1502. July 14. Columbus sails away.
July 30. At Guanaja.
Meets a strange canoe.
Columbus, having lingered about the island to repair his ships and refresh his crews, and also to avoid a second storm, did not finally get away till July 14, when he steered directly for Terra Firma. The currents perplexed him, and, as there was little wind, he was swept west further than he expected. He first touched at some islands near Jamaica. Thence he proceeded west a quarter southwest, for four days, without seeing land, as Porras tells us, when, bewildered, he turned to the northwest, and then north. But finding himself (July 24) in the archipelago near Cuba, which on his second voyage he had called The Gardens, he soon after getting a fair wind (July 27) stood southwest, and on July 30 made a small island, off the northern coast of Honduras, called Guanaja by the natives, and Isla de Pinos by himself. He was now in sight of the mountains of the mainland. The natives struck him as of a physical type different from all others whom he had seen. A large canoe, eight feet beam, and of great length, though made of a single log, approached with still stranger people in it.
On the Honduras coast.
They had apparently come from a region further north; and under a canopy in the waist of the canoe sat a cacique with his dependents. The boat was propelled by five and twenty men with paddles. It carried various articles to convince Columbus that he had found a people more advanced in arts than those of the regions earlier discovered. They had with them copper implements, including hatchets, bells, and the like. He saw something like a crucible in which metal had been melted. Their wooden swords were jagged with sharp flints, their clothes were carefully made, their utensils were polished and handy. Columbus traded off some trinkets for such specimens as he wanted. If he now had gone in the direction from which this marvelous canoe had come, he might have thus early opened the wondrous world of Yucatan and Mexico, and closed his career with more marvels yet. His beatific visions, which he supposed were leading him under the will of the Deity, led him, however, south. The delusive strait was there. He found an old man among the Indians, whom he kept as a guide, since the savage could draw a sort of chart of the coast. He dismissed the rest with presents, after he had wrested from them what he wanted. Approaching the mainland, near the present Cape of Honduras, the Adelantado landed on Sunday, August 14, and mass was celebrated in a grove near the beach. Again, on the 17th, Bartholomew landed some distance eastward of the first spot, and here, by a river (Rio de la Posesion, now Rio Tinto), he planted the Castilian banner and formally took possession of the country. The Indians were friendly, and there was an interchange of provisions and trinkets. The natives were tattooed, and they had other customs, such as the wearing of cotton jackets, and the distending of their ears by rings, which were new to the Spaniards.
Seeking a strait.
Columbus oppressed with the gout.