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,
or imagined that he saw something which he certainly concluded to be land.
On his arrival at Tercera, he told this to one Luke de Cazzana, a Genoese
merchant, his friend, and a very rich man, and endeavoured to persuade him
to fit out a vessel for the conquest of this place:
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