seen by Columbus before in these waters.  They wore clothing, they had copper hatchets, and bells, and palm-wood swords in the edges of which were set sharp blades of flint.  They had a fermented liquor, a kind of maize beer which looked like English ale; they had some kind of money or medium of exchange also, and they told the Admiral that there was land to the west where all these things existed and many more.  It is strange and almost inexplicable that he did not follow this trail to the westward; if he had done so he would have discovered Mexico.  But one thing at a time always occupied him to the exclusion of everything else; his thoughts were now turned to the eastward, where he supposed the Straits were; and the significance of this canoe full of natives was lost upon him.

They crossed over to the mainland of Honduras on August 15th, Bartholomew landing and attending mass on the beach as the Admiral himself was too ill to go ashore.  Three days later the cross and banner of Castile were duly erected on the shores of the Rio Tinto and the country was formally annexed.  The natives were friendly, and supplied the ships with provisions; but they were very black and ugly, and Columbus readily believed the assertion of his native guide that they were cannibals.  They continued their course to the eastward, but as the gulf narrowed the force of the west-going current was felt more severely.  Columbus, believing that the strait which he sought lay to the eastward, laboured against the current, and his difficulties were increased by the bad weather which he now encountered.  There were squalls and hurricanes, tempests and cross-currents that knocked his frail ships about and almost swamped them.  Anchors and gear were lost, the sails were torn out of the bolt-ropes, timbers were strained; and for six weeks this state of affairs went on to an accompaniment of thunder and lightning which added to the terror and discomfort of the mariners.

This was in August and the first half of September—­six weeks of the worst weather that Columbus had ever experienced.  It was the more unfortunate that his illness made it impossible for him to get actively about the ship; and he had to have a small cabin or tent rigged up on deck, in which he could lie and direct the navigation.  It is bad enough to be as ill as he was in a comfortable bed ashore; it is a thousand times worse amid the discomforts of a small boat at sea; but what must it have been thus to have one’s sick-bed on the deck of a cockle-shell which was being buffeted and smashed in unknown seas, and to have to think and act not for oneself alone but for the whole of a suffering little fleet!  No wonder the Admiral’s distress of mind was great; but oddly enough his anxieties, as he recorded them in a letter, were not so much on his own account as on behalf of others.  The terrified seamen making vows to the Virgin and promises of pilgrimages between their mad rushes to the sheets and furious