"Life has more imagination than we carry in our dreams."

"The natives are an inoffensive people, but so far from being intelligent that they are incapable of learning."

"They ought to make good and skilled servants, for they repeat very quickly whatever we say to them."

"I should be judged as a captain who went from Spain to the Indies."

"I arrived at the Indies with the fleet which the Sovereigns, our Lord and Lady, sent me. I had not been there twenty days when I discovered by my own experience that the whole of that land is an islan…"