Lord deeply for having come to our aid when we were in such great need, for besides being very tired we were weakened by hunger. On the third day after our arrival, the Purser, the Inspector, the Commissary and I joined in asking the Governor to send a party to search for the coast in the hope of finding a port, since the Indians had told us that we were not far from the sea. He replied that we should not even talk about such things because the coast was very far from there.

Since I was the most insistent, he told me to go on foot with forty men to search for the coast and to look for a harbor. So the next day I left with Captain Alonso del Castillo and forty of his men. We walked until midday, when we arrived at sandbanks by the sea, which appeared to go far inland. We walked on them about a league and a half in knee-deep water, stepping on oysters that cut our feet severely and caused us a lot of hardship, until we arrived at the river we had already crossed, which ran into that same inlet. Since we could not cross it because we were so ill-equipped, we returned to camp and reported to the Governor what we had found. We told him we would have to cross the river again to explore the inlet and verify whether or not there was a harbor there. The next day he sent a captain named Valenzuela with sixty men on foot' and six on horses down to the sea to determine if there was a harbor. Valenzuela returned after two days of exploring the inlet, saying that it was a shallow, knee-deep bay without a harbor. He also said that he had seen five or six Indian canoes going from one side to the other, and that the Indians were wearing feather headdresses.

Hearing this, we departed the next day to continue