He remained at this island during the twenty-second and twenty-third of October, waiting first for the king, who did not appear, and then for a favorable wind.  “To sail round these islands,” he says, “one needs many sorts of wind, and it does not blow as men would like.”  At midnight, between the twenty-third and twenty-fourth, he weighed anchor in order to start for Cuba.

“I have heard these people say that it was very large and of great traffic,” he says, “and that there were in it gold and spices, and great ships and merchants.  And they showed me that I should go to it by the west-southwest, and I think so.  For I think that if I may trust the signs which all the Indians of these islands have made me, and those whom I am carrying in the ships, for by the tongue I do not understand them, it (Cuba) is the Island of Cipango,(*) of which wonderful things are told, and on the globes which I have seen and in the painted maps, it is in this district.”

     (*) This was the name the old geographers gave to Japan.

The next day they saw seven or eight islands, which are supposed to be the eastern and southern keys of the Grand Bank of Bahama.  He anchored to the south of them on the twenty-sixth of October, and on the next day sailed once more for Cuba.

On Sunday, October 28, he arrived there, in what is now called the Puerto de Nipe; he named it the Puerto de San Salvador.  Here, as he went on, he was again charmed by the beautiful country.  He found palms “of another sort,” says Las Casas, “from those of Guinea, and from ours.”  He found the island the “most beautiful which eyes have seen, full of very good ports and deep rivers,” and that apparently the sea is never rough there, as the grass grows down to the water’s edge.  This greenness to the sea’s edge is still observed there.  “Up till that time,” says Las Casas, “he had not experienced in all these islands that the sea was rough.”  He had occasion to learn about it later.  He mentions also that the island is mountainous.

CHAPTER V. —­ LANDING ON CUBA

—­The cigar and tobacco—­Cipango and the great Khan—­from Cuba to Hayti—­its shores and harbors.

When Columbus landed, at some distance farther along the coast, he found the best houses he had yet seen, very large, like pavilions, and very neat within; not in streets but set about here and there.  They were all built of palm branches.  Here were dogs which never barked (supposed to be the almiqui), wild birds tamed in the houses and “wonderful arrangements of nets,(*) and fish-hooks and fishing apparatus.  There were also carved masks and other images.  Not a thing was touched.”  The inhabitants had fled.

     (*) These were probably hammocks.