He sailed first to the Canary Isles, where he took aboard wood and water and many cattle, sheep and swine.

Then, on the seventeenth of October, he steered straight out into the broad Atlantic, and on Sunday, the third of November, he saw the hill-tops of one of the West India Islands that he named Dominica.

You can find it on your map of the West Indies.
For days he sailed on, passing island after island, landing on some and giving them names.

Some of them were inhabited, some of them were not; some were very large, some were very small.

But none of them helped him in any way to find Cathay, so at last he steered toward Hayti (or Hispaniola, as he called it) and the little ship-built fortress of La Navidad, where his forty comrades had been left.
On the twenty-seventh of November, the fleet of the Admiral cast anchor off the solitary fort.