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FROM the time Columbus first sailed up the quiet waters of the Ozama River with his three sea-weary caravels, and secured his flag-ship to the trunk of a mighty tree on the river's bank, the Isle of Santo Domingo has been a land of adventure. What Hispaniola was in the days before, the coming of the Spaniards is lost in the legends of the Indians, but since that time the very mention of its name has suggested a place obscure, where one might have adventures of almost any kind, of lost mines where the Spaniards got their gold, and of hidden treasure.
The island has charmed all who gazed upon it. Set in a sea of deep blue-green water, with its palm fringed shores, broad savannahs, fertile plains and lofty mountains cloudtopped, it has lured them back to its shores. Columbus returned to spend his last days in the island he loved so well, and today his bones rest in the interior of the old cathedral at the capital. Attracted by the wonderful stories of the richness of the island many gentleman adventurers of the Spanish Main, buccaneers, and colonists flocked to its shores.
In the early annals of the New World the island of Santo Domingo, or Haiti, as it is often called, figured colorfully. First fighting between the Spaniards and the Indians and the subjugation of the latter. Then quarreling and fighting amongst themselves, and later the intermittent raiding of the seacoast towns by the pirates or some country at war with Spain. Those early voyagers of the sea never dreamed that their descendants would behold voyagers of the upper blue passing over at incredible speed in "argosies of magic sail," as Tennyson so aptly puts it.
NEAR the water's edge several hundred yards up from the mouth of the river is the huge mahogany stump, all that is now left of the tree to which tradition says Columbus secured the Santa Maria in days of old. If it could only talk all the world would listen in rapture to the tales it could tell. It knew the island when only the peace loving Indians roamed its plains, climbed its lofty mountains and bathed in its clear cool waters. It saw the...