Uncharted Waters New Horizons

First, I want to encourage everyone to play the games without defecting a couple of times. With Catalina it is helpful to defect to a country other than Spain, and if played somewhat historically, other than Portugal as well.

The reason you ran into that situation with Bernal Loyla and loosing your citizenship is two fold, and technically not much of a problem. First, the event in Seville with getting the ship is not entirely complete until you encounter them in a battle. You basically jumped ship :p in the middle of the event. The second part is that if you checked the enmity with Spain after taking the ship it would have been very high, I'm thinking it is a red 100 at that point but that could be off.

The fastest and easiest way to get rid of a red number that high is to get caught when entering the castle while you have very little gold. They will take 4/5 of your money and the enmity will be reduced to zero. Defecting should reduce the enmity some, but not enough to keep them from coming after you. If you wait until after the battle to defect, and get caught entering the castle first, then you may even have positive enmity number. I'm not certain about the positive enmity number, but it will at least be zero after defecting if you are caught entering the castle before defecting.

Without starting a separate thread, I also have another question. Among the items I pilfered was something called a diamond crown. In reading some of the various FAQs, there's something called a queen's crown that seems to be pretty important to Joao. So, is this the same item? And is it something I need to hold on to, or can I sell it? I tried at one of the shops, just to see how much it would fetch, and the shopkeeper offered 50,000. That's a nice chunk of change.

Diamond Crown, strangely enough, is not sold in one of ports of the world. It can be extracted only attacking other fleet of the countries.

All true what Pavel said here. I've found for Otto Baynes you're allowed one and only one extra port visit before Seville, and any more means the event with the galleon won't start up. But if you managed three or more good warships without that event, it's certainly not worth re-starting just to get one galleon. Actually, when I first tried playing Otto, I decided that the worst part is puttering back and forth to & from London to see King Henry for promotions in that clumsy galleon, and that the most important challenge for Otto is to see how quickly you can replace any and all galleons(only any good as long as you stay in the Mediterranean, the least wind and current bog them down badly) with LaReales and/or Venetians.