I Have Come To Believe That

This line comes from Christopher Columbus's letter reporting his third voyage (1498) to Ferdinand and Isabella, in which he described the coast of present-day Venezuela, near the mouth of the Orinoco River. He noted the enormous freshwater flow as evidence that this was a continental landmass, not an island — though he initially speculated it might be the Terrestrial Paradise described in medieval theology. This letter is one of Columbus's closest approaches to acknowledging that the lands he had found were not part of Asia but something geographically distinct.