s 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 clinging and hauling; his son Ferdinand, who was only
fourteen, but who had to endure the same pain and fatigue as the rest of
them, and who was enduring it with such pluck that "it was as if he had
been at sea eighty years"; the dangers of Bartholomew, who had not wanted
to come on this voyage at all, but was now in the thick of it in the
worst ship of the squadron, and fighting for his life amid tempests and
treacherous seas; Diego at home, likely to be left an orphan and at the
mercy of fickle and doub