giving them names. Some of them were inhabited, some of them were not;
some were very large, some were very small. But none of them helped
him in any way to find Cathay, so at last he steered toward Hayti (or
Hispaniola, as he called it) and the little ship-built fortress of La
Navidad, where his forty comrades had been left.

On the twenty-seventh of November, the fleet of the Admiral cast anchor
off the solitary fort. It was night. No light was to be seen on the
shore; through the darkness nothing could be made out that looked like
the walls of the fort. Columbus fired a cannon; then he fired another.
The echoes were the only answer. They must be sound sleepers in our
fortress there, said the Admiral. At last, over the water he heard the
sound of oars--or was it the dip of a paddle? A voice called for the
Admiral; but it was not a Spanish voice. The interpreter--who was
the only one left of those ten stolen Indians carried by Columbus to
Spain--came to the Admiral's side; by the light of the ship's lantern
they could make out the figure of an Indian in his canoe. He brought
presents from his chief. But where are my men at the fort? asked the
Admiral. And then the whole sad story was told.

The fort of La Navidad was destroyed; the Spaniards were all dead; the
first attempt of Spain to start a colony in the new world was a terrible
failure. And for it the Spaniards themselves were to blame.

After Columbus had left them, the forty men in the fort did not do as
he told them or as they had solemnly promised. They were lazy; they were
rough; they treated the Indians badly; they quarreled among themselves;
some of them ran off to live in the woods. Then sickness came; there
were two "sides," each one jealous of the other; the Indians became
enemies. A fiery war-chief from the hills, whose name was Caonabo, led