e anchorage appearing, he coasted westward in
search of a harbour and water. Instead of a sterile land, he saw the
country covered with groves of palm-trees, cultivated in many places,
and enlivened by hamlets and scattered habitations, while streams came
rushing down the hill-sides.

At length anchoring, abundance of water was obtained from a limpid
brook, and traces of animals were seen, which must have been those of
deer, though supposed to be those of goats.

When coasting the island, he now for the first time saw, stretching away
to the south, that mighty continent of which he had so long been in
search, it being the land near the many mouths of the Oronoco; supposing
it, however, to be an island, he called it La Isla Santa. On the 2nd of
August he cast anchor near the south-west portion of Trinidad. As the
ships approached this place, a large canoe, with five and twenty Indians
on board, put off from the shore.

He in vain tried to induce the savages to come on board, by offering
them looking-glasses, glass, beads of polished metal, and glittering
trinkets. They remained gazing in mute wonder at the ships, but kept
their paddles ready to make off at the least attempt to approach them.
They were young, well formed, and naked, excepting fillets of cotton
bound round their heads, and coloured cloths about their loins. Besides
their bows and arrows, they carried bucklers,--an article of armour now
first seen among the inhabitants of the New World.

Believing that they might be affected by music, Columbus ordered the
band to strike up; but the Indians, mistaking the sounds as a sign of
hostility, seized their bows and let fly a shower of arrows. The
discharge of a couple of crossbows, however, put them to flight. They
afterwards approached the other ships, but had conceived an especial
fear of that of the Admiral.

Columbus, supposing himself to be in the seventh degree of latitude,
though actually in the tenth, expected to find the inhabitants similar
to the natives of Africa, under the same parallel,--black, with crisp
hair,--and was astonished at finding these natives even fairer than
those met with farther north.

The ships brought up at Point Arenal, the nearest to the mainland,
between which and the island Columbus observed, night and day, a current
flowing at a tremendous speed, boiling and raging to such a degree that
he thought it was crossed by a reef of rocks. From its dangerous
appearance he