Note 536 — Chapter 8

Mr. Winship calls attention to Mota Padilla's reasons for the failure of the expedition: "It was most likely the chastisement of God that riches were not found on this expedition, because, when this ought to have been the secondary object of the expedition, and the conversion of all those heathen their first aim, they bartered with fate and struggled after the secondary; and thus the misfortune is not so much that all those labors were without fruit, but the worst is that such a number of souls have remained in their blindness." Historia de la Conquista, 1742, p. 166 (repr. 1870).