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17 but with his ever-soaring and irrepressible enthusiasm, Columbus sailed from Cadiz, on his fourth voyage, on May 9, 1502, with four caravels and 150 men, in search of a passage to the East Indies near the Isthmus of Darien, which should supersede that of Vasco de Gama. Being denied relief and even shelter at Santo Domingo, he was swept away by the currents to the NW.; he, however, missed Yucatan and Mexico, and at last reached Truxillo, whence he coasted Honduras, the Mosquito-Shore, Casta Rica, Veragua, as far as the point which he called El Retrete, where the recent westward coasting of Bastides had terminated. But here, on the 5th of December, he gave up his splendid vision, and yielded to the clamorous outbreakings of his crews to return in search of gold to Veragua, a country which he himself mistook for the Aurea Chersonesus of the ancients.

The fierce resistance of the natives and the crazy state of his ships forced him, at the close of April 1503, to make the best of his way for Hispaniola, with only two crowded wrecks, which, being incapable of keeping the sea, came, on the 24th day of June, to anchor at Jamaica. After famine and despair had occasioned a series of mutinies and disasters far greater than any that he had yet experienced, he at last arrived, on the 13th of August, at Santo Domingo. Here he exhausted his funds in relieving his crews, extending his generosity even to those who had been most outrageous. Sailing homewards on the 12th of September, he anchored his tempest-tossed and shattered bark at San Lucar, November 7, 1504. From San Lucar he proceeded to Sevilla, where he