to find the way back to it; and he took a kind of pleasure
in the complete mystification thus produced on his fellow-voyagers.
"None of them could explain whither I went nor whence I came; they did
not know the way to return thither," he writes, somewhat childishly.

But he was not back in Espanola yet, and his means for getting there were
crumbling away beneath his feet. One of the three remaining caravels was
entirely riddled by seaworms and had to be abandoned at the harbour
called Puerto Bello; and the company was crowded on to two ships. The
men now became more than ever discontented at the easterly course, and on
May 1st, when he had come as far east as the Gulf of Darien, Columbus
felt obliged to bear away to the north, although as it turned out he had
not nearly made enough easting. He stood on this course, for nine days,
the west-going current setting him down all the time; and the first land
that he made, on May 10th, was the group of islands off the western end
of Cuba which he had called the Queen's Gardens.

He anchored for six days here, as the crews were completely exhausted;
the ships' stores were reduced to biscuits, oil, and vinegar; the vessels
leaked like sieves, and the pumps had to be kept going continually. And
no sooner had they anchored than a hurricane came on, and brought up a
sea so heavy that the Admiral was convinced that his ships could not live
within it. We have got so accustomed to reading of storms and tempests
that it seems useless to try and drive home the horror and terror of
them; but here were these two rotten ships alone at the end of the world,
far beyond the help of man, the great seas roaring up under them in the
black night, parting their worn cables, snatching away their anchors from
them, and finally driving them one upon the other to grind and strain and
prey upon each other, as though the external conspiracy of the elements
against them both were not sufficient! One writes or reads the words,
but what does it mean to us? and can we by any conceivable effort of
imagination realise what it meant to this group of human beings who lived
through that night so many hundred years ago--men like ourselves with
hearts to sink and faint, capable of fear and hunger, capable of misery,
pain, and endurance? Bruised and battered, wet by the terrifying surges,
and entirely uncomforted by food or drink, they did somehow endure these
miseries; and were to endure worse too before the