Juan Ponce de Leon went to Spain and obtained from the crown the appointment of adelantado of Bimini and Florida. When he heard, while living at Porto Rico, the reports of the success of Hernando Cortes in Mexico, he fitted out, in 1521, two ships, and sailed to Florida to take possession of it and to settle a colony on its attractive shores. But the natives valiantly opposed the occupation of their country and drove the ambitious invader, with the loss of many men, to his ships. Juan Ponce was wounded in the thigh by an arrow. The vessels sailed to Cuba, where the impoverished and disabled Spaniard not long after died.'

The exploration of Central America was continued in 1511 by Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, a native of Xeres de los Caballeros, Spain, who had accompanied Rodrigo de Bastidas when he sailed on his voyage of discovery to the New World, in October, 1500. In 1510 the Indian village on the isthmus of Darien, west of the Gulf of Uraba, was made the seat of the government of this part of the continent by the Spaniards, and called Santa Maria de la Antigua del Darien. Vasco Nuñez de Balboa was appointed alcade of the new colony. This ambitious and avaricious adventurer penetrated the dense forest belting the northern coast of the isthmus, and invaded the interior, where he found a wealthy cacique, named Comogre. The Indian chief entertained Vasco Nuñez and his fourscore followers with generous hospitality in his large and attractive palace, a wooden building one hundred and fifty paces long and eighty wide. He presented his indigent guest with four thousand ounces of golden ornaments and sixty slaves. "This

1 Primera y segunda parte de la historia general de las Indias. Gomara.

cap. x.

gold, with as much more obtained at another place," says Peter Martyr, "our men weighed on the porch of Comogre's palace, to separate the fifth part due to the king's exchequer, for it was a law that the fifth part of the gold, pearls, and precious stones should be given to the royal treasurer, and the remainder be divided among the discoverers. While our men were wrangling and contending about the division of the gold, the eldest son of Comogre, the cacique, who was present and whom we commended for wisdom, approached with some appearance of anger him who was weighing the treasure, and struck the balances with his fist, scattering the gold all over the porch." Pointing southward toward the mountains, he told them that beyond those sierras was a great sea, on which people sailed with ships as large as theirs, and that the adjacent country contained great quantities of gold.

Balboa heard this surprising announcement with delight, and, ambitious to be honored as the discoverer of the unnamed sea and the country abounding with rich mines, began to plan to go there and achieve the notoriety that would make his name forever famous. On the first of September, 1513, Vasco Nuñez, with one hundred and ninety men and a number of Indian guides, embarked at Santa Maria de la Antigua and set sail in a brigantine for the Indian village of Coyba. Here he began his toilsome and dangerous march across the isthmus. After enduring untold hardships the pertinacious Spaniard and his small body of wayworn followers arrived at the foot of the Sierra de Quarequa, intercepting the view of the unseen ocean.'

1 Ten years before this, says Humboldt, "Columbus distinctly learned, when he was coasting along the eastern shores of Veragua, that to the west of this land there was a sea 'which in less than nine days' sail would bear ships to the Chersonesus aurea of Ptolemy and to the mouth of the Ganges.' In the

While climbing the rugged slope of the intervening mountain, on the twenty-fifth of September, Balboa commanded his men to halt and to remain where they were until he had reached the summit and surveyed the wide expanse of the great ocean billowing between the isthmus and the remote shores of India. When the enthusiastic Spaniard ascended to the top of the mountain and beheld the Mar del Sur (Sea of the South), he fell upon his knees and thanked God for honoring him as its discoverer, "as he was a man of moderate ability, little knowledge, and humble birth.” Calling to his men to come to him, he ordered them, after surveying the discovered sea, to construct a wooden cross, and to plant it where he had kneeled and rendered thanks for the honor conferred on him. A mound of stones was built near the cross as a monument to commemorate the discovery of the ocean and the adjacent country for his majesty, the king of Spain. Descending the southern slope of the mountain, Balboa and his followers made their way to the shore of the bay, which he called San Miguel, where the proud discoverer, with a banner embellished with the picture of the Holy Virgin and Child and the insignia of Spain, marched into the sea, and took possession of it in the name of his sovereign, King Ferdinand. Having explored a part of the southern coast of the isthmus, Vasco Nuñez and his men reëntered the wilderness and arrived at Santa Maria de la Antigua on the nineteenth of January, 1514.

same Carta rarissima, which contains the beautiful and poetic narration of a dream, the admiral says that the opposite coasts of Veragua, near the Rio de Belen, are situated relatively to another, as Tortosa on the Mediterranean and Fuenterabia in Biscay, or as Venice and Pisa.' The great ocean, the South Pacific, was even at that time regarded as merely a continuation of the Sinus magnus (μéyas nóλπ05) of Ptolemy, situated before the golden Chersonesus, whilst Cattigara and the land of the Sines (Thinae) were supposed to constitute its eastern boundary."-Humboldt: Cosmos. Otte's trans. vol. ii. pp. 642, 643.

In the following year Gaspar Morales and Francisco Pizarro crossed the isthmus with sixty men, and visited the island which Balboa had called Isla Rica. In 1516, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, ambitious of obtaining greater fame, and having two hundred men and considerable money at his command, transported the timber, rigging, and other appendages of two brigantines across the isthmus, and after putting the vessels in sailing condition, launched them upon the recently discovered ocean. After a short cruise among the islands near Isla Rica, Balboa returned to the Spanish settlement at Acla, on the north coast, where he was arrested on some false charges and put in irons by Pedrarias Davila, "as a traitor and an usurper of the territories of the crown of Spain." The enmity of Pedrarias was so bitter toward the innocent officer that the Spanish governor of Darien ordered Balboa to be executed. In 1517, at the age of forty-one years, in the plaza of Acla, the discoverer of the South Sea was publicly beheaded.'

To further explore the coast of Brazil, it is said that Juan Diaz de Solis sailed from Lepe, Spain, on the eighth of October, 1515. Descrying the continent at Cape San Roque, in five degrees south latitude, he steered southward along the coast to Rio de Janeiro, (River of January,) in twenty-three degrees south latitude. Thence he coasted farther southward and entered a large bay of fresh water, which he called Mar Dulce, that was afterward called Rio de la Plata. While exploring this stream, De Solis, with some of his crew, went on land, and while ashore was attacked by the natives, and falling into their hands he and his men were roasted and devoured. The vessel returned to cap. i, ii, iv. dec. ii. lib. i. dec. iii. cap. ii, iii, vi, x.

'Historia general. Herrera. dec. i. lib. x. cap. iv, xi. De Orbe Novo decades. Martire. dec. iv. cap. vi. dec. vii. cap. x.

Cape St. Augustine, and having loaded with Brazilwood, sailed to Spain.'

The greed of gold, silver, and pearls,-the master passion governing Spanish capitalists and the horde of moneyless adventurers at this time in the New World,was the cause of the fitting out of three vessels, in 1517, to go in search of new countries west of the island of Cuba. This fleet, under the command of Francisco Hernando de Cordoba, set sail, with one hundred and ten soldiers, about the beginning of February, from San Cristobal, on the north side of the island, and after a voyage of twenty-one days came in sight of the northeastern part of the peninsula of Yucatan, where an Indian town was seen, to which the Spaniards gave the name El Gran Cairo. Near this place three temples, built of stone and lime, were found, in which were many clay idols "some of them having terrible shapes, seemingly representing Indians committing horrible offences. In these temples," says Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who was connected with the expedition, "we also found wooden boxes containing other gods with hellish faces, several small shells, some ornaments, three crowns, and a number of trinkets, some in the shape of fish, others in the shape of ducks, all made of an inferior kind of gold. Seeing all these things, the gold and the good architecture of the temples, we felt overjoyed at the discovery of the country." At a town, which the Spaniards called San Lazaro, although they

'Historia general. Herrera. dec. ii. lib. i.

cap. vii.

Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a native of Medina del Campo, Spain, came to the New World, in 1514, with Pedro Arias de Avila, who had been appointed governor of Terra Firma. He sailed with Cordoba and Grijalva on their expeditions of discovery, and was with Cortes in his Mexican campaign, and participated in more than a hundred engagements. He was regidor of the city of Guatemala, where, on the twenty-sixth day of February, 1568, he completed his True history of the conquest of New Spain.