THE WEALTH OF NATIONS.

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tians, and this last discovery opened to them a probable pros-pect of doing so. In 1497, Vasco de Gama sailed from theport of Lisbon with a fleet of four ships, and after a naviga-tion of eleven months, arrived upon the coast of Indostan,and thus completed a course of discoveries which had beenpursued with great steadiness, and with very little interrup-tion, for near a century together.

Some years before this, while the expectations of Europe were in suspense about the projects of the Portuguese , ofwhich the success appeared yet to be doubtful, a Genoesepilot formed the yet more daring project of sailing to theEast Indies by the West. The situation of those countrieswas at that time very imperfectly known in Europe . Thefew European travellers who had been there, had magnifiedthe distance; perhaps through simplicity and ignorance,what was really very great, appearing almost infinite tothose who could not measure it; or, perhaps, in order toincrease somewhat more the marvellous of their own adven-tures in visiting regions so immensely remote from Europe .The longer the way was by the East, Columbus very justlyconcluded, the shorter it would be by the West. lie pro-posed, therefore, to take that way, as both the shortest andthe surest, and lie had the good fortune to convince Isabellaof Castile of the probability of his project. He sailed fromthe port of Palos in August 1492, near five years before theexpedition of Vasco de Gama set out from Portugal , and,alter a voyage of between two and three months, discoveredfirst some ot the small Bahama or Lucayan islands, and af-terward the great island of St. Domingo.

But the countries which Columbus discovered either inthis or in any of his subsequent voyages, had no resem-blance to those which he had gone in quest of. Instead ofthe wealth, cultivation, and populousness of China and In-dostan, he found, in St. Domingo, and in all the other partsot the new world which he ever visited, nothing but a countryquite covered with wood, uncultivated, and inhabited onlyby some tribes ot naked and miserable savages, lie wasnot very willing, however, to believe that they were not thesame wilh some of the countries described by Marco Polo ,the first European who had visited, or at least had left behindWi any description of China or the East Indies ; and a veryslight resemblance, such as that which lie found between theUame of Cibao, a mountain in St. Domingo, and that of