ame place of security, but it
pleased GOD to save them. Having rejoined the other caravels, they all
sailed over to the eastern part of Hispaniola, and thence to a little
island called _Mona_ by the Indians, which lies between Hispaniola and St
John de Boriquen.

The journal of the admiral breaks off at this island, and he does not
inform us of his course from thence to Isabella; but only, that while
going from Mona to St John, the great fatigues he had undergone, together
with his own weakness and the want of proper food, brought on a violent
malady, between a pestilential fever and a lethargy, which presently
deprived him of his senses and memory; whereupon, all the people in the
three caravels resolved to desist from the design he had then in hand of
discovering all the islands in the Caribbean sea, and returned to Isabella,
where they arrived on the 29th of September, five days afterwards[21].
This heavy sickness lasted during five months, but it pleased GOD to
restore him afterwards to health. His illness was occasioned by the great
sufferings he had gone through in this voyage, during which he had often
not been able to sleep three hours in eight days, owing to the perilous
nature of the navigation among innumerable islands and shoals; a degree
of privation that seems almost impossible, were it not authenticated by
himself and those who accompanied him.

On his return to Hispaniola, the admiral found there his brother
Bartholomew Columbus whom he had sent, as formerly related, to treat with
the king of England about the discovery of the Indies. On his return to
Spain with the grant of all his demands, he learned at Paris from Charles
king of France, that his brother the admiral had already made the
discovery, and the king supplied him with an hundred crowns to enable him
to prosecute his journey into Spain. He thereupon made all the haste he
could to overtake the admiral in Spain; but on his arrival at Seville, he
found that the admiral had gone out upon his second voyage with seventeen
sail, as already related. Wherefore, to fulfil the orders which his
brother had left for him at the beginning of 1494, he went to the court of
their Catholic majesties at Valadolid, carrying my brother Don James
Columbus and me along with him, as we had been appointed to serve as pages
to Prince John. Immediately upon our arrival, their majesties sent for Don
Bartholomew, and dispatched him with three ships to Hispaniola, where he