Still Columbus went on in pursuit of his geographical chimera; even gold had no power to detain him from the earnest search for this imaginary strait.  Here and there along the coast he saw increasing signs of civilisation—­once a wall built of mud and stone, which made him think of Cathay again.  He now got it into his head that the region he was in was ten days’ journey from the Ganges, and that it was surrounded by water; which if it means anything means that he thought he was on a large island ten days’ sail to the eastward of the coast of India.  Altogether at sea as to the facts, poor Admiral, but with heart and purpose steadfast and right enough.

They sailed a little farther along the coast, now between narrow islands that were like the streets of Genoa, where the boughs of trees on either hand brushed the shrouds of the ships; now past harbours where there were native fairs and markets, and where natives were to be seen mounted on horses and armed with swords; now by long, lonely stretches of the coast where there was nothing to be seen but the low green shore with the mountains behind and the alligators basking at the river mouths.  At last (November 2nd) they arrived at the cape known as Nombre de Dios, which Ojeda had reached some time before in his voyage to the West.

The coast of the mainland had thus been explored from the Bay of Honduras to Brazil, and Columbus was obliged to admit that there was no strait.  Having satisfied himself of that he decided to turn back to Veragua, where he had seen the natives smelting gold, in order to make some arrangement for establishing a colony there.  The wind, however, which had headed him almost all the way on his easterly voyage, headed him again now and began to blow steadily from the west.  He started on his return journey on the 5th of December, and immediately fell into almost worse troubles than he had been in before.  The wood of the ships had been bored through and through by seaworms, so that they leaked very badly; the crews were sick, provisions were spoilt, biscuits rotten.  Young Ferdinand Columbus, if he did not actually make notes of this voyage at the time, preserved a very lively recollection of it, and it is to his Historie, which in its earlier passages is of doubtful authenticity, that we owe some of the most human touches of description relating to this voyage.  Any passage in his work relating to food or animals at this time has the true ring of boyish interest and observation, and is in sharp contrast to the second-hand and artificial tone of the earlier chapters of his book.  About the incident of the howling monkey, which the Admiral’s Irish hound would not face, Ferdinand remarks that it “frighted a good dog that we had, but frighted one of our wild boars a great deal more”; and as to the condition of the biscuits when they turned westward again, he says that they were “so full of weevils that, as God shall help me, I saw many that stayed till night to eat their sop for fear of seeing them.”