beautiful rivers.  The land is high, and exhibits chains of tall mountains which seem to reach to the skies and surpass beyond comparison the isle of Cetrefrey (Sicily).  These display themselves in all manner of beautiful shapes.  They are accessible in every part, and covered with a vast variety of lofty trees which it appears to me never lose their foliage.  Some were covered with blossoms, some with fruit, and others in different stages according to their nature.  There are palm trees of six or eight sorts.  Beautiful forests of pines are likewise found, and fields of vast extent.  Here are also honey and fruits of thousand sorts, and birds of every variety.”

Having landed at this indefinitely located point, Columbus, believing that he had reached the region he was seeking, despatched messengers to the interior to open communication with some high official of Cathay, in which country he supposed himself to be, the idea of Cipango apparently having been abandoned.  “Many at the present day,” says Washington Irving, “will smile at this embassy to a naked savage chieftain in the interior of Cuba, in mistake for an Asiatic monarch; but such was the singular nature of this voyage, a continual series of golden dreams, and all interpreted by the deluding volume of Marco Polo.”  But the messengers went on their journey, and proceeded inland some thirty or forty miles.  There they came upon a village of about fifty huts and a population of about a thousand.  They were able to communicate only by signs, and it is quite certain that the replies of the natives were as little understood by the messengers as the questions were by the natives.  The messengers sought something about which the natives knew little or nothing.  The communications were interpreted through the medium of imagination and desire.  Nothing accomplished, the commission returned and made its disappointing report.  Washington Irving thus describes the further proceedings:  “The report of the envoys put an end to the many splendid fancies of Columbus, about the barbaric prince and his capital.  He was cruising, however, in a region of enchantment, in which pleasing chimeras started up at every step, exercising by turns a power over his imagination.  During the absence of the emissaries, the Indians had informed him, by signs, of a place to the eastward, where the people collected gold along the river banks by torchlight and afterward wrought it into bars with hammers.  In speaking of this place they again used the words Babeque and Bohio, which he, as usual, supposed to be the proper names of islands or countries.  His great object was to arrive at some opulent and civilized country of the East, with which he might establish commercial relations, and whence he might carry home a quantity of oriental merchandise as a rich trophy of his discovery.  The season was advancing; the cool nights gave hints of approaching winter; he resolved, therefore, not to proceed farther to the north, nor to linger about uncivilized places which, at present, he had not the means of colonizing, but to return to the east-south-east, in quest of Babeque, which he trusted might prove some rich and civilized island on the coast of Asia.”  And so he sailed away for Hispaniola (Santo Domingo) which appears to have become, a little later, his favorite West Indian resort.