Hard fighting ensued. Many of the natives of the islands were killed, and at last the Spaniards put them to flight and returned to their ships. The next day the natives came again to renew the contest, for which the Spaniards landed. “After a long battle,” wrote Vespucci, describing this second day, “[in which] many of them [were] slain, we put them [again] to flight, and pursued them to a village, having made about 250 of them prisoners; and we burnt the village, and returned to our ships with victory and 250 prisoners, leaving many of them dead and wounded; and of ours there were no more than one killed, and 22 wounded, who all escaped [_i. e._ recovered], God be thanked. “We arranged our departure, and the seven men, of whom five were wounded, took an island canoe, and with seven prisoners that we gave them,—four women and three men,—returned to their [own] country full of gladness, wondering at our strength: and we thereupon made sail for Spain, with 222 captive slaves, and reached the port of Cadiz on the 15 day of October, 1498, where we were well received and sold our slaves.” Varnhagen, in his discussion of Vespucci’s voyages, presented arguments to show that the Bermudas were the group of islands thus occupied by a warlike and cannibal people, whom he supposed to have been soon afterwards exterminated by slavers, before the discovery of these islands by Bermudez about the year 1522, when they were uninhabited. Bancroft and Fiske inclined to the same view. It seems to me more probable, however, that the Bermudas, distant fully six hundred miles from any other land, had never been peopled until they were found by Europeans. The extreme isolation and comparatively small extent of the Bermuda group, far out in the sea, would make it practically impossible for the savages, with any means of navigation that they possessed, to pass back and forth in frequent war expeditions. Instead, I believe that the islands visited by Vespucci on the return voyage were the northern part of the Bahama group. Without going so far from the coast and its inlets as to incur much danger of storms, or to completely lose the course and the reckoning in cloudy weather, canoe expeditions from the Bahamas could come frequently, as the narrative says, to attack the Indians in the region of Pamlico Sound. These Indians, too, sometimes pursuing their enemies homeward, might learn the situation of their islands, and would thus be able to pilot the way for Vespucci’s ships. According to this view, they sailed south from Pamlico Sound to the Bahamas. The direction of east-northeast, given in the narrative, must be a mistake, being applicable instead for the course taken from the Bahamas to Spain. The larger islands of this very extensive group had many inhabitants when discovered by Columbus; but they were afterward wholly depopulated by the unspeakable cruelties of slave-traders.