On September the 19th there was a comparison of dead-reckonings.  The Nina’s pilot made it 440 leagues from the Canaries, the Pinta’s 420 leagues, and the Admiral’s pilot, doubtless instructed by the Admiral, made it 400.  On Sunday the 23rd they were getting into the seaweed and finding crayfish again; and there being no reasonable cause for complaint a scare was got up among the crew on an exceedingly ingenious point.  The wind having blown steadily from the east for a matter of three weeks, they said that it would never blow in any other direction, and that they would never be able to get back to Spain; but later in the afternoon the sea got up from the westward, as though in answer to their fears, and as if to prove that somewhere or other ahead of them there was a west wind blowing; and the Admiral remarks that “the high sea was very necessary to me, as it came to pass once before in the time when the Jews went out of Egypt with Moses, who took them from captivity.”  And indeed there was something of Moses in this man, who thus led his little rabble from a Spanish seaport out across the salt wilderness of the ocean, and interpreted the signs for them, and stood between them and the powers of vengeance and terror that were set about their uncharted path.

But it appears that the good Admiral had gone just a little too far in interpreting everything they saw as a sign that they were approaching land; for his miserable crew, instead of being comforted by this fact, now took the opportunity to be angry because the signs were not fulfilled.  The more the signs pointed to their nearness to land, the more they began to murmur and complain because they did not see it.  They began to form together in little groups—­always an ominous sign at sea —­and even at night those who were not on deck got together in murmuring companies.  Some, of the things that they said, indeed, were not very far from the truth; among others, that it was “a great madness on their part to venture their lives in following out the madness of a foreigner who to make himself a great lord had risked his life, and now saw himself and all of them in great exigency and was deceiving so many people.”  They remembered that his proposition, or “dream” as they not inaptly call it, had been contradicted by many great and lettered men; and then followed some very ominous words indeed.  They held

     [The substance of these murmurings is not in the abridged Journal,
     but is given by Las Casas under the date of September 24.]

that “it was enough to excuse them from whatever might be done in the matter that they had arrived where man had never dared to navigate, and that they were not obliged to go to the end of the world, especially as, if they delayed more, they would not be able to have provisions to return.”  In short, the best thing would be to throw him into the sea some night, and make a story that he had fallen, into the water while taking the position of a star with his astrolabe; and no one would ask any questions, as he was a foreigner.  They carried this talk to the Pinzons, who listened to them; after all, we have not had to wait long for trouble with the Pinzons!  “Of these Pinzons Christopher Columbus complains greatly, and of the trouble they had given him.”