In his person the admiral was above the middle stature and well shaped, having rather a long visage, with somewhat full cheeks, yet neither fat nor lean.  His complexion was very fair with delicately red cheeks, having fair hair in his youth, which became entirely grey at thirty years of age.  He had a hawk nose, with fair eyes.  In his eating and drinking, and in his dress, he was always temperate and modest.  In his demeanour he was affable to strangers and kind and condescending to his domestics and dependents, yet with a becoming modesty and dignified gravity of manner, tempered with easy politeness.  His regard for religion was so strict and sincere, even in keeping the prescribed fasts and reciting all the offices of the church, that he might have been supposed professed in one of the religious orders; and so great was his abhorrence to profane swearing that I never heard him use any other oath than by St Ferdinand; and even in the greatest passion, his only imprecation was “God take you.”  When about to write, his usual way of trying his pen was in these words, Jesu cum Maria sit nobis in via; and in so fair a character as might have sufficed to gain his bread by writing.

Passing over many particulars of his character, manners, and disposition, which will appear in the course of this history, I shall now only mention that, in his tender years he applied himself to such studies at Pavia as fitted him to understand cosmography, his favourite science; for which purpose he chiefly devoted himself to the study of geometry and astronomy, without which, it is impossible to make any proficiency in cosmography.  And, because Ptolemy, in the preface to his cosmography, asserts that no person can be a good cosmographer without a thorough knowledge of drawing; he therefore learnt to draw, so as to be able to delineate not only the exact outlines of countries, but to express their cosmographical features, whether having plain surfaces or interspersed with hills and vallies.

Having laid a foundation in the before-mentioned sciences, he went to sea, and made several voyages both to the east and west[1]:  But of these, and many other circumstances respecting his early years I have no perfect knowledge.  I was so young at his death, that owing to filial respect, I had not the boldness to ask an account from him of the incidents of his youth, and besides I was not then interested in such inquiries.  But some account of these things may be gleaned from his letters to their Catholic majesties, to whom he would not dare to write any thing but the truth.  In one of these letters, written in the year 1501, he says,