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The admiral takes the beach with his eyes on the sky. The annuity for first sight went to him; the sailor who shouted got a silk doublet.

The crossing from the Canaries took 33 days, which was twenty more than the crews had signed up for in their heads. Columbus kept two logs: the private one with his real guesses, and a public reckoning that 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 were 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: an annuity of 10,000 maravedís, 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 that he himself, four hours earlier, had seen a light, like a small wax candle rising and falling, and 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, and the admiral renamed it San Salvador, planted the royal standard, and had the notary record the taking of possession, the fleet's lawyers being 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 in red kneeling under the standard, eyes up; the Pinzón brothers flanking him with the green-crossed banner of the expedition; a friar raising a crucifix over ground that had gotten along without one; sailors kissing the rock. In the shade at the left edge, where the composition keeps its conscience, the Taíno watch from the trees.