Nine against the unknown

NINE AGAINST THE UNKNOWN II9
against you, and no one spoke a word in your favour. . . .
I cannot promise to reinstate you at once in your government.
People are too much inflamed against you, and must have
time to cool. As to your rank of admiral, I never intended to
deprive you of it. But you must bide your time and trust
in me.”
Bide his time . . . when on the tip of his eager tongue
was a great project to push still further west than the islands,
on a fourth great expedition which would bring him, by way
of a <cstrait” of which he had heard, to those dominions
in Asia which the Portuguese, sailing eastwards, were already
exploiting. . . . The Spanish rulers listened with some doubt
to weary months of pleading, and at last and again surrendered.
That golden tongue riddled every shield of sanity and reason
opposed to it.
On the 9th of May be sailed from Cadiz with five.ships.
He was strictly interdicted from putting in at Hispaniola
or meddling at all in the affairs of the colonies. But was he
not the Admiral ? On the pretext that one of his ships required
repairs he determined to make Isabella En route, he looked
at the skies and saw certain signs of the coming of one of
the great Atlantic storms. Unless he found shelter for his
squadron
Ovando, the new governor who had superseded Bobadilla,
refused to allow the squadron shelter in the harbour. He
refused, equally, to delay the sailing of a great treasure-
fleet loaded with gold from the mines of Ciboa. On board it
sailed a cloud of the Spanish adventurers including Bobadilla.
Two days out at sea a great tornado smote it. One ship
escaped, having seen her companions whelmed in the great
Atlantic mountains. Columbus had proved a true prophet.
Escaping the worst of that storm himself by sheltering
under an unknown headland, he held on in the course of
his fourth expedition of discovery. Jamaica was reached on
the 14th of July, 1502. Still he held westwards. But.presently
the fleet almost foundered in the maze of cays and islets that
littered those seas—islands flowering a rank green or glimmer¬
ing rocky and inhospitable under the burning summer. The
winds died away.
For over two months the worm-eaten, leaking ships
tacked to and fro amidst those islets, seeking a wind to help
them escape. Scurvy came on the crews, and men sickened