erhaps five
hundred men for more extended enterprises, in which he had as his
principal companions Las Casas and a young nephew of Velasquez, Juan de
Grijalva. The precise route of this expedition cannot now be stated. It
certainly, however, traversed the Bayamo region, and went as far west as
Camaguey. It also visited the neighborhood of Cape Cruz and there passed
through the town of Cueyba, as Las Casas called it, where, as hitherto
related, a Spanish mariner, presumably Ojeda, had landed and had
established a Christian shrine with a statue of the Holy Virgin. Here
and at other places amicable relations were maintained between the
Spaniards and the natives.

Unhappily that was not always the rule. At the large town of Caonao,
probably near Manzanillo, a number of Spanish soldiers, as if suddenly
stricken with madness, began a massacre of the natives, killed a great
number, and drove the rest into flight. Narvaez does not seem to have
ordered nor to have taken part in the slaughter, but neither did he
exert himself to prevent it or to stop it. Whereupon Las Casas,
righteously wrathful, bade him to go to the Devil, and thereafter
devoted himself to ministering to the sufferers and to reassuring the
survivors.

From Caonao the expedition moved westward, through the southern part of
the Province of Camaguey, where the natives were so frightened that they
fled to the little islands off the coast which Columbus had named the
Queen's Gardens. Thence it went across the island to the north coast,
and probably in the region of Sagua la Grande, in Santa Clara Province,
found some small deposits of gold. After stopping there for some time,
it continued its progress into Havana Province, where more gold was
found and where, unhappily, serious trouble with the natives was
renewed.

On the way across the island Narvaez had heard of three Spaniards, a man
and two women, who had been shipwrecked on the coast and were living
with the Indians somewhere in the west. He sent word of this report back
to Velasquez, who returned him orders to search for the castaways even
in preference to gold, and who also dispatched a ship along the north
coast to meet Narvaez and his party in the region to which they were
going. In Santa Clara the two women were found, unharmed and well, and
they presently married members of the expedition. Finally, in Havana the
man also was found. He too was unharmed and well, though he had become
in speech and habi