and the chests of the sailors would have followed, had not the latter, despite their fright, raised such a howl of remonstrance that the order was revoked.  At length day dawned.  At least there was light to die by.  Plunging, reeling, half submerged, quivering under the crashing shock of the seas, whose mountain ridges rolled down upon her before the gale, the ship lay in deadly jeopardy from Friday till Monday noon.  Then the storm abated; the sun broke forth; and again she held her course.

They reached Dominica on Sunday, the fifth of August.  The chaplain tells us how he went on shore to refresh himself,—­how, while his Italian servant washed his linen at a brook, he strolled along the beach and picked up shells,—­and how he was scared, first, by a prodigious turtle, and next by a vision of the cannibal natives, which caused his prompt retreat to the boats.

On the tenth, they anchored in the harbor of Porto Rico, where they found two of their companion-ships, from which they had parted in the storm.  One of them was the San Pelayo, with Menendez on board.  Mendoza informs us that in the evening the officers came on board his ship, when he, the chaplain, regaled them with sweetmeats, and that Menendez invited him not only to supper that night, but to dinner the next day, “for the which I thanked him, as reason was,” says the gratified churchman.

Here thirty men deserted, and three priests also ran off, of which Mendoza bitterly complains, as increasing his own work.  The motives of the clerical truants may perhaps be inferred from a worldly temptation to which the chaplain himself was subjected.  “I was offered the service of a chapel where I should have got a peso for every mass I said, the whole year round; but I did not accept it, for fear that what I hear said of the other three would be said of me.  Besides, it is not a place where one can hope for any great advancement, and I wished to try whether, in refusing a benefice for the love of the Lord, He will not repay me with some other stroke of fortune before the end of the voyage; for it is my aim to serve God and His blessed Mother.”

The original design had been to rendezvous at Havana, but, with the Adelantado, the advantages of despatch outweighed every other consideration.  He resolved to push directly for Florida.  Five of his scattered ships had by this time rejoined company, comprising, exclusive of officers, a force of about five hundred soldiers, two hundred sailors, and one hundred colonists.  Bearing northward, he advanced by an unknown and dangerous course along the coast of Hayti and through the intricate passes of the Bahamas.  On the night of the twenty-sixth, the San Pelayo struck three times on the shoals; “but,” says the chaplain, “inasmuch as our enterprise was undertaken for the sake of Christ and His blessed Mother, two heavy seas struck her abaft, and set her afloat again.”