Thinking it another island, they sailed over to it when the boats were mended. The Admiral was suffering torture with eyestrain (small wonder, one would say who has seen those hundreds of cramped pages he wrote), so he called a reliable man and ordered him to conduct a party ashore and take possession in the name of their sovereigns. He himself, he said, would lie down awhile in his dark cabin, for the glare of the tropic sun made his eyes ache cruelly. That is how it happened that, on August 10, 1498, the Admiral lost the chance of putting foot on the vast mainland of South America. Back came the party from shore after a few hours to report that the natives appeared very intelligent, that their land was called Paria, that they wore a little gold which came (as usual) from "the west," and that they wore strings of pearls that were gathered a little farther south on the Paria coast. At last, pearls! How it must have encouraged our ever hopeful Admiral! So now, though they did not suspect it, the great continent of South America was discovered. They sailed south along its shore for a time, hoping to find the pearls, but the farther they went the rougher the great waves became,--mountainous, indeed,--forming actual lofty ridges on the surface of the sea. Of this phenomenon Columbus wrote home to the monarchs, "I shuddered lest the waters should have upset the vessel when they came under its bows." The rush, as we now know, was made partly by the delta of the Orinoco River and partly by the African current squeezing itself into the narrow space between the continent and the southern end of Trinidad, after which it curls itself into the Gulf of Mexico and comes out again as the Gulf Stream. Columbus, after buffeting these dangerous waters as long as he could, turned north again along Trinidad and emerged out of the Gulf of Paria, leaving the pearls behind him. Instead of landing and looking to see if the natives spoke the truth, he started a hopeful letter to the sovereigns, telling them what rich pearl fisheries he had discovered. This time, however, Christopher's imagination really ran close to the facts, for at their next landing, on the island of Margarita, north of Venezuela, they actually bartered three pounds of large pearls from the natives! Then they headed northwest for Haiti, reaching it the last of August, 1498.