They also brought tidings of the King of Canoaboa, of whom they had heard before, and he is called by the name of Caunebo himself.(*) He was afterwards carried, as a prisoner or as a hostage, on the way to Spain; but died on the passage.

     (*) The name is spelled in many different ways.

Columbus was able to dispatch the returning ships, with the encouraging reports brought in by Meldonado and Ojeda, but with very little gold.  But he was obliged to ask for fresh supplies of food for the colony—­even in the midst of the plenty which he described; for he had found already what all such leaders find, the difficulty of training men to use food to which they were not accustomed.  He sent also his Carib prisoners, begging that they might be trained to a knowledge of the christian religion and of the Spanish language.  He saw, already, how much he should need interpreters.  The fleet sailed on the second of February, and its reports were, on the whole, favorably received.

Columbus chose for the new city an elevation, ten leagues east of Monte Christi, and at first gave to his colony the name of Martha.  It is the Isabella of the subsequent history.

The colonists were delighted with the fertility of the soil under the tropical climate.  Andalusia itself had not prepared them for it.  They planted seeds of peas, beans, lettuces, cabbages and other vegetables, and declared that they grew more in eight days than they would have grown in twenty at home.  They had fresh vegetables in sixteen days after they planted them; but for melons, pumpkins and other fruits of that sort, they are generous enough to allow thirty days.

They had carried out roots and suckers of the sugar-cane.  In fifteen days the shoots were a cubit high.  A farmer who had planted wheat in the beginning of February had ripe grain in the beginning of April; so that they were sure of, at least, two crops in a year.

But the fertility of the soil was the only favorable token which the island first exhibited.  The climate was enervating and sickly.  The labor on the new city was hard and discouraging.  Columbus found that his colonists were badly fitted for their duty, or not fitted for it at all.  Court gentlemen did not want to work.  Priests expected to be put on better diet than any other people.  Columbus—­though he lost his own popularity—­insisted on putting all on equal fare, in sharing the supplies he had brought from Spain.  It did not require a long time to prove that the selection of the site of the colony was unfortunate.  Columbus himself gave way to the general disease.  While he was ill, a mutiny broke out which he had to suppress by strong measures.

Bornal Diaz, who ranked as comptroller of the expedition, and Fermin Cedo, an assayer, made a plot for seizing the remaining ships and sailing for Europe.  News of the mutiny was brought to Columbus.  He found a document in the writing of Diaz, drawn as a memorial, accusing Columbus himself of grave crimes.  He confined Diaz on board a ship to be sent to Spain with the memorial.  He punished the mutineers of lower rank.  He took the guns and naval munitions from four of the vessels, and entrusted them all to a person in whom he had absolute confidence.