In another letter, written in January 1495 from Hispaniola, to their Catholic majesties, in illustration of the errors and mistakes common in voyages and the piloting of ships, he thus writes, "I was formerly sent to Tunis by King _Renee_, whom God hath since taken to himself, to take the galeasse called Fernandina; and, when near the island of St Peter off Sardinia, I was informed that the Fernandina was accompanied by two ships and a carack. This intelligence dismayed my people, who refused to proceed in the enterprize, and demanded to go back to Marseilles for another ship and more men. Finding that it was impossible to go on against their inclinations, without a stratagem, I pretended to yield to their desires; but having altered the card of the ships compass, I set sail when it was late, under pretence of making for Marseilles. But next morning at day-break, when all on board believed we had been sailing for Marseilles, we found ourselves close in with Cape Carthagena[3]." In a memorandum or observation tending to prove that all the five zones are habitable by the experience of navigation, he thus writes: "In February 1467, I sailed an hundred leagues beyond Thule, or Iceland, the northern part of which is 73 degrees distant from the equinoctial, and not 63 degrees as some suppose; neither does it lie upon the line where Ptolemy begins the West, but considerably more to the westwards. To this island, which is as large as England, the English carry on trade, especially from the port of Bristol. When I was there the sea was not frozen, but the tides were so great that in some places it rose and fell twenty-six fathoms[4]. I have likewise been in the Portuguese fort of St George del Mina, under the equinoctial, and can witness that it is not uninhabitable, as some have supposed." In his book respecting his first voyage, he says that he saw some mermaids on the coast of _Menegueta_, but that they were not by any means so like ladies as represented in paintings. In another place he says, that, in several voyages between Lisbon and Guinea, he had observed that a degree on the earth corresponds to 56 miles and two thirds. He notices having seen mastick drawn from some trees in the island of Scio, one of the isles in the Greek Archipelago.