With him on the same ship were two representatives from Balboa, who were to inform the colonial authorities of the situation, and request more men and supplies to continue the conquest of Veragua. Balboa continued defeating various tribes and befriending others, exploring rivers, mountains, and sickly swamps, while always searching for gold and slaves and enlarging his territory. He was also able to quell revolts among those of his men who challenged this authority, and, through force, diplomacy, and negotiation, he earned a certain respect and fear among the natives. In a letter addressed to the King of Spain, he expressed, somewhat ironically, that he had to act as a conciliatory force during the course of his expeditions. He succeeded in planting corn, received fresh supplies from Hispaniola and Spain, and got his men used to life as explorers in the new territories. Balboa managed to collect a great deal of gold, much of it from the ornaments worn by the native women, and the rest obtained by violence. Peter Martyr d'Anghiera in his "De orbe novo decades", wrote how Balboa had fed forty local homosexual men to his dogs. Balboa, upset with ""a brother of the king and other young men, obliging men, [who] dressed effeminately with women's clothing [... of those which the brother of the king] went too far with unnatural"" temerity, threw forty of them as food to the dogs. D'Anghiera continues his story saying that the indigenous people's ""natural hate for unnatural sin"" drove them so that, ""spontaneously and violently, they searched for all the rest that they would know who were infected"". After all, D'Anghiera mentions that ""only the nobles and the gentlemen practiced that kind of desire. The] indigenous people knew that sodomy gravely offended God. And that these acts provoked] the tempests that with thunder and lightning so frequently afflicted them, or the floods that drowned their fruits that had caused hunger and sickness."" At the end of 1512 and the first months of 1513, he arrived in a region dominated by the "cacique" Careta, whom he easily defeated and then befriended. Careta was baptized and became one of Balboa's chief allies; he ensured the survival of the settlers by promising to supply the Spaniards with food. Balboa then proceeded on his journey, arriving in the lands of Careta's neighbour and rival, "cacique" Ponca, who fled to the mountains with his people, leaving his village open to the plundering of the Spaniards and Careta's men.