Mothers, unable to bear the pining of their children, struck them dead, and then took their own life. Whole families folded themselves in loving embrace, and while thus embracing ended their life with their own hand. When the wild beasts came upon them, the exiles plunged into the sea, and stood shivering in the water for hours and hours, until the beasts retreated. Wearily they made their way onward, until, at last, they beheld the joyous sight of human settlements. Exhausted, they lay along the coasts, wasted by suffering and disease, and half demented from starvation. Down to the shore came the priests, and holding a crucifix in the one hand, and provisions in the other, the unfortunate Jews were given the choice between Christ and starvation. The flesh was stronger than the spirit. They begged for the bread, and ate at it ravenously, after the few drops of baptismal water had cleansed their soul from the foulest stains of infidelity. "Thus," says a pious Castilian historian, "thus the calamities of these poor blind creatures proved in the end an excellent remedy, that God made use of, to unseal their eyes, so that, renouncing their ancient heresies, they became faithful followers of the cross." How many hundred days of purgatory punishment were cancelled for this pious utterance of the Castilian, History again neglected to record. Another ship load was cast out by a barbarous captain upon the African coast, where the African savages pounced down upon them, and abandoned themselves to frightful cruelties. The men and youths they sold into slavery, the defenseless women were brutally ravished; the children at their mothers' breasts, the aged and the sick and the infirm were mutilated and tortured and murdered by the thousands. Another ship load landed in the harbor of Genoa. A graphic picture of their sufferings is given by a Genoese historian, an eye witness of the scenes, which he describes as follows: