for geographical references of this article.

The story of his actual achievement is sufficiently known to all
readers, and need not be repeated here. Amid the many disappointments
and humiliations which succeeded the brief triumphant blaze of his
first return, and clouded the latter years of his life, Columbus was
spared the pang of realizing that the problem was insoluble for the
time. Like many a prophet before him, he knew not what, nor what
manner of time, the spirit that was in him foretold, and died the
happier for his ignorance. The certainty that a wilderness, peopled by
savages and semi-barbarians, had been added to the known world, would
have been a poor awakening from the golden dreams of beneficent glory
as well as of profit which so long had beckoned him on. That the
western land he had discovered interposed a barrier to the further
progress of ships towards his longed-for goal, as inexorable as the
mountain ranges and vast steppes of Asia, was mercifully concealed
from his eyes; and the elusive "secret of the strait" through which he
to the last hoped to pass, though tantalizing in its constant evasion,
kept in tension the springs of hope and moral energy which might have
succumbed under the knowledge of the truth.

It fell to the great discoverer, in his last voyage, to approach the
continent, and to examine its shores along the region where the true
secret of the strait lay hidden,--where, if ever, it shall pass from a
dream to a reality, by the hand of man. In the autumn of 1502, after
many trials and misadventures, Columbus, having skirted the south side
of Cuba, reached the north coast of Honduras. There was little reason,
except in his own unaccountable conviction, for continuing thence in
one direction rather than in the other; but by some process of thought
he had convinced himself that the sought-for strait lay to the south