Crossing from Isla de Sacrificios, as they called this blood-bespattered place, the Spaniards landed on the adjoining mainland, and making for themselves shelter with boughs and sails began trading for gold; but the natives being timid and returns inconsiderable, Grijalva proceeded to another island, less than a league from the mainland and provided with water. Here was a harbor sheltered from the dread yet grateful north winds, which in winter rush in with passionate energy, driving away the dreadful summer vómito and tumbling huge surges on the strand, though now they formed but a wanton breeze by day, which slept on waves burnished by the radiant sun or silvered by the moon. Here they landed and erected huts upon the sand.[35] To the Spaniards all nature along this seaboard seemed dyed with the blood of human sacrifices. And here, beside evidences of heathen abominations in the forms of a great temple, idols, priests, and the bodies of two recently sacrificed boys, they had gnats and mosquitoes to annoy them, all which led them to consider the terror of their voyage and the advisability of return. Of the Indian, Francisco, Grijalva asked the significance of the detestable rite of ripping open living human bodies and offering bloody hearts to hungry gods; and the heathen answered, because the people of Culhua, or Ulua, as he pronounced the name, would have it so. From this circumstance, together with the facts that the name of the commander was Juan, and that it was now about the time of the anniversary of the feast of John the Baptist, the island was named San Juan de Ulua,[36] while the continent in that vicinity was called Santa María de las Nieves. FOOTNOTES [14] Solis and Herrera say 250; Gomara and Galvano, 200; Peter Martyr, 300, etc. [15] Torquemada, i. 358, asserts that Montejo furnished his own vessel, and that Alonso Hernandez Puertocarrero, Alonso Dávila, Diego de Ordaz, and others, went at their own cost.