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Your Design All Along: FOR more than four hundred years the...

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Your Design All Along:

FOR more than four hundred years the mind of man has been possessed with a great idea, which, although by its wide diffusion and prophetic nature resembling one of those fundamental instincts whose very existence points to a necessary fulfillment, first quickened into life in the thought of Christopher Columbus.

To him the vision, dimly seen through the scanty and inaccurate knowledge of his age, imaged a close and facile communication, by means of the sea, that great bond of nations, between two ancient and diverse civilizations, which centred, the one around the Mediterranean, the birthplace of European commerce, refinement, and culture, the other upon the shores of that distant Eastern Ocean which lapped the dominions of the Great Khan, and held upon its breast the rich island of Zipangu.

Hitherto, an envious waste of land, entailing years of toilsome and hazardous journey, had barred them asunder.

A rare traveler might now and again penetrate from one to the other, but it was impossible to maintain by land the constant exchange of influence and benefit which, though on a contracted scale, had constituted the advantage and promoted the development of the Mediterranean peoples.

The microcosm of the land-girt sea then only typified that future greater family of nations, which one by one have since been bound into a common tie of interest by the broad enfolding ocean, that severs only to knit them more closely together.

So with a seer's eye, albeit as in a glass darkly, saw Columbus, and was persuaded, and embraced the assurance.

As the bold adventurer, walking by faith and not by sight, launched his tiny squadron upon its voyage, making the first step in the great progress which was to be, and still is not completed, he little dreamed that the mere incident of stumbling upon an unknown region that lay across his route should be with posterity his chief title to fame, obscuring the true glory of his grand conception, as well as delaying its fulfillment to a far distant future.

The story of his actual achievement is sufficiently known to all readers, and need not here be repeated.

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 for the time insoluble.

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 had so long 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.

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It fell to the great discoverer, in his last voyage, to approach the continent, and 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 rather than to the north.

He therefore turned to the eastward, though the wind was contrary, and, after a hard buffet against it, doubled Cape Gracias á Dios, which still retains its expressive name, significant of his relief at finding that the trend of the beach at last permitted him to follow his desired course with a fair wind. During the next two months he searched the entire coast line as far as Porto Bello, discovering and examining several openings in the land which have since been of historical importance, among others the mouth of the San Juan River and the Chiriqui Lagoon, one of whose principal divisions still recalls his visit in its name, Almirante Bay, the Admiral's Bay. A little beyond, to the eastward of Porto Bello, he came to a point already known to the Spaniards, having been reached from Trinidad.

The explorer thus acquired the certainty that from the latter island to Yucatan there was no break in the obdurate shore which barred his access to Asia.

T.B. in French and Haitian Kreyol

Posted September 25 2023 at 4:30 PM

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