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,
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 Caz