Most Reverend and Illustrious Lord:  my only Lord, to you I most humbly commend myself.  Not long ago one of those five ships returned which the emperor, while he was at Saragossa some years ago, had sent into a strange and hitherto unknown part of the world, to search for the islands in which spices grow.  For although the Portuguese bring us a great quantity of them from the Golden Chersonesus, which we now call Malacca, nevertheless their own Indian possessions produce none but pepper.  For it is well known that the other spices, as cinnamon, cloves, and the nutmeg, which we call muscat, and its covering [mace], which we call muscat-flower, are brought to their Indian possessions from distant islands hitherto only known by name, in ships held together not by iron fastenings, but merely by palm-leaves, and having round sails also woven out of palm-fibres.  Ships of this sort they call “junks,” and they are impelled by the wind only when it blows directly fore or aft.

Nor is it wonderful, that these islands have not been known to any mortal, almost up to our time.  For whatever statements of ancient authors we have hitherto read with respect to the native soil of these spices, are partly entirely fabulous, and partly so far from truth, that the very regions, in which they asserted that these spices were produced, are scarcely less distant from the countries in which it is now ascertained that they grow, than we are ourselves.

For, not to mention others, Herodotus, in other respects a very good authority, states that cinnamon was found in birds’ nests, into which the birds had brought it from very distant regions, among which birds he mentions especially the Phoenix—­and I know not who has ever seen the nest of a Phoenix.  But Pliny, who might have been thought to have had better means of knowing the facts, since long before his time many discoveries had been made by the fleets of Alexander the Great, and by other expeditions, states that cinnamon was produced in Ethiopia, on the borders of the land of the Troglodytes.  Whereas we know now that cinnamon is produced at a very great distance from any part of Ethiopia, and especially from the country of the Troglodytes, i.e. dwellers in subterraneous caves.

Now it was necessary for our sailors, who have recently returned, who knew more about Ethiopia than about other countries, to sail round the whole world and that in a very wide circuit, before they discovered these islands and returned to Europe; and, since this voyage was a very remarkable one, and neither in our own time, nor in any former age, has such a voyage been accomplished, or even attempted, I have determined to send your Lordship a full and accurate account of the expedition.

I have taken much care in obtaining an account of the facts from the commanding officer of the squadron, [221] and from the individual sailors who have returned with him.  They also made a statement to the emperor, and to several other persons, with such good faith and sincerity, that they appeared in their narrative, not merely to have abstained from fabulous statements, but also to contradict and refute the fabulous statements made by ancient authors.