Of the expenditure which the Marquis Don Hernando Cortés incurred for the fleets which he sent on voyages of discovery, and how he had no good luck at all.

It is necessary to go far back in my story so that what I shall now say may be quite clear. At the time when Marcos de Aguilar was governing New Spain by virtue of the authority which the Licentiate Luis Ponce de Leon had left him when he died, as I have already stated many times, before Cortés went to Castile, [he], the Marquis del Valle, himself despatched four ships which he had built in a province named Zacatula, well supplied with provisions and artillery, with good sailors and fifty soldiers and much merchandise and trifles from Castile for barter, and everything that was necessary for victuals, and biscuits for more than a year. And he sent with them as commander-in-chief a gentleman of birth named Álvaro de Sayavedra Zeron, with orders to lay his course for the Moluccas or Spice Islands or China, and this was by the command of His Majesty, which he had written to Cortés from the City of Granada on the twenty-second of June fifteen hundred and twenty-six, and because Cortés showed the letter itself to me and other Conquistadores, who were in his company, I say it and assert it here, and His Majesty even commanded Cortés to order the Captains whom he should send to go and search for a fleet which had sailed from Castile to China, with a certain Don Fray Garcia de Loayza, Knight Commander of the order of St. John of Rhodes, as Captain.