fleet. While he was waiting came the bitter and disquieting news that
Portuguese explorers were returning in a stream from the Indian Ocean
with exceedingly rich cargoes, all justly traded for in the markets of
Calcutta. Why, he groaned, had _his_ India been so barren of
riches?

He began to ponder over all the theories he had read concerning the
geography of the world, and to wonder what his discoveries might really
be. If it dawned upon him that he had struck islands fringing on
absolutely new, unsuspected land, he appears to have dismissed the
extraordinary idea, and to have come back to Martin Alonzo Pinzon's
theory that he, by sailing west over the globe, had come to Asiatic
regions. It must be so, he argued. Marco Polo had made known the fact
that an ocean bounded Asia on the east, and that ocean must be the
Atlantic, which continued across to Europe. The Indian Ocean which the
Portuguese had crossed must be the southern part of the Atlantic, where
it curved around Asia's southern shores. Ah, if only he could reach it!
If only he had sailed straight for the rich mainland, instead of wasting
his time on those pretty islands, inhabited only by a "poor people"!

He began to recall how the land north of the Gulf of Paria stretched far
west; how the southern shore of Cuba stretched far west; how the
currents of the Caribbean Sea indicated, by the fact that they had
washed Cuba, Haiti, and Porto Rico into their long narrow east-and-west
shape that somewhere in the west they passed through a strait which
separated some large island from southeastern Asia; and that strait must
lead into the Indian Ocean--the very ocean the Portuguese were now
sailing so profitably! He wisely resolved to linger no longer in Spain,
importuning for his lost governorship, but to undertake a fourth voyage
and find this passage.