The Santa Maria and the Nina rode close in shore.  Captain Martin Pinzon beached the Pinta and unshipped the hurt and useless rudder.  Work upon a new one began at once.  The Admiral, the two captains and those of rank upon the ships supped with the commandant at his quite goodly house, and the next day he and his officers dined aboard the Santa Maria.  The Admiral liked him much for he was more than respectful toward this voyage.  A year before, bathing one day in the surf, there had come floating to his hand a great gourd.  None such grew anywhere in these islands, and the wind for days had come steadily from the west.  The gourd had a kind of pattern cut around it.  He showed it to the Admiral and afterwards gave it to him.  The latter caused it to pass from hand to hand among the seamen.  I had it in my hands and truly saw no reason why it might not have been cut by some native of the West, and, carried away by the tide or dropped perchance from a boat, have at last, after long time, come into hands not Indian.  Asia tossing unthinkingly a ball which Europe caught.

The Pinta proved in worse plight than was at first thought.  The Nina also found this or that to do besides squaring her Levant sails.  We stayed in Gomera almost three weeks.  The place was novel, the day’s task not hard, the Admiral and his captains complaisant.  We had leisure and island company.  To many it was happiness enough.  While we stopped at Gornera we were at least not drifting upon lodestone, equator fire and chaos!

Here on Gomera might be studied the three Pinzon brothers.  Vicente was a good, courageous captain, Francisco a good pilot, and a courageous, seldom-speaking man.  But Martin Alonso, the eldest, was the prime mover in all their affairs.  He was skillful navigator like his brothers and courageous like them, but not silent like Francisco, and ambitious far above either.  He would have said perhaps that had he not been so, been both ambitious and shrewd, the Pinzons would never have become principal ship-owning, trading and maritime family of Palos and three leagues around.  He, too, had family fortunes and aggrandizement at heart, though hardly on the grand, imperial scale of the Admiral.  He had much manly beauty, daring and strength.  His two brothers worshipped him, and in most places and moments his crew would follow him with a cheer.  The Admiral was bound to him, not only in that he had volunteered and made others to go willingly, but that he had put in his ship, the Nina, and had furnished Master Christopherus with monies.  That eighth of the cost of the expedition, whence else could it come?  If it tied Martin Pinzon to the Admiral, seeing that only through success could those monies be repaid, it likewise made him feel that he, too, had authority, was at liberty to advise, and at need to become critical.