himself south of Cuba among the little "Garden" group. It was the third
time he had had a chance to sail along the Cuban coast and discover
whether it really was an island, as the natives said, or whether it was
the mainland, as he had forced his sailors to swear while on the Cuban
voyage when his brain was full of fever. Again he let the problem go
unsolved; the object of this fourth voyage was to find the straits
leading into the Indian Ocean. Having failed to begin his search from
Trinidad by following South America westward, as originally planned, he
expected he would come to the straits by following Cuba's southern shore
in the same direction, if Cuba, as he hoped, was a great strip of land
projecting eastward from the continent. And yet, instead of sailing
along Cuba, or returning to the Gulf of Paria and hugging the land
westward, he suddenly decided to put out southwest into the open sea.
This seems to us a foolish course, for no matter at what point he struck
land, how would he know whether to explore to the left or right for his
straits? Why this least desirable of three courses was taken neither the
Admiral nor his son explained in their diaries. Of course he found
land,--the Honduras coast; but of course he had no means of knowing what
relation it had either to Cuba or to the land around the Gulf of Paria.
Thus the poor Admiral lost his last chance of arriving at any just
conclusions of the magnitude of his discovery.

Before reaching this Honduras coast they stopped at the Isle of Pines,
where they saw natives in comfortable-looking house boats; that is, huge
canoes sixty feet long, cut from a single mahogany tree, and with a
roofed caboose amidships. These natives wore plenty of gold ornaments
and woven clothing; they had copper hatchets and sharp blades of flint;
and they used a sort of money for buying and selling. In other words, it
was the nearest approach to civilization that Columbus had ever seen in
his new lands. He tried by signs to ask about all these things, and the