title was used indifferently by land and sea—was Don Pedro de Mendoza, a gentleman of Guadix in Almeria, and a member of the household of Charles V. Don Pedro had seen service in the Italian wars, and seems to have been a man of character and bravery, but wanting in the discretion and the necessary tact essential in the founder of a colony. In 1534 the expedition started, unfortunate almost from the first. In a ‘certain island’, as the historian of the expedition, Hulderico Schmidel, a German or Flemish soldier, calls Rio Janeiro, a dispute occurred between Don Pedro and his second in command, Juan de Osorio. At a court-martial held upon Osorio, Don Pedro appears to have let fall some remarks which Juan de Ayolas, the Alguazil Mayor (Chief Constable), seems to have taken up as an order for instant execution. This he performed upon the spot, plunging his dagger repeatedly into Osorio, or, as Hulderico Schmidel has it, ‘sewing him up with cuts’ (_cosiendole à puñaladas_). This murder or execution—for who shall tell when murder finishes and its legal counterpart begins?—rendered Don Pedro very unpopular with all the fleet; for, as Schmidel has it in his history,[17] ‘the soldiers loved Osorio.’ To be loved by the soldiers was the only chance a Spanish officer had in those times of holding his own. Both Schmidel and Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who had both been common soldiers, and who, curiously, both wrote histories, lose no occasion of vilifying officers who used the soldiers hardly. It is true that Bernal Diaz (who, unlike Schmidel, was a man of genius) does so with some discretion, and always apparently with reason. Schmidel, on the other hand, seems to have considered that any officer who interfered between the soldiers and the Indians was a tyrant, and hence his denunciation of Alvar Nuñez, under whom he served.