VOYAGE OF ULRICH SCHMIDT
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2011
Summary
In the first place, when setting forth from Antorff, I came in fourteen days to Hispania, to a town called Calles, to which one reckons four hundred miles by sea. I saw before that town a balena, or whale, thirty-five paces long, out of which thirty tuns–of the capacity of herring tuns–of fat had been extracted.
Near the said town of Calles there were fourteen great ships, well provided with all ammunitions and necessaries, which intended to voyage to Riodellaplata in India. Also there were two thousand five hundred Spaniards and one hundred and fifty Germans, Netherlander, and Saxons. And our chief captain was called Petrus Manchossa.
Among these fourteen ships, one belonged to Messrs. Sebastian Neidhart and Jacob Welser, from Nürnberg, who had sent their factor, Heinrich Paeime, with merchandise to Riodellaplata. With these and others, as Germans and Netherlanders, about eighty men, armed with arquebuses and muskets, I went to Riodellaplata.
As we were now come there, we set out from Sibylla with the said gentlemen and the chief captain, in the aforesaid year, on the day of S. Bartholomew, and came to a town in Spain called S. Lucas which is twenty miles' distance from Sibylla. There we were compelled, on account of much blustering winds, to stay till the first of September of the year before-named (1534).
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- Conquest of the River Plate (1535–1555)Translated for the Hakluyt Society with Notes and an Introduction, pp. 1 - 92Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010First published in: 1891