miles an hour; and so he would have gone 88 miles, which are 22 leagues, by sunset; all to the southeast. And because night was falling he ordered the caravel Niña to go ahead to see the harbor by daylight, because she was a good sailer, and on reaching the mouth of the harbor, which was like the bay of Cádiz, and because it was already night, she sent her boat to sound the harbor, which carried a candle light, and before the Admiral reached the place where the caravel was beating to windward and waiting for the boat to signal her to enter the harbor, the boat’s light went out. The caravel, seeing no light, ran on and showed a light to the Admiral, and when he came up to her they told what had happened. While this was going on, those in the boat made another light: the caravel went to it, and the Admiral could not, and spent all that night beating to windward.

Source  ·  p. p. 229 Bartolomé de Las Casas, Diario del primer viaje (Las Casas’s abstract of Columbus’s log), in Navarrete, Colección de los viages y descubrimientos, t. I (1825), p. p. 229