with them; but that was only because the father, having seen his wife and
children kidnapped, came and offered to go with them of his own accord.
This taking of the women raises a question which must be in the mind of
any one who studies this extraordinary voyage--the question of the
treatment of native women by the Spaniards. Columbus is entirely silent
on the subject; but taking into account the nature of the Spanish rabble
that formed his company, and his own views as to the right which he had
to possess the persons and goods of the native inhabitants, I am afraid
that there can be very little doubt that in this matter there is a good
reason, for his silence. So far as Columbus himself was concerned, it is
probable that he was innocent enough; he was not a sensualist by nature,
and he was far too much interested and absorbed in the principal objects
of his expedition, and had too great a sense of his own personal dignity,
to have indulged in excesses that would, thus sanctioned by him, have
produced a very disastrous effect on the somewhat rickety discipline of
his crew. He was too wise a master, however, to forbid anything that it
was not in his power to prevent; and it is probable that he shut his eyes
to much that, if he did not tolerate it, he at any rate regarded as a
matter of no very great importance. His crew had by this time learned to
know their commander well enough not to commit under his eyes offences
for which he would have been sure to punish them.


For two days they ran along the coast with a fair wind; but on the 14th a
head wind and heavy sea drove them into the shelter of a deep harbour
called by Columbus Puerto del Principe, which is the modern Tanamo. The
number of islands off this part of the coast of Cuba confirmed Columbus
in his profound geographical error; he took them to be "those innumerable
islands which in the maps of the world are placed at the end of the
east." He erected a great wooden cross on an eminence here, as he always