the curious custom of rolling up a large dry leaf called tobago,
lighting it at one end, and drawing the smoke up through their nostrils.
Obviously, another "poor people" like those of San Salvador; they were
not the rich and civilized Chinese that Marco Polo had written about.
Neither capital nor king had they, and their land, they told the
explorers, was surrounded by water. They called it Colba. It was, in
fact, the modern Cuba which Columbus had discovered.

Instead of continuing west along Cuba's northern shore till he came to
the end of it, the Admiral preferred to turn east and see what lay in
that direction. It was one of the few times when Columbus's good
judgment in navigation deserted him; for had he kept west he might have
learned from the natives that what we call Florida lay beyond, and
Florida was the continent; or, even if the natives had nothing to
communicate, west would have been the logical direction for him to take
after leaving the extremity of Cuba, had he fully shared Pinzon's belief
that Asia lay beyond the islands. But no, without waiting to get to the
extremity of Cuba, Columbus retraced his course east, as if expecting to
find there the one, definite thing which, according to his friend, Las
Casas, he had come to find.

On November 12 he writes: "A canoe came out to the ship with sixteen
young men; five of them climbed aboard, whom I ordered to be kept so as
to have them with us; I then sent ashore to one of the houses and took
seven women and three children; this I did in order that the five men
might tolerate their captivity better with company." No doubt he treated
the natives kindly, but one can readily understand that their families
and friends back on the island must have felt outraged at this conduct
on the white man's part.