rsion per se. But the idea of finding the East by sailing West does appear to have been a grand conception of the world. Thus the actual encounter with native American peoples was an unexpected attribute of the first voyage; the grand mission was to have been to find Asia. In one sense the great gulf of culture could be persistently perceived as a merely physical obstacle to the completion of objectives. But in any case, by the time the encounter had taken place, the death of such obstacles does not appear to have achieved anything the moral equivalence of slaughtering other Europeans in continental wars. Doubtless this owes something to the disappointment that Columbus's first voyage did not result, as Columbus himself anticipated, in the discovery of the great cities of Asia. As Jane notes, Columbus "was very far from being wholly satisfied with the results of his first voyage." Jane continues:
He had sought in vain for that highly developed civilization, for those mighty cities and for those powerful kings that he had expected to find. Instead, he had me
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