Pedro Arias found two thousand young soldiers in excess of his number awaiting him at Seville; he likewise found a goodly number of avaricious old men, the majority of whom asked merely to be allowed to follow him at their own cost, without receiving the royal pay.  Rather than overcrowd his ships and to spare his supplies, he refused to take any of the latter.  Care was taken that no foreigner should mingle with the Spaniards, without the King’s permission, and for this reason I am extremely astonished that a certain Venetian, Aloisio Cadamosto, who has written a history of the Portuguese, should write when mentioning the actions of the Spaniards, “We have done; we have seen; we have been”; when, as a matter of fact, he has neither done nor seen any more than any other Venetian.  Cadamosto borrowed and plagiarised whatever he wrote, from the first three books of my first three Decades, that is to say, those which I addressed to the Cardinals Ascanio and Arcimboldo, who were living at the time when the events I described were happening.  He evidently thought that my works would never be given to the public, and it may be that he came across them in the possession of some Venetian ambassador; for the most illustrious Senate of that Republic sent eminent men to the Court of the Catholic Kings, to some of whom I willingly showed my writings.  I readily consented that copies should be taken.  Be that as it may, this excellent Aloisio Cadamosto has sought to claim for himself what was the work of another.  He has related the great deeds of the Portuguese, but whether he witnessed them, as he pretends, or has merely profited by the labour of another, I am unable to state. Vivat et ipse marte suo.

Nobody, who had not been enrolled by the royal agents, as a soldier, in the King’s pay was allowed to go on board the vessels of Pedro Arias.  In addition to these regulars there were some others, including one Francisco Cotta, a compatriot of mine, and thanks to a royal order I obtained for him, he was allowed to go to the New World as a volunteer with Pedro Arias.  But for this he would not have been permitted to depart.  Now let the Venetian, Cadamosto, go on and write that he has seen everything, while I, who for twenty-six years have lived, not without credit, at the Court of the Catholic King, have only been able by the greatest efforts to obtain authorisation for one foreigner to sail.  Some Genoese, but very few, and that at the instance of the Admiral, son of the first discoverer of those countries, succeeded in obtaining a like authorisation; but to no one else was permission granted.