"To sail round these islands," he says, "one needs many sorts of wind, and it does not blow as men would like." At midnight, between the twenty-third and twenty-fourth, he weighed anchor in order to start for Cuba.
"I have heard these people say that it was very large and of great traffic," he says, "and that there were in it gold and spices, and great ships and merchants.

And they showed me that I should go to it by the west-southwest, and I think so.

For I think that if I may trust the signs which all the Indians of these islands have made me, and those whom I am carrying in the ships, for by the tongue I do not understand them, it (Cuba) is the Island of Cipango,( *) of which wonderful things are told, and on the globes which I have seen and in the painted maps, it is in this district." (*) This was the name the old geographers gave to Japan.
The next day they saw seven or eight islands, which are supposed to be the eastern and southern keys of the Grand Bank of Bahama.

He anchored to the south of them on the twenty-sixth of October, and on the next day sailed once more for Cuba.
On Sunday, October 28, he arrived there, in what is now called the Puerto de Nipe; he named it the Puerto de San Salvador.

Here, as he went on, he was again charmed by the beautiful country.