If the compliant spirit of his crew had not been exhausted, he would perhaps have gone on, and would have been forced by developments to a revision of his geographical faith. His vessels, unfortunately, were strained in all their seams. Their leaks had spoiled his provisions. Incessant labor had begun to tell upon the health of the crew. They much preferred the chances of a return to Isabella, with all its hazards, than a sight of Jaffa and the Mediterranean, with the untold dangers of getting there.
The Admiral, however, still pursued his course for a few days more to a point, as Humboldt holds, opposite the St. Philip Keys, when, finding the coast trending sharply to the southwest, and his crew becoming clamorous, he determined to go no farther.
[Sidenote: 1494. June 12. He turns back.]
It was now the 12th of June, 1494, and if we had nothing but the _Historie_ to guide us, we should be ignorant of the singular turn which affairs took. Whoever wrote that book had, by the time it was written, become conscious that obliviousness was sometimes necessary to preserve the reputation of the Admiral. The strange document which interests us, however, has not been lost, and we can read it in Navarrete.
[Sidenote: Enforces an oath upon his men]
It is not difficult to understand the disquietude of Columbus's mind. He had determined to find Cathay as a counterpoise to the troubled conditions at Isabella, both to assuage the gloomy forebodings of the colonists and to reassure the public mind in Spain, which might receive, as he knew, a shock by the reports which Torres's fleet had carried to Europe. He had been forced by a mutinous crew to a determination to turn back, but his discontented companions might be complacent enough to express an opinion, if not complacent enough to run farther hazards. So Columbus committed himself to the last resort of deluded minds, when dealing with geographical or historical problems,--that of seeking to establish the truth by building monuments, placing inscriptions, and certifications under oath. He caused the eighty men who constituted the crew of his little squadron--and we find their name in Duro's _Colón y Pinzón_--to swear before a notary that it was possible to go from Cuba to Spain by land, across Asia.
