In Cochin, Where The Viceroy Of India Resides, Every
Holiday Ten Or Twelve Mahometans Or Idolaters Are Professed To Our
Religion; so that we may have good hope that in time our faith may
greatly spread with the blessing of
God, who hath given such miraculous
victories to the Christians; wherefore all who profess to believe in the
holy name of Christ, ought incessantly to pray to God to assist the king
of Portugal in so godly an enterprise.
When we had sailed about two hundred miles beyond the Cape of Good Hope,
there arose a sudden tempest of contrary wind, which towed us to and fro
for seven days in great danger, but we escaped by the blessing of God.
After the cessation of this tempest, and when we had again proceeded
other two hundred miles on our voyage, a new tempest arose, which
scattered all our ships during six days that it continued, so that we
did not all meet again till our arrival at Lisbon in Portugal. I was in
a ship called the St Vincent, belonging to one Bartholomew a Florentine,
who was a citizen of Lisbon. She was a vessel of great size, and carried
seven hundred tons of spices of all kinds. We passed the island of St
Helena, near which we saw certain fishes of such enormous bigness that
one of them was as large as a great house. When they rise above water,
or gape or yawn, the upper jaw covers all the forehead, as it were a
soldier in shining armour, and when they swim along the surface of the
deep, the forehead seems three paces broad.
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