About the ninth of December Columbus sailed eastwardly from the site of the Villa de la Navidad, and anchored before an Indian town, where he determined to plant a colony. “He landed with all his men, provisions and implements, which he had brought in the ships of the fleet, at a plain, near a rock, on which a fort could easily be built. Here he erected a town, and called it Isabela, in honor of Queen Isabella. This place was deemed very suitable, inasmuch as the harbor was very large, though exposed to the northwest, and had an attractive river a bow-shot from it, from which canals of water might be cut to run through the middle of the town, and beyond was an extensive plain, from which the Indians said the mines of Cibao were not very distant. For these reasons the admiral was eager to settle the colony. On account of the fatigue of the voyage and that caused by his labor here, he did not have time to write in his journal, from day to day, what happened, as had been his habit. He also fell sick, which interrupted his writing from the eleventh of December to the twelfth of March, 1494. Meanwhile he administered the affairs of the town according to his ability. He intrusted Alonso de Hojeda with fifteen men to discover the mines of Cibao. Afterward, on the second of February, twelve ships of the fleet set sail for Castile, under the command of Antonio de Torres.”[178] In March Columbus with a body of armed men explored the country of Cibao. “It is rough and stony,” writes Ferdinand Columbus, “full of gravel, grassy, and watered by several rivers in which gold is found. The farther they went into the country the more rugged and mountainous they found it. On the tops of the mountains were grains of gold-sand, for, as the admiral said, the great rains carry it down from the summits of the mountains to the rivers in small sand.... The admiral, perceiving that he was now eighteen leagues from Isabela, and the country he had left behind him very craggy, ordered a fort to be built in a very pleasant and defensible place, which he called the castle of San Tomas, to command the country about the mines, and to be a place of safety for the Christians who went there. The command of this new fort he gave to Don Pedro Margarita, a person of some importance, with fifty-six men, among whom were men of all trades to erect the fort, which was built with clay and timber, which made it strong enough to resist the attack of any number of Indians that might come against it.... On Sunday, the twenty-ninth of March, Columbus arrived at Isabela, where melons were already grown fit to eat, although it was not more than two months after the seed had been put into the ground. Cucumbers came up in twenty days, and a wild vine of that country, having been pruned, had produced grapes which were good and large. The next day, being the thirtieth of March, a farmer gathered ears of wheat, the seed of which he had sown at the latter end of January.