ause for complaint
a scare was got up among the crew on an exceedingly ingenious point. The
wind having blown steadily from the east for a matter of three weeks,
they said that it would never blow in any other direction, and that they
would never be able to get back to Spain; but later in the afternoon the
sea got up from the westward, as though in answer to their fears, and as
if to prove that somewhere or other ahead of them there was a west wind
blowing; and the Admiral remarks that "the high sea was very necessary to
me, as it came to pass once before in the time when the Jews went out of
Egypt with Moses, who took them from captivity." And indeed there was
something of Moses in this man, who thus led his little rabble from a
Spanish seaport out across the salt wilderness of the ocean, and
interpreted the signs for them, and stood between them and the powers of
vengeance and terror that were set about their uncharted path.

But it appears that the good Admiral had gone just a little too far in
interpreting everything they saw as a sign that they were approaching
land; for his miserable crew, instead of being comforted by this fact,
now took the opportunity to be angry because the signs were not
fulfilled. The more the signs pointed to their nearness to land, the
more they began to murmur and complain because they did not see it. They
began to form together in little groups--always an ominous sign at sea
--and even at night those who were not on deck got together in murmuring
companies. Some, of the things that they said, indeed, were not very far
from the truth; among others, that it was "a great madness on their part
to venture their lives in following out the madness of a foreigner who to
make himself a great lord had risked his life, and now saw himself and
all of them in great exigency and was deceiving so many people." They
remembered that his proposition, or "dream" as they not inaptly call it,
had been contradicted by many great and lettered men; and then followed
some very ominous words indeed. They held

[The substance of these murmurings is not in the abridged Journal,
but is given by Las Casas under the date of September 24.]

that "it was enough to excuse them from whatever might be done in the
matter that they had arrived where man had never dared to navigate, and
that they were not obliged to go to the end of the world, especially as,
if they delayed more, they would not be able to ha