Columbus stays in the harbor and measures its mouth and depth

This day it rained and was winter weather, as in Castile in October. He had seen no village, only one very beautiful house in the Puerto de San Nicolás, and better made than in other parts that he had seen. The island is very large, and the Admiral says it would not be much if it measured 200 leagues around: he has seen that it is all very much tilled; he believed the villages must be far from the sea, from where they see when he arrived, and so they all fled and took with them everything they had, and made smoke signals like people at war. This harbor is 1,000 paces across at the mouth, which is a quarter of a league: in it there is neither bar nor shoal, rather hardly any bottom is found up to the land at the edge of the sea, and inward it runs 3,000 paces in length, all clean and ooze, so that any ship can anchor in it without fear and enter without precaution: at its head it has two river mouths that bring little water: opposite it there are some plains, the most beautiful in the world and almost like the lands of Castile, and rather these have the advantage, for which reason he named the said island la Isla Española.