When he had gone, as he says, one hundred and twenty leagues, he began to find those floating fields of sea-weed which he had encountered in his first voyage.

Here he took an observation at nightfall, and found that the north star was in five degrees.

The wind suddenly abated, and the heat was intolerable; so much so, that nobody dared to go below deck to look after the wine and the provisions.

This extraordinary heat lasted eight days.

The first day was clear, and if the others had been like it, the admiral says, not a man would have been left alive, but they would all have been burnt up.
COLUMBUS SAILS WESTWARD.
At last a favourable breeze sprang up, enabling the admiral to take a westerly course, the one he most desired, as he had before noticed in his voyages to the Indies that about a hundred miles west of the Azores there was always a sudden change of temperature.[15] [Footnote 15: I suppose he came into or out of one of those warm ocean rivers which have so great an effect in modifying the temperature of the earth--perhaps into the one which comes from the south of Africa through the Gulf of Mexico, to our own shores, and on which we so much depend.] TRINIDAD SEEN.
On Sunday, the 22nd of July, in the evening, the sailors saw innumerable birds going from the south-west to the north-east, which flight of birds was a sign that land was not far off.