This precaution saved the intrepid Diego a second surprise from cannibals; but the passage, after leaving Jamaica, was torture. So intense was the heat, that he and his Indian rowers were forced to take turns jumping overboard and swimming alongside the canoe in order to cool off. The Indians, like children, wanted to drink all the water at once. In spite of warning, they emptied the kegs the second night, and then lay down on the bottom of the canoe, panting for more. Diego and his Spanish companion did the rowing till the Indians were rested a bit. Then Diego brought out two more kegs of water which he had artfully hidden under his seat, gave them all a drink, and set them to work again. Late that second night the moon came up, not out of the sea, but behind the jagged rock that lies ten miles off the western end of Haiti. Blessed sight! What new courage it put into the tired rowers; how eager they were to make the rock by sunrise so as to lie in its shade all that August day of 1503, instead of blistering under the torrid sun in an open boat. Surely, if ever men deserved to lie all day in the shade, it was these brave fellows who were trying to save Christopher Columbus. From this point Mendez went on with his six rowers till he found the governor; but before going into that matter, let me tell you how proud, and justly proud, Diego Mendez was all his life of this canoe trip. He lived to be an old man (in the city of Valladolid), and when he felt himself nearing the end, he asked his relatives to mark his grave by a tombstone, "in the center of which let a canoe be carved (which is a piece of wood hollowed out in which the Indians navigate), because in such a boat I navigated some three hundred leagues; and let some letters be carved above it saying _canoa_." Quite right of you, Diego Mendez, to wish posterity to know of your plucky voyage. We hope your relatives gave you the coveted tombstone; and we hope, also, that they carved, on its reverse side, that of all the men who ever served Don Cristobal Colon, you were the most loyal and the most valiant. The Admiral, in writing an account of what happened on the Jamaica beach while Mendez was seeking aid, says:-- "At the request of the king's treasurer, I took two brothers with me to the Indies--one as captain, the other as auditor. Both were without any capacity for their work, yet became more and more vain. I forgave them many incivilities. They rebelled openly on Jamaica, at which I was as much astonished as if the sun should go black." Yet why, we ask, should Columbus have been so astonished? Had he ever known much else from those under him but incivility and rebellion?