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 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: This Cazzana agreed to, and obtained a license from the king of Portugal for the purpose. He wrote accordingly to his brother Francis de Cazzana, who resided at Seville, to fit out a vessel with all expedition for Diaz; but Francis made light of the matter, and Luke de Cazzana actually fitted out a vessel from Tercera, in which the before named pilot sailed from 120 to 130 leagues, but all in vain, for he found no land. Yet neither he nor his partner Cazzana desisted from the enterprize till death closed their hopes. The before mentioned Francis de Cazzana likewise informed the admiral, that he knew two sons of the pilot who discovered the island of Tercera, named Michael and Jasper Cortereal, who went several times in search of that land, and at last perished one after the other in the year 1502, without having ever been heard of since, as was well known to many credible persons.

If all that has been said above concerning so many imaginary islands and continents appears to be mere fable and folly, how much more reason have we to consider that as false which Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo conceits in his Natural History of the Indies, "That there was another discoverer of this navigation of the ocean, and that the Spaniards held anciently the dominion of these lands." He pretended to make out this assertion from what Aristotle wrote concerning the island of Atalantis, and Sebosus of the Hesperides. Thus, looking upon his own imagination as a certain standard of truth, he affirms upon the judgment of some persons whose writings I have duly weighed and attentively examined. I should have omitted to enlarge on this subject, to avoid tiring the reader, and that I might not be obliged to condemn the opinions of others, were it not that many persons, to detract from the honour and reputation of the admiral, have made great account of these notions. Besides, it appeared that I should not fully perform my duty by merely recounting with all sincerity and truth, the motives and incitements which inclined the admiral my father to undertake his unparalleled enterprize, if I should suffer what I know to be a manifest falsehood to pass uncensured. Wherefore, the better to detect the mistake of Oviedo, I shall first state what Aristotle has said on this subject, as related by F. Theophilus de Ferrariis, among the problems of Aristotle which he collected in a book entitled De Admirandis in Natura auditis, in the following strain:

"Beyond the pillars of Hercules, it is reported that certain Carthaginian merchants discovered an island in the Atlantic, which had never before been inhabited except by beasts. This island was not many days sail from the continent, was entirely covered over with trees, and abounded in all the usual productions of nature, having a considerable number of navigable rivers. Finding this a beautiful country, possessing it fertile soil and salubrious atmosphere, these Carthaginians began to people it; but the senate of Carthage, offended with this procedure, passed a decree forbidding any person to go to that island under pain of death, and they ordered all those who had already gone there to be slain; meaning thereby to prevent all other nations from acquiring any knowledge of the place, lest some other and more powerful state might take possession, to the detriment of their liberty and commercial interest."

Oviedo had no just grounds for asserting that this island must have been Hispaniola or Cuba. As he was ignorant of Latin, he was obliged to take such interpretation of this story as he could procure from some other person, who certainly was very ill qualified for the task, since the Latin text has been altered and misinterpreted in several particulars. This may have misled Oviedo, and induced him to believe that the foregoing quotation referred to some island in the West Indies. In the Latin text we do not read of the Carthaginian merchants going out of the straits of Gibraltar as Oviedo writes16. Neither is it said that the island was extensive, or its trees large, but only that it was much wooded. Nor do we find that the rivers were wonderful, or the soil fat, or that the island was more remote from Africa than from Europe; but merely that it was remote from the continent. It is not said in the original that any towns were built here, and indeed it is not likely that these traders should build much; neither is the place said to have become famous, as we see on the contrary that the Carthaginians were careful to prevent its fame from spreading among the nations. Thus the translator being ignorant, led Oviedo to believe quite a different story from the reality17.

It is quite ridiculous to suppose that Carthaginian merchants could possibly be carried so far out of their way as Hispaniola or Cuba; neither could they have arrived at either of those islands without meeting with the many other islands which surround them. It is more probable that the island discovered by the Carthaginians was one of the Azores; for though Ferrarius speaks of navigable rivers, he might possibly have written ad navigandum instead of potandum, and have thereby corrupted the meaning of his author, that the island had plenty of streams fit for drinking, into abundance of rivers adapted for navigation18. Oviedo falls into a similar error in supposing this island of the Carthaginians to have been the same with that mentioned by Seneca in his fourth book; where he tells us that Seneca speaks of an island named Atlantica, which was entirely or mostly drowned in the time of the Peloponnesian war; and of which island Plato likewise makes mention in his Timaeus: But we have already dwelt too long on these fables.