happened to be then absent, but who would be very kind to them, and give them many presents.  But the master and seamen were afraid of being detained, and suspected that the islanders had no mind to be discovered, and might burn their vessel; wherefore they sailed back to Portugal, hoping to be rewarded for their discovery by Don Henry.  But he reproved them severely, and ordered them to return quickly; wherefore the master and all his crew escaped from Portugal with their ship, and never returned.  It is likewise reported, that while the master and seamen of this vessel were at church in the foresaid island, the boys of the ship gathered sand for the cook room, a third part of which was found to be pure gold.

Among others who set out to discover this island was one Jattes de Fiene, whose pilot Peter Velasquez, of the town of Palos de Moguer, told the admiral in the monastery of St Mary de la Rabida, that they sailed 150 leagues south-west from Fayal, and discovered the island of Flores in their return, to which they were led by observing numbers of birds to fly in that direction, and because these were land birds they concluded that they were making for land, as they could not rest upon the waters.  Leaving Flores, they sailed so far to the north-east, that they came to Cape Clear in the west of Ireland, where they met with a stiff western gale and yet a smooth sea, whence they concluded that there must be land in that direction by which the sea was sheltered from the effects of the west wind; but it being then the month of August, they did not venture to proceed in search of that supposed island, for fear of winter.  This happened about forty years before the discovery of the West Indies.

The foregoing account was confirmed to the admiral by the relation of a mariner whom he met with at Port St Mary, who told him that, once in a voyage to Ireland he saw that western land, which he then supposed to be a part of Tartary stretching out towards the west, but could not come near it on account of bad weather.  But it is probable that this must have been the land now called Bacallaos, or Newfoundland.  This was farther confirmed by what was related to him by one Peter de Velasco of Galicia, whom he met with in the city of Murcia in Spain:  who, in sailing for Ireland, went so far to the north-west, that he discovered land far to the west of Ireland; which he believes to have been the same which one Femaldolmos endeavoured to discover in the following manner, as set down in my fathers writings, that it may appear how some men build great and important matters upon very slight foundations.  Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, in his natural history of the Indies, says that the admiral had a letter in which the Indies were described by one who had before discovered them; which was by no means the case, but only thus:  Vincent Diaz, a Portuguese of Tavira, on his return from Guinea to the Tercera islands, and having passed the island of Madeira, which he left to the east, saw,