ABSTRACT
After this miserable occurrence, we all arrived, true shipwrecked persons, most of us in shirts and white breeches, on a deserted shore of a land and people more barbarous than any other known to us, more than three thousand leagues from our native land, totally ignorant of everything we were seeing, without any possibility of repairing our ill fortune, without clothing with which we could cover ourselves and recover, with no food whatsoever except for a small quantity of biscuit which I happened to take from the cabin when I embarked on the boat and took with me. 1 The peril, however, which we left behind us and our escape from death, which we had struggled against for a long time, made that deserted shore seem to us as if it were the shore of Lisbon. We thus embraced one another, we thus kissed that unfamiliar sand, we were thus delighted with those mountains, groves of trees and land as if it were our own native land, all of us on our knees and our hands raised, with our eyes bathed in tears, with grateful and humble though sad and afflicted hearts, giving due thanks to God Our Lord for bringing us alive to that place. And because those aboard the carrack kept us constantly in view, observing all of our actions and what happened to us, since it was they who were expecting us to bring help to them, when they saw us enveloped in the waves being driven to shore where the sea was breaking so furiously, they were so sure we were lost that, pitying our sad fate, the master gave a signal with his whistle, as is the custom and ordered them to say the Lord's Prayer and a Hail Mary as for the dead which they thought we were, and in truth we were not far from being so.
