voyage to Portugal in 1515. Also, Lopo Homem-Reineis published the Atlas Universal about 1519 which clearly showed the locations of St Helena and Ascension. The first residents all arrived on Portuguese vessels. Its first known permanent resident was Portuguese, Fernão Lopes (also Fernando Lopes) who had turned traitor in India and had been mutilated by order of Alphonso d'Albuquerque, the Governor of Goa. Fernão Lopes preferred being marooned to returning to Portugal in his maimed condition, and lived on Saint Helena from about 1516. By royal command, Lopes returned to Portugal about 1526 and then travelled to Rome, where Pope Clement VII granted him an audience. Lopes returned to Saint Helena, where he died in 1545. When the island was discovered, it was covered with unique indigenous vegetation. Claims that on discovery the island "was entirely covered with forests, the trees drooping over the tremendous precipices that overhang the sea" have been questioned. It is argued that the presence of an endemic plover and several endemic insects adapted to the barren and arid coastal portions of the island are strong indications that these conditions existed before the island was discovered. Also, the earliest description of the island by Thome Lopez, who sighted the island on 3 July 1503, specifically states that coastal trees were absent: ". . . nor did we see any kind of trees, but it was completely green . . ." Rather than trees, this eyewitness account suggests the presence of low-height scrub adapted to the coastal desert conditions. Nevertheless, St Helena certainly once had a rich and dense inland forest. The loss of endemic vegetation, birds and other fauna, much of it within the first 50 years of discovery, can be attributed to the impact of humans and their introduction of goats, pigs, dogs, cats, rats as well as the introduction of non-endemic birds and vegetation into the island. Sometime before 1557 five people (two male slaves from Mozambique, one from Java and two women) escaped from a ship and remained hidden on the island for many years, long enough for their numbers to rise to twenty. Bermudez, the Patriarch of Abyssinia landed at St Helena in 1557 on a voyage to Portugal, remaining on the island for a year. Three Japanese ambassadors on an embassy to the Pope also visited St Helena in 1583. Strong circumstantial evidence supports the idea that Sir Francis Drake located