... Mr Maynard's lively book tells as much as is known of the story of the most interesting of Pisarro's captains. ... De Soto himself seems to have been among the most modern of the Spanish conquerors. He definitely disapproved of wholesale slaughter if unnecessary, though he did not mind giving Indians to be torn to pieces by dogs. Further, when the Indians took him for a God, he preached to them and set up a cross for them, but he does not seem to have felt the incongruity between his occasional missionary enterprise and the possession of three native wives at once, besides a Spanish one waiting for his return to Cuba from the mainland.

Arthur Ransome in The Observer, 17 Aug. 1930, reproduced in Christina Hardyment, Ransome on blue water sailing (1999), pp. 62-64.