[305] “On Sunday, the eighth of May, they doubled the Cape of Florida, giving it the name of the Cape of the Currents (Cabo de Corrientes), because they are stronger there than the wind, and came to an anchorage near a town called Abaiòa. All this coast, from the Point of Reefs (Punta de Arracifes) to the Cape of the Currents, trending north and south one point to the eastward, is clean, and has six fathoms water, the cape lying in twenty-eight degrees fifteen minutes. They sailed on till they met with two islands to the southward, in twenty-seven degrees, one of which, being a league in compass, they named Santa Marta, and took in water there. “On Friday, the thirteenth of May, they sailed along a shoal and a row of islands as far as the island which they called Pola, lying in twenty-six degrees and a half. Between the shoal and the row of islands and the continent is a spacious sea, like a bay. “On Sunday, the day of the Feast of the Holy Spirit, the fifteenth of May, they coasted ten leagues along a row of small islands as far as two white ones, and they called them all the Martyrs, (las Martires), because the high rocks, at a distance, look like men suffering, and the name has suited them well on account of the large number of persons who have since been lost there. The rocks lie in twenty-six degrees fifteen minutes. The ships held on, sometimes north and sometimes northeast, until the twenty-third of May; and on the twenty-fourth they ran along the coast to the southward as far as some small islands which lay out at sea, and still they did not perceive that it was the main-land.” [306] Historia general. Herrera. dec. i. lib. ix. cap. x, xii. [307] Primera y segunda parte de la historia general de las Indias. Gomara. cap. x. [308] Ten years before this, says Humboldt, “Columbus distinctly learned, when he was coasting along the eastern shores of Veragua, that to the west of this land there was a sea ‘which in less than nine days’ sail would bear ships to the _Chersonesus aurea_ of Ptolemy and to the mouth of the Ganges.’ In the same _Carta rarissima_, which contains the beautiful and poetic narration of a dream, the admiral says that ‘the opposite coasts of Veragua, near the Rio de Belen, are situated relatively to another, as Tortosa on the Mediterranean and Fuenterabia in Biscay, or as Venice and Pisa.’ The great ocean, the South Pacific, was even at that time regarded as merely a continuation of the _Sinus magnus_ (μέγας κόλπος) of Ptolemy, situated before the golden Chersonesus, whilst Cattigara and the land of the Sines (Thinae) were supposed to constitute its eastern boundary.”—Humboldt: Cosmos. Otté’s trans. vol. ii. pp. 642, 643. [309] Historia general. Herrera. dec. i. lib. x. cap. i, ii, iv. dec. ii. lib. i. cap. iv, xi. De Orbe Novo decades. Martire. dec. iii. cap. ii, iii, vi, x. dec. iv. cap. vi. dec. vii. cap. x. [310] Historia general. Herrera. dec. ii. lib. i. cap. vii.