And indeed, if the old Indian that the admiral took on board for a guide had piloted the Spaniards to his own country, they would have found there great cities and stone temples and hoards of gold to their hearts' content. But when they had come to Cape Honduras, where the shore of Central America runs east and west, they asked the old Indian which way the gold came from. He pointed to the east, away from his own country, and so Yucatan and Mexico were left to be conquered by Cortez in 1517.
Fighting against head winds—once they made but sixty leagues in seventy days—the little fleet struggled on down the coast. The first Indians they met with had such large holes bored in their ears that the Spaniards called that region "the Coast of the Ear." Better weather came after rounding Cape Gracias à Dios, or "Thanks to God," and the Indians offered to trade with guanin, a mixture of gold and copper. Pure gold, they said, was to be found further down the coast. So Columbus kept on, past what are now Nicaragua and Costa Rica, until he came to the great Chiriqui Lagoon. Here were plenty of gold ornaments, in the form of eagles, frogs, or other creatures, such as are dug up to-day from the ancient Indian graves in the Province of Chiriqui. Among them we often find little bells of pure gold, shaped exactly like our sleigh bells, but Columbus does not mention them. Ferdinand Columbus does speak of finding something a little further down the coast that seems even stranger: the ruins of a stone wall, a piece of which they brought away "as a memorial of that antiquity."
