With one ship, therefore, and two caravels, the great admiral made for the
Cape Verde islands, "a false name," as he observes, for nothing was to be
seen there of a green colour. He reached these islands on the 27th of
June, and quitted them on the 4th of July, having been in the midst of
such a dense fog all the time, that, he says, "it might have been cut with
a knife," Thence he proceeded to the south-west, intending afterwards to
take a westerly direction. When he had gone, as he says, one hundred and
twenty leagues, he began to find those floating fields of sea-weed which
he had encountered in his first voyage. Here he took an observation at
nightfall, and found that the north star was in five degrees. The wind
suddenly abated, and the heat was intolerable; so much so, that nobody
dared to go below deck to look after the wine and the provisions. This
extraordinary heat lasted eight days. The first day was clear, and if the
others had been like it, the admiral says, not a man would have been left
alive, but they would all have been burnt up.


COLUMBUS SAILS WESTWARD.

At last a favourable breeze sprang up, enabling the admiral to take a
westerly course, the one he most desired, as he had before noticed in his
voyages to the Indies that about a hundred miles west of the Azores there
was always a sudden change of temperature.[15]

[Footnote 15: I suppose he came into or out of one of those warm ocean
rivers which have so great an effect in modifying the temperature of the
earth--perhaps into the one which comes from the south of Africa through
the Gulf of Mexico, to our own shores, and on which we so much depend.]