that they were scarcely able to speak. Hanging from the neck of each native were two dried gourd-shells, one filled with the herb which the people had in their mouths, the other containing a white meal like chalk dust. The natives carried small sticks which they wetted at intervals in their mouths and then put them into the meal and then into the gourds containing the herb.” Then they again filled their cheeks with the herb. At another place the explorers remained forty-seven days, where they obtained “one hundred and nineteen marks of pearls” in exchange for some small trifles. From a native, Vespucci obtained an oyster containing one hundred and thirty pearls. The fleet sailed along the coast to where it was “fifteen degrees north of the equator.” Thence the explorers steered for Española to obtain provisions. Departing from the island on the twenty-second of July, 1500, they sailed for Spain, and arrived at the port of Cadiz on the eighth of September.[206] When King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella heard that the Portuguese had reached India by sailing around Africa, they commissioned Columbus to explore the western coast of Paria, where he conceived a navigable strait could be found through which the vessels of Spain might sail to Cathay. Four caravels composed the fleet with which he sailed from Cadiz on the ninth of May, 1502. On the fifteenth of June, the vessels came in sight of one of the Caribbean islands called by the natives Mantinino. Thence they sailed to the island of Dominica, and thence to Española. Departing, on the fourteenth of July, from the port of Brazil, on the south side of the island of Española, Columbus sailed toward the Bay of Honduras, eastward of which he imagined was a strait through which he might sail to the Indian Ocean and reach Cathay. “We came to certain islands,” says Ferdinand Columbus, who had accompanied his father to the New World, “where we went ashore on the largest, called Guanaia, whence those that make sea-charts took occasion to call all those islands Guanaia, which are almost twelve leagues from the continent, near the province now called Honduras, though the admiral then called it Cabo Casinas.” While the fleet was anchored in one of the roadsteads of the group of islands called Guanaia, a large log-boat crowded with Indians and filled with certain commodities arrived there. Describing the capture of this highly valued prize, Ferdinand Columbus remarks: “Fortune so ordered it that a canoe, as long as a galley and eight feet wide, all of one tree, and like the other boats in shape, put in there, loaded with commodities brought from the country toward the west and bound for Nueva España.[207] In the middle of it was a covering like an awning, made of palm leaves, resembling those of the Venetian gondolas, which protected all beneath it, that neither rain nor sea-water could wet the goods. Under the awning were the women and children. Although there were twenty-five men in the