expedition. She was swept during a calm by the strong current and through the carelessness of the crew on a sandbank, where she became a total wreck. Fortunately the weather continued calm, so that the lives of the crew, as well as everything on board, were saved. All the stores, with the assistance of the natives, were carefully stowed away in huts on shore. Nor was there the slightest disposition on their part to take the smallest advantage of the strangers who had come among them. Not one article was pilfered; not a "hawk's bell," nor a bead—to them objects of envy and delight—was taken away; nor were the most trifling articles appropriated while removing them in their canoes from the wreck to the shore. "So loving, so tractable, so peaceable are these people," says Columbus in his journal, "that I swear to your Majesties, there is not in the world a better nation, nor a better land. They love their neighbours as themselves."[1] What an example the uncivilized savage here presents to the civilization of our own age, of which we so often make such vaunted boasts!
A colony established. As most of the shipwrecked crew, besides some other persons belonging to the expedition, expressed a desire to be left behind, and as the two vessels would have been overcrowded with the three crews, their wishes suggested to Columbus the idea of constituting them the germ of a future colony. The wreck of the caravel provided abundant material for the fortress he had resolved to build. Her guns and ammunition were ready for its protection; and with his crews so reduced in number, he could spare provisions for the year, by the end of which he hoped
- ↑ W. Irving, p. 92.
