comiendas. At the same time, he procured for himself the government of Veragua. As this province had been discovered by Columbus,* such a grant of its government must have been very offensive to his son, the present governor of the Indies.

Ojeda, who was favored by Bishop Fonseca, obtained at the same time the appointment to the government of the province of Urabá, adjacent to Veragua. Ojeda was poor, his previous voyages having been of little or no profit to him; but he was aided in furnishing his present expedition by the celebrated pilot, Juan de la Cosa, and by a lawyer named Martin Fernandez d'Enciso,† whom Ojeda at once appointed alcalde in his province, which received the name of Nueva Andalucia.

Nicuesa, as the richer personage, had the larger fleet and more men; but he, too, went far beyond his means in fitting out his fleet, and came thereby into great embarrassments.

Both these commanders arrived at St. Domingo, which was to be their starting-point, at the same time, and, as was natural, began to quarrel about the limits of their respective governments. Finally, however, Juan de la Cosa persuaded the two governors to accept the River Darien as the boundary line between their two provinces. The province of Urabá was to extend from the River Darien eastward to Cape de la Vela; the province of Veragua from the River Darien westward to Cape Gracias a Dios. The former province was called Castilla del Oro, which name it gained from the flattering accounts that Columbus had given of it.

* In his fourth and last voyage.

† Enciso was the author of the valuable work Suma de Geographia, which is now very rare. There is a copy in the British Museum.

Rodrigo de Colmenares, a soldier who acted as Nicuesa's lieutenant, says that the agreement made with both these governors by the authorities in Spain was not fulfilled in St. Domingo by the admiral and his officers. Nicuesa and Ojeda were to have been allowed to be accompanied by four hundred of the inhabitants of Hispaniola, with Indians assigned to them, of whom they were not to be deprived for four years.

These would have been the rich men of the colony, and would have brought provisions; but, this privilege being denied to Ojeda and Nicuesa by the admiral, they were obliged to take poor people. Also they were to have had the government of Jamaica ceded to them, as in that island there was an abundance of the provisions that would be needful for them; but this also was denied by the admiral. How these slight

*

* "Ansimismo habia quedado capitulado con el Rey que les daba

drawbacks, often the proximate causes of failure in great adventures, show the evil of divided and conflicting authority! The governor of the Indies ought to have been the chief, if not the sole responsible agent for farther discovery. How strange it is, too, to see an island like Jamaica, from which so much wealth has since been extracted, treated as a mere adjunct to greater gifts, and as a sort of store-house for provisions. Either of these governors would have done well to have taken this store-house in lieu of his province, if he could have been content to cultivate it. But such small and practical forms of ambition were not congenial to the men, nor to the age in which they lived.

Ojeda was the first to sail for his province. He left the port of St. Domingo on the 10th or 12th of November, 1509, with two ships, two brigantines, three hundred men, and twelve mares. As horses and dogs played such an important part in the wars of the Spaniards against the Indians, these animals well deserve to be named in the enumeration of any forces.

Nicuesa's.departure was delayed by the difficulty he had in providing for his debts. It is probable that the admiral's well-known enmity toward him, as to one who was unjustly about to reap the fruits of his father's discovery, increased the difficulty. Even when Nicuesa's vessels had started, and he himself was just going to embark, or indeed had embarked (for, to the best of LAS CASAS's recollection, who was an eye-witness, Nicuesa was taken out of his boat),

la gobernacion de una isla que se llama Jamaica, que hay en ella muchos mantenimientos de lo que ellos tenian harta necesidad, y ansimismo se la quitaron."-See Memorial de COLMENARES; NAV., Col., tom. iii., p. 387.

7

If Ni

he was arrested for five hundred castellanos. cuesa could but have known from what evils this hard creditor was unconsciously endeavoring to save him, he would have gone to prison with a merry heart. But, indeed, even a very little of the knowledge possessed by the seer would often make us resign ourselves to misfortunes without much struggling, accounting them as blessings in disguise, or as, at least, the smallest evils in a long series. Some friendly notary came forward and paid this debt for Nicuesa, who was thus enabled to start at last, about ten days after Ojeda. Nicuesa's fleet consisted of two good ships, a caravel, and two brigantines, and he was accompanied by six hundred and fifty men.

Meanwhile Ojeda, who no doubt was delighted at having got the start of Nicuesa, had not profited much by this precedence. In four or five days he reached the port of Carthagena. Having received permission from those who had the management of Indian affairs in Spain to make war upon the Indians, he began at once to avail himself of it. The grounds of this permission were very slight and questionable. The Indians had, on some occasions, resisted the violence of the Spaniards, or shown an unwillingness to let them land, and therefore they were to be accounted enemies. Ojeda, it is said, disregarded the advice of Juan de la Cosa, the second in command, who wished him not to enter the country at Carthagena, where the Indians were not friendly, and where they used poisoned arrows, but to pass on at once to the Gulf of Urabá, and found his settlement there. But to this Ojeda would not listen, and, taking Juan de la Cosa with him, he made an attack upon a town called Calamar, where he

captured seventy Indians, and sent them to his ships. He then marched upon a large Indian town called Turbaco, which he found deserted. He pursued the fugitive Indians, and, while doing so, his men spread themselves over the country in a disorderly manner.

The

of carbo

Indians, seeing this disorder, collected together, and came down suddenly upon the Spaniards, who in their turn had to become the fugitives, and to take refuge in a fort constructed hastily of palisades. The In