Horrified by this catastrophe, and feeling themselves unable to avenge their companions the Spaniards decided to fly from that barbarous land and the monstrous cruelty of those savages.  They therefore continued their voyage, stunned by the massacre of their companions and suffering severely from want.  After leaving the southern coast of Cuba behind them, a thousand untoward events still further delayed them.  They learned that Hojeda had also landed and that he had been driven by storms upon these coasts, where he led a wretched existence.  He endured a thousand annoyances and a thousand different kinds of sufferings.  After having suffered the loss of his companions or witnessed them gasping from hunger, he had been carried to Hispaniola almost alone.

He arrived there hardly alive, and died from the effects of the wound he had received from the natives of Uraba.  Enciso, the judge elect, had sailed along this same coast, but with better fortune, for he had had favourable weather.

He himself told me these things at Court, and he added that the natives of Cuba had received him kindly, especially the people of a certain cacique called El Comendador [the Commander].  When this chief was about to be baptised by some Christians who were passing through, he asked them how the governor of the neighbouring island of Hispaniola was called, and he was answered that he was called El Comendador.[1] The governor of that island was at that period, an illustrious knight of the Order of Calatrava, and the knights of that Order take the title of Commander.  The cacique promptly declared that he wished to be called El Comendador; and he it was who had given hospitality to Enciso, when he landed, and had supplied all his wants.

[Note 1:  Don Nicholas de Ovando, Comendador de Lares, and later Grand Master of the Order of Calatrava.]

According to Enciso, now is the time, Most Holy Father from whom we receive our religion and our beliefs, to preach to the islanders.  An unknown sailor,[2] who was ill, had been left by some Spaniards who were coasting the length of Cuba, with the cacique El Comendador, and this sailor was very kindly received by the cacique and his people.  When he recovered his health, he frequently served the cacique as lieutenant in his expeditions, for the islanders are often at war one with another; and El Comendador was always victorious.  The sailor was an ignorant creature, but a man of good heart, who cultivated a peculiar devotion for the Blessed Virgin, Mother of God.  He even carried about him, as constantly as his clothes, a picture of the Blessed Virgin, very well painted on paper, and he declared to El Comendador that it was because of it that he was always victorious.  He also persuaded the latter to abandon the zemes the people adored, because he declared that these nocturnal goblins were the enemies of souls, and he urged the cacique to choose for his patron the Virgin Mother of God,