where there was nothing to be seen but the low green shore with the
mountains behind and the alligators basking at the river mouths. At last
(November 2nd) they arrived at the cape known as Nombre de Dios, which
Ojeda had reached some time before in his voyage to the West.

The coast of the mainland had thus been explored from the Bay of Honduras
to Brazil, and Columbus was obliged to admit that there was no strait.
Having satisfied himself of that he decided to turn back to Veragua,
where he had seen the natives smelting gold, in order to make some
arrangement for establishing a colony there. The wind, however, which
had headed him almost all the way on his easterly voyage, headed him
again now and began to blow steadily from the west. He started on his
return journey on the 5th of December, and immediately fell into almost
worse troubles than he had been in before. The wood of the ships had
been bored through and through by seaworms, so that they leaked very
badly; the crews were sick, provisions were spoilt, biscuits rotten.
Young Ferdinand Columbus, if he did not actually make notes of this
voyage at the time, preserved a very lively recollection of it, and it is
to his Historie, which in its earlier passages is of doubtful
authenticity, that we owe some of the most human touches of description
relating to this voyage. Any passage in his work relating to food or
animals at this time has the true ring of boyish interest and
observation, and is in sharp contrast to the second-hand and artificial
tone of the earlier chapters of his book. About the incident of the
howling monkey, which the Admiral's Irish hound would not face, Ferdinand
remarks that it "frighted a good dog that we had, but frighted one of our
wild boars a great deal more"; and as to the condition of the biscuits
when they turned westward again, he says that they were "so full of
weevils that, as God shall help me, I saw many that stayed till night to
eat their sop for fear of seeing them."