While the colonists were undergoing these sufferings, Las Casas found himself on board a vessel whose pilots, ignorant of the chart, carried him eighty leagues beyond the harbour of Hispaniola and wasted two months in beating against the currents to pass the little island La Beata. Seeing the hopeless incompetency of these men, he had himself put ashore at the harbour of Jaquimo some twenty leagues lower down, from whence he could go on to Jaguana and so across the island to the city of Santo Domingo. The news of the disaster at Cumaná had long since reached Hispaniola and Las Casas heard of it in the following manner, while journeying on foot across the island with several companions. One day, while he was taking his afternoon siesta under a tree, a party of travellers joined his companions, who enquired what news there was in Santo Domingo or from Spain. The newcomers answered that the only recent news was that of the murder of the clerigo Las Casas and all his colony at Cumana by the Indians. “We are witnesses to prove that that is impossible” replied the others, and the discussion which ensued awakened the clerigo who thus received the disheartening tidings, which he was inclined to believe, of the total destruction of his hopes. He afterwards attributed this catastrophe to his own weakness in allowing himself to be drawn into a partnership with godless men, whose sole object was to enrich themselves, by which he had offended God and merited punishment. He would have done better to keep to his original plan of forming a religious company of Knights of the Golden Spur, who, aided by the friars, would have embarked with him on the conversion of the natives without mingling any expectation of profitable trade with their project. The struggle for immediate and inordinate gain, in which the Spanish colonists were engaged, with its slave raids, extermination of the Indians by selling them alcoholic liquors and forcing them into the dangerous labours of mining and pearl diving, was incompatible with such a colony as Las Casas designed to found, and the agreement into which he entered with the Audiencia of Hispaniola was bound to wreck his projects.