Red-hot with a determined purpose, he would brook no delay. To him, says the chronicler, every day seemed a year. He was eager to anticipate Ribaut, of whose designs and whose force he seems to have been informed to the minutest particular, but whom he hoped to thwart and ruin by gaining Fort Caroline before him. With eleven ships, then, he sailed from Cadiz on the 29th of June, 1565, leaving the smaller vessels of his fleet to follow with what speed they might. He touched first at the Canaries, and on the eighth of July left them, steering for Dominica. A minute account of the voyage has come down to us from the pen of Mendoza, chaplain of the expedition, a somewhat dull and illiterate person, who busily jots down the incidents of each passing day, and is constantly betraying, with a certain awkward simplicity, how the cares of this world and the next jostle each other in his thoughts. On Friday, the twentieth of July, a storm fell upon them with appalling fury. The pilots lost head, the sailors gave themselves up to their terrors. Throughout the night, they beset Mendoza for confession and absolution, a boon not easily granted, for the seas swept the crowded decks in cataracts of foam, and the shriekings of the gale in the rigging drowned the exhortations of the half-drowned priest. Cannon, cables, spars, water-casks, were thrown overboard, and the chests of the sailors would have followed, had not the latter, despite their fright, raised such a howl of remonstrance that the order was revoked. At length day dawned. At least there was light to die by. Plunging, reeling, half submerged, quivering under the crashing shock of the seas, whose mountain ridges rolled down upon her before the gale, the ship lay in deadly jeopardy from Friday till Monday noon. Then the storm abated; the sun broke forth; and again she held her course. They reached Dominica on Sunday, the fifth of August. The chaplain tells us how he went on shore to refresh himself,--how, while his Italian servant washed his linen at a brook, he strolled along the beach and picked up shells,--and how he was scared, first, by a prodigious turtle, and next by a vision of the cannibal natives, which caused his prompt retreat to the boats. On the tenth, they anchored in the harbor of Porto Rico, where they found two of their companion-ships, from which they had parted in the storm. One of them was the San Pelayo, with Menendez on board. Mendoza informs us that in the evening the officers came on board his ship, when he, the chaplain, regaled them with sweetmeats, and that Menendez invited him not only to supper that night, but to dinner the next day, "for the which I thanked him, as reason was," says the gratified churchman.