Twenty-five hundred persons embarked as colonists in the vessels, and, for the first time, men took their families with them.
Everything was done to give dignity to the appointment of Ovando, and it was hoped that by sending out families of respectable character, who were to be distributed in four towns, there might be a better basis given to the settlement.

This measure had been insisted upon by Columbus.
This fleet put to sea on the thirteenth of February, 1502.

It met, at the very outset, a terrible storm, and one hundred and twenty of the passengers were lost by the foundering of a ship.

The impression was at first given in Spain that the whole fleet had been lost; but this proved to be a mistake.

The others assembled at the Canaries, and arrived in San Domingo on the fifteenth of April.
Columbus himself never lost confidence in his own star.