And would we go to visit the cacique whose town was not so far yonder?
It was Christmas Eve.

We sailed with a small, small wind for the cacique's village, out from harbor of St.Thomas, around a headland and along a low, bright green shore.

So low and fitful was the wind that we moved like two great snails.

Better to have left the ships and gone, so many of us, in our boats with oars, canoes convoying us! The distance was not great, but distance is as the power of going.

"I remember," quoth the Admiral, "a calm, going from the Levant to Crete, and our water cask broken and not a mouthful for a soul aboard! That was a long, long two days while the one shore went no further and the other came no nearer.