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Columbus kneels in red under the royal standard with his eyes up. The 10,000-maravedí annuity for first sight of land ended here and not on the Pinta's forecastle.

The crossing from the Canaries took 33 days, which was 20 more than the crews had signed up for in their heads. Columbus kept two logs. One was private, with his real guesses. The other was public, and it understated each day's run so the men would not despair at the distance from home. By a joke of dead reckoning, the falsified figures turned out to be the more accurate. By early October the Santa María, Pinta and Niña were sailing through floating branches, land birds, a carved stick. The monarchs' promise hung over every masthead: 10,000 maravedís a year, for life, to the first man who saw land. At two in the morning on 12 October a sailor on the Pinta's forecastle, Rodrigo de Triana, saw white sand cliffs in the moonlight and shouted, and the Pinta fired her gun. When the fleet compared notes, the admiral remembered a light of his own, seen four hours earlier, like a small wax candle rising and falling. He had mentioned it quietly to a steward at the time. The annuity went to Columbus, every year, for the rest of his life. The chroniclers say Rodrigo de Triana got a silk doublet and a grievance; one tradition, probably too neat, has him quitting Spain for Africa and another faith over it. At dawn they went ashore on an island its people called Guanahani. The admiral renamed it San Salvador, planted the royal standard, and had the notary write down the taking of possession. The fleet's lawyers were the one department that never slept. The Taíno came down to the beach unarmed, swam out with parrots and cotton thread, traded anything for a hawk's bell. Columbus wrote it all down that night with an appraiser's eye: how open they were, how quickly they understood, how easily, with 50 men, they could all be made to serve. Both futures of the next four centuries are in that one journal entry, and he wrote it on the first day. Dióscoro Puebla painted the landing in 1862 for the Spanish state, which wanted its founding morning in the grand manner. The admiral kneels in red under the standard, eyes up. The expedition's banner with its green cross goes up over the crowd on the right. A friar raises a crucifix over ground that had gotten along without one, and sailors kiss the rock. In the shade at the left edge, where the composition keeps its conscience, the Taíno watch from the trees.