The men returned the next day without going to the Indian village.  Columbus then sent out nine men, with an Indian, who found a town of a thousand huts about four and a half leagues from the ship.  They thought the population was three thousand.  The village in Cuba is spoken of as having twenty people to a house.  Here the houses were smaller or the count of the numbers extravagant.  The people approached the explorers carefully, and with tokens of respect.  Soon they gained confidence and brought out food for them:  fish, and bread made from roots, “which tasted exactly as if it were made of chestnuts.”

In the midst of this festival, the woman, who had been sent back from the ship so graciously, appeared borne on the shoulders of men who were led by her husband.

The Spaniards thought these natives of St. Domingo much whiter than those of the other islands.  Columbus says that two of the women, if dressed in Castilian costume, would be counted to be Spaniards.  He says that the heat of the country is intense, and that if these people lived in a cooler region they would be of lighter color.

On the fourteenth of December he continued his voyage eastward, and on the fifteenth landed on the little island north of Hayti, which he called Tortuga, or Turtle island.  At midnight on the sixteenth he sailed, and landed on Hispaniola again.  Five hundred Indians met him, accompanied by their king, a fine young man of about twenty years of age.  He had around him several counselors, one of whom appeared to be his tutor.  To the steady questions where gold could be found, the reply as steady was made that it was in “the Island of Babeque.”  This island, they said, was only two days off, and they pointed out the route.  The interview ended in an offer by the king to the Admiral of all that he had.  The explorers never found this mysterious Babeque, unless, as Bishop Las Casas guessed, Babeque and Jamaica be the same.

The king visited Columbus on his ship in the evening, and Columbus entertained him with European food.  With so cordial a beginning of intimacy, it was natural that the visitors should spend two or three days with these people.  The king would not believe that any sovereigns of Castile could be more powerful than the men he saw.  He and those around him all believed that they came direct from heaven.

Columbus was always asking for gold.  He gave strict orders that it should always be paid for, when it was taken.  To the islanders it was merely a matter of ornament, and they gladly exchanged it for the glass beads, the rings or the bells, which seemed to them more ornamental.  One of the caciques or chiefs, evidently a man of distinction and authority, had little bits of gold which he exchanged for pieces of glass.  It proved that he had clipped them off from a larger piece, and he went back into his cabin, cut that to pieces, and then exchanged all those in trade for the white man’s commodities.  Well pleased with his bargain, he then told the Spaniards that he would go and get much more and would come and trade with them again.