12 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. I02 



bounds of the earth. So that not only long lapse of time, which 

 changes and terminates everything; the currents which normally 

 exist; the prolongation of the sea into some land areas — all these 

 have penetrated into the land and eaten up much of it ; but earthquakes 

 have contributed their share to it by extending the sea and breaking 

 up the land and cutting it apart, of which fact there are many ex- 

 amples which I have seen with my own eyes in the Indies, but for 

 conciseness' sake I do not instance. 



Chapter VI 



Continuing the Subject, and How the First Settlers Crossed to 

 the Indies. 



29. The doubt which presents itself is whether the first settlers of 

 that New World came there by sea or by land; if by sea, they must 

 have gone and arrived there by one of two ways, either driven by 

 some overpowering tempest which carried them there, as has hap- 

 pened frequently in various epochs, as related by various trustworthy 

 authors, and in other cases in our own times. Pliny states in books 2, 

 6, and 69, that when Quintus Metellus was Proconsvil of Gaul, the 

 King of the Suevi consigned to him some Indians, who when sailing 

 from India or China on business, had been carried by a driving storm 

 to the German Ocean ; and in the days of the Emperor Frederick 

 Barbarossa, some Indians reached Lubeck in a dugout, carried by 

 another storm. The Andalusian pilot who was trading among the 

 Canary Islands and got carried off by another storm to the discovery 

 of the Indies, by name Alonso Sanchez, a native of the city of Huelva 

 in the County of Niebla, in the Archdiocese of Seville, about the 

 year 1480, had such ill fortune that through his death, the result of 

 the trials undergone in the storm and the exploration he carried out, 

 he was unable to leave his name immortalized, but he left to the 

 renowned Christopher Columbus for his kind hospitality the journals 

 and notes which he had kept on the voyage, by virtue of which 

 Columbus later made the great discovery of the Indies. 



30. Bartholomew Carreno in another great storm caused by the 

 evil spirits, not without divine permission, resisting them valiantly 

 like another Job, came in one night from the Indies to Spain, and 

 numerous others made long voyages. Hanno, a Carthaginian captain, 

 sailed from Gibraltar and coasted the whole of Africa, as far as the 

 extreme tip of Arabia ; and Eudoxus fled in the opposite direction 

 from the King of the Latiri, by the Red Sea and along the African 

 coast up to Gibraltar; and there are many others mentioned by 



