But there was One mightier than Las Casas to do that, One whose artillery was mightier than the cannon in which Montoro put such confidence. Two days passed, and then the tropical storm burst in all its fury. To such poor, unforbidden shelter as he could find the Admiral had guided his battered little squadron, and there he and his followers waited, and watched the gathering gloom of earth and sea and air and sky; and well it might seem to some of those watchers that a spirit of retributive wrath was brooding over the scene of cruelty, treachery, and insolence.
"It will require all their seamanship to ride out the coming hurricane," said the pilot, Antonio de Alaminos, on the second day, as he regarded somewhat dubiously their own quarters.
And Diego Mendez answered moodily:
"I should heave no sigh if they and their ill-gotten wealth went to the bottom of the deep before mine eyes; but I do grieve to have heard that on the craziest of their barques they are carrying home the Admiral's gold, the poor remnant of his rents they have permitted him."
"Never have care for that, Señor," said the young Fernando earnestly. "It is my father's, and it will be kept safe for him."
"It is as well that thou canst console thyself with that belief, any way," muttered the man, as the boy went off to where Columbus was already issuing orders, needed by the sudden wild gusts of wind that came as forerunners of the tempest.
Then came the wild roar and whirl, and darkness made more awful by the fiery flashes that momentarily illumined the terrors of the scene. On land trees uprooted, houses flung into ruins as though made by children's hands of cards, the fields of maize changed as in an instant from fields of gold to grey, scorched deserts. Living beings struck at a breath into corpses; others crushed in the downfall of their homes. And at sea those four poor cranky vessels, which were all a great country could afford its great benefactor, tossing and toiling in the boiling sea.
Now the waters would seethe as though some hideous cauldron, prepared by evil spirits for some demon feast, and the doomed vessels shook through every plank and spar as though with living horror. And then, with a sudden shock the waters would rush together, and mount wildly into mountain waves crowned with crests of foam.
The ships lost sight of each other. Sailors and adventurers all gave themselves up for death. In a delirium of fear they confessed their sins to whoever would heed the dismal catalogue. Ave Marias, invocations of the saints, and such fragments of Scripture as they knew, were groaned forth on all sides, rather as invocations than prayers, as the days went by, and still the furious battle of nature raged.
The fellow to that storm not even the veteran navigator of all seas had experienced before. At times during the blackness of the night it would seem to the affrighted mariners as though hell itself had opened its jaws to swallow them. Making a pathway for themselves through the darkness, the raging billows would suddenly rush onwards brilliant with light, and surround the ship and its awe-struck occupants with a sea of flame. For a day and night the heavens glowed as a furnace; and the reverberating peals of thunder sounded to the distracted sailors as the last despairing cries from the other ships of their sinking comrades. What was becoming of the wretched, foolhardy creatures on board Ovando's proud fleet they had no longer care to think. Drenched with the ceaseless sheet of rain, which poured down day and night throughout that long week of storm continually, exhausted with toil, worn with fears, Columbus and his company were to be still further tried by the majestic terrors of those southern seas.