ned all the above information.

[_Addressed:_ "Sacred Caesarean and Catholic Majesty."]

[_Endorsed:_ "To his majesty, xxjx of August from Cochin, December
23, 1522.

Advices of the voyage of Magallanes and of his death, and news from
Portuguese India."]

De Molvccis Insulis

Most Reverend and Illustrious Lord: my only Lord, to you I most humbly
commend myself. Not long ago one of those five ships returned which
the emperor, while he was at Saragossa some years ago, had sent into
a strange and hitherto unknown part of the world, to search for the
islands in which spices grow. For although the Portuguese bring us a
great quantity of them from the Golden Chersonesus, which we now call
Malacca, nevertheless their own Indian possessions produce none but
pepper. For it is well known that the other spices, as cinnamon,
cloves, and the nutmeg, which we call muscat, and its covering
[mace], which we call muscat-flower, are brought to their Indian
possessions from distant islands hitherto only known by name, in
ships held together not by iron fastenings, but merely by palm-leaves,
and having round sails also woven out of palm-fibres. Ships of this
sort they call "junks," and they are impelled by the wind only when
it blows directly fore or aft.

Nor is it wonderful, that these islands have not been known to any
mortal, almost up to our time. For whatever statements of ancient
authors we have hitherto read with respect to the native soil of these
spices, are partly entirely fabulous, and partly so far from truth,
that the very regions, in which they asserted that these spices were
produced, are scarcely less distant from the countries in which it
is now ascertained that they grow, than we are ourselves.

For, not to mention others, Herodotus, in other respects a very good
authority, states that cinnamon was found in birds' nests, into which
the birds had brought it from very distant regions, among which birds
he mentions especially the Phoenix--and I know not who has ever seen
the nest of a Phoenix. But Pliny, who might have been thought to have
had better means of knowing the facts, since long before his time many
discoveries had been made by the fleets of Alexander the Great, and
by other expeditions, states that cinnamon was produced in Ethiopia,
on the borders of the land of the Troglodytes. Whereas we know now
that cinnamon is produced at a very great distance from any part of
Ethiopia, and especially from t