Christmas Eve came, and the Admiral, being very weary, went below
to sleep, leaving a sailor to steer the ship. But this sailor thought
he too would like to sleep, so he gave the tiller in charge of a
boy.

Now throughout the whole voyage the Admiral had forbidden this.
Whether it was stormy or calm he had commanded that the helm was
never to be entrusted to a boy. This boy knew very little of how
to steer a ship, and being caught in a current it was cast upon a
sand-bank and wrecked. By good luck every one was saved and landed
upon the island of Haiti. But Columbus had now only one little
vessel, and it was not large enough to carry all the company. Many
of them, however, were so delighted with the islands that they
wanted to stay there, and they had often asked the Admiral's leave
to do so.

Columbus therefore now determined to allow some of his men to
remain to found a little colony, and trade with the Indians, "and
he trusted in God that when he came back from Spain - as he intended
to do - he would find a ton of gold collected by them, and that
they would have found a gold mine, and such quantities of spices
that the Sovereigns would in the space of three years be able to
undertake a Crusade and conquer the Holy Sepulchre."

So out of the wreck of the Santa Maria Columbus built a fort, and
from the many who begged to be left behind he chose forty-four,
appointing one of them, Diego de Arana, as Governor. He called the
fort La Navida or The Nativity in memory of the day upon which it
was founded. The island itself he called Española or Little Spain.