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. The strange thing is that Columbus, so wise in many ways, did not understand it too, in spite of the miserably mean ideas which prevailed in his day regarding the heathen. But the very fact that he notes so frankly how he captured the natives shows that neither he, nor those who were to read his journal, had any scruples on the subject. All moral considerations aside, it was tactless indeed to treat the natives thus in islands where he hoped to have his own men kindly received. On Cuba the boats were calked and scraped, and the Admiral superintended the operations. He was always a busy, busy man, on land or sea. Being a great lover of nature, he left this nautical business for a while and traveled a few days inland; and of every native he met he asked that same question that he had been asking among all these lovely islands, "Is there any gold or pearls or spices?" No, that land lies west, far west; thus Columbus understood the sign answer; but after following a native in that direction for a long time, he had to give it up, for the time being. When he returned to the beach, Martin Pinzon showed him a big stick of cinnamon wood for which, in his absence, one of the sailors had traded a handful of beads. "The native had quantities of it," Martin assured his Admiral. "Then why didn't the sailor get it all?" "Because," and here Martin grew malicious, "you ordered that they could trade only a little, so that you could do most of it yourself!" And now the native had gone, and the rueful Admiral never saw him nor his cinnamon again!