Columbus was now advanced in years, and his sufferings and labors had dimmed his eyesight and bowed his frame; but his mind was yet active, and his enthusiasm in the cause of discovery irrepressible. He had convinced himself, and now sought to convince the queen, that to the westward of the regions he had visited the land converged, leaving a narrow passage through which he hoped to pass, and proceed to the Indies beyond. This convergence of the land did in reality exist, but the strait of water he expected to find was, and is, a strait of land--the Isthmus of Panama. However, the queen approved of the plan, and gave him four ships, equipped and victualled for two years. Columbus had conceived the immense idea of passing through the strait, and returning by Asia and the Cape of Good Hope, thus circumnavigating the globe and proving its spherical form. He departed from Cadiz on the 8th of May, 1502. He touched at, and named, Martinique early in June, and afterwards at St. Jean, now Porto Ricco. Ovando refused his request to land at Isabella to repair his vessel and exchange one of them for a faster sailer. Escaping a terrible storm, which wrecked and utterly destroyed the splendid fleet in which the rapacious pillagers of the island had embarked their ill-gotten wealth, he was driven by the winds to Jamaica, and thence by the currents to Cuba. Here a strong north wind enabled him to sail south southwest, towards the latitude where he expected to find the strait. He touched the mainland of North America at Truxillo, in Honduras, and coasted thence southward along the Mosquito shore, Nicaragua, Costa Ricca, and Panama. Here he explored every sinuosity and indentation of the shore, seeking at the very spot where civilization and commerce now require a canal, a passage which he considered as demanded by Nature and accorded by Providence. He followed the isthmus as far as the Gulf of Darien, and then, driven by a furious tropical tempest, returned as far as Veragua, in search of rich gold mines of which he had heard. The storm lasted for eight days, concluding with a terrible display of water-spouts, which Columbus is said to have regarded as a work of the devil, and to have dispelled by bringing forth the Bible and exorcising the demon. One of the water-spouts passed between the ships without injuring them, and spun away, muttering and terrible, to spend its fury elsewhere. [Illustration: THE WATERSPOUT.]