friend Fonseca to show him both the pearls and Columbus's map of
Trinidad and the neighboring coast. Although Ojeda had recently been in
open rebellion against the Admiral in Haiti, as we have seen, Fonseca
did not hesitate to let him see where the pearl land lay; and so Ojeda,
with an Italian named Vespucci, whom we shall meet later, sailed to
Paria and gathered its wealth.

Also, in this year so great for navigation, a Portuguese fleet of
thirteen ships set out from Lisbon to round the Cape of Good Hope. In
trying to escape the long calms which had beset Bartolome Dias in the
Gulf of Guinea, Pedro Cabral, commander of the fleet, struck out quite
far from the Morocco coast and got into the Equatorial Current. The
existence of this powerful westward current had never been suspected by
either Spanish or Portuguese mariners. Wind and current combining,
Cabral and his captains found themselves, in about a month's time, on
the coast of Brazil near the present Rio de Janeiro. Thus a current
never before known carried them to land never before known. And thus for
the second time, if the shipwrecked pilot told the truth, America was
discovered by accident.

All this had given Europe some idea of the vastness of the world to the
west. If Columbus was to bring his own discoveries to a glorious finish,
it was high time that, instead of quibbling over maintaining a contract,
he should have given up the empty honors that were to have been his, and
have asked only for permission to hurry back and discover more land.

Ferdinand, who now saw that the islands would need not one but a dozen
governors if ever they were to be colonized and developed, would not
hear of reinstating Columbus as governor. The most the monarchs would
give him in the way of satisfaction was that Bobadilla should be removed