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Table of Contents

It would be manifestly impossible, in the present work, to enter in detail upon the wide field of the history of the Spanish American States. Yet, just as in order to gain an intelligent idea topographically of the region we must refer to its main geographical features and disposition, so must we cast a glance at its historical outlines. Those readers who are drawn on to fill in the detail have ample material at hand in the books recently published on the Latin American States.[4]

The beginnings of history and of geography are, of course, inextricably interwoven, and in the case of America this is markedly so. America, in a sense, was discovered by accident, and its first discoverers did not know they had brought to being a new continent. Columbus, to his dying day, believed it was India he had reached, which he had set out to reach, and would not be persuaded to the contrary.

On the maps of the earlier geographers there was, in fact, no room for America. From the shores of Europe and Africa to those of Cathay—the old, mediaeval, and still the poetical name for China, the great Asiatic coast—stretched one sea, the Western Ocean, broken by some small islands and Cipango, or Japan. Scholars and dreamers, studying isolated passages in cryptic and classic writings, or arguing from general principles, in which the wish was at times father to the thought, believed that by sailing west India could be reached.

These dreams of poets and the beliefs of scholars crystallized in the mind of the Genoese sailor, Columbus, a man of humble origin, and after many disappointments and disillusions, in the interviewing of kings and high personages for aid and patronage (among them the King of England, but England with characteristic lack of imagination would have none of it, and the King of Portugal, who tried to cheat him), was enabled to set sail by aid of the Queen of Spain—women having more imagination than men—in three small vessels, and made his great and memorable landfall in the New World on October 12, 1492, in the Bahamas.

These islands Columbus and his officers believed to be those described by Marco Polo, as forming the eastern end of Asia; and thus arose the name of "Las Indias," the Indies, which America long retained.

As a result of this discovery, a controversy arose between Spain and Portugal, for, in 1454, the Pope had given the Portuguese—by what right he himself doubtless best knew—exclusive control of exploration and conquest on the road to the Indies, although his Bull had in view only the eastern route. Now, however, "spheres of influence" might easily clash. The two Powers repaired again to the Pope, successor of the former, and he, drawing a line across the map of the world from north to south, in a position west of the Azores a hundred leagues, awarded Spain everything that might lie beyond it. The Pope was a Spaniard. The Portuguese did not think the award fair. (It might have been mentioned that the Portuguese King, his "especial friend," had treacherously endeavoured to forestall Columbus by dispatching a caravel on his proposed route secretly, instead of helping him, a futile errand, however.) They protested, and by common consent the line was shifted to 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, corresponding to-day to the 50th degree of longitude.

Such a line cuts South America across the mouth of the Amazon, and the Spaniards claimed the right to exclude all other people and all trade but their own from beyond this line.

The subsequent conquest and discovery of America embodies some of the most romantic and stirring episodes in history. In his last voyage Columbus explored the West Indies and reached South America, landing at the mouth of the Orinoco, and he sailed along the coast of the Caribbean and Central America to Nombre de Dios—"Name of God"—near Colon. Henry VII of England—who had declined to help Columbus—now kindly permitted John Cabot to sail, in 1499, who discovered Newfoundland and did other valuable exploits. Hispaniola was the first Spanish Settlement, on the Island of Hayti, and this spread to the mainland. In 1513 Vasco Nuñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Darien and Panama and beheld the "South Sea," as described in our chapter upon Central America. The insistent hope of a "strait" or passage through these lands, giving a way to the Spice Islands of the Indies, was now given up, and when Magellan, in 1520, passed through the strait which bears his name, and sailed across the Pacific, it was understood that a vast continent and a vast ocean divided the world from Asia here, a new world, and that lying mainly within the sphere of influence which the Pope had so generously assigned to Spain.

With regard to this obsession of Colombus that westward lay the shortest route to India, and the insistent idea of a strait, have not these been materialized in the Panama Canal, and are not these ancient mariners vindicated to-day?

The New World now belonged to Spain. Perhaps the first purpose of the Spaniards was trade with the Indies, but their main object was that of gold, to be gained by slave labour. They could not themselves work in the tropics, even if they had had any desire for manual labour, which they had not. However, they began to introduce European plants and animals into Cuba and Hispaniola, a service which was of enormous value later to America, which possessed but a meagre range of staple food products and no beasts of burden or bovines. But gold—that was what they wanted. The shallow deposits of the island were soon exhausted, as were the poor willing Indians, killed off by forced labour. The barbarous treatment of the aborigines of the New World by the Spaniards—and the Portuguese—is one of the most dreadful blots on the history of America, indeed of the world.

The easily gotten gold being exhausted, it was necessary to go farther afield. The Darien Settlement was transferred to Panama, the coasts of Yucatan and the Gulf of Mexico were explored by Cordova and Grijalva, from Cuba, and in 1519 the great Conquest of Mexico was entered upon by Cortes.

So far the Spaniards had found little difficulty in subduing the Indians to their will, the inoffensive islanders, and Caribs, which latter became almost exterminated. The Indian folk of these islands were generally a simple and credible race, who at first looked upon the white man as a demi-god, but these simple children of the soil were treated with utmost callousness and barbarity. There is an example in the treatment of the natives of Watling Island in the Bahamas, which, as before remarked, was the first point in the New World trodden by Columbus. Of this land and its folk the explorer wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella: "These beautiful islands excel all other lands. The natives love their neighbours as themselves, their faces are always smiling, their conversation is the sweetest imaginable, and they are so gentle and affectionate that I swear to your Highness there is no better people in the world." But what was the lot of these folk? The Spaniards wanted further labour in the mines of Hispaniola, and to get these natives there they, trading on a characteristic love of the people for their ancestors and departed relatives, promised to convey them to the heavenly shores, where these were imagined as dwelling; and so, treacherously getting them on board the ships, they were taken away to the mines, where it is said 40,000 perished under starvation and the lash.

The natives of Mexico were people of a different stamp. The Aztecs were pueblo or town Indians, highly organized as soldiers, skilled in arts and crafts, with a developed civilization and certain intellectuality. They were highland folk, the Mexican plateau lying at seven to eight thousand feet above sea level, protected by mountain fastnesses. It was, in fact, an empire of the New World such as, in some respects, might compare with those ancient semi-barbaric empires of the Old World, in times more ancient. Its conquest by Cortes was an affair of great enterprise and toil, entailing heavy loss and suffering on the part of the Spaniards, and at one time their defeat, from which only a superhuman rally saved them, at the Battle of Otumba. There was one specially weak point about the Aztec rule. It was a hegemony, exercised over various other Mexican races, who hated Montezuma, the Aztec Emperor, and his people. Cortes was skilful enough to take advantage of this flaw in the Mexican armour, to fan the jealousies of the subject tribes, and enlist them to march against Tenochtitlan, the capital of Mexico. These allied Indians, when the place fell, themselves committed the most unheard-of barbarities on the Aztec population, such as shocked the Spaniards, who were unable to restrain them.

The Conquest of Mexico was effected by 1521, and the success, the romance, the adventure, and the objects of gold and silver sent by Cortes to Spain, and the loot of the soldiers, fired the imagination of the Spaniards in Hispaniola and Darien to other quests. The settlers at Panama had heard of another empire where gold was to be had for the taking, perhaps richer and greater even than that of the Aztecs. This was Peru, and Francisco Pizarro and Diego Amalgro set sail from Panama to explore and conquer that unknown region along the sunset shores of America to the south.

This adventure too was an arduous one, not by reason of the opposition of savage natives, for the Incas of Peru were a gentle and philosophical people, animated by a remarkable social system, and they offered little resistance to the white men and the formidable men-animals, or horsemen, and their guns. It was famine that assailed Pizarro and his followers, and insufficient support. Also he, like Cortes, had to contend with the jealousies and double-dealing of the Spanish Governor of the Indies. As for Peru, its coast was barren, as it is to-day, and only after surmounting the dreadful fastness of the Andes, amid the inclement climate of a region twelve to fifteen thousand feet above the level of the sea, was the Inca Empire reached and subdued. Here lay Cuzco, the Mecca of Peru, and Cajamarca, a more northern capital. The stores of gold recovered seem to have filled these Spaniards' expectations, and great renown was the result of this conquest, which was completed by 1533.

These exploits were followed by a period of strife among the Spaniards, and Pizarro was murdered, after founding Lima, the capital of Peru. But in 1536 the regions lying between Peru and Panama, which to-day we know as Ecuador and Colombia, were explored and conquered, the first by Sebastian de Benalcazar, the second by Jimenez de Quesada. Here were dwelling other advanced people or tribes. Quito, the capital of Ecuador, had been the home of the Shiris, a cultured people who were overthrown by the Incas before the Spanish advent. The city was joined to Cuzco, eleven hundred miles to the south, by the famous Inca roads, one along the Cordillera, the other along the coast. Some early Spanish historian delighted to speak of these roads as equal to those of the Romans, but this was an exaggeration. Colombia was the culture-area of the Chibchas. The Spaniards had heard of a further great empire, a rich El Dorado, in this region, and encouraged by the ease with which Pizarro had conquered Peru, they made their way up the Magdalena River from the Caribbean Sea. A pleasing land and much gold was encountered, after severe hardships, the people being of some considerable degree of civilization, although not of the status of the Aztec or the Inca. The richest plums, in fact, had fallen. Quesada named this region New Granada, with its capital at Bogota.

There still remained the conquest of the huge territory south of Peru, known as Chile, and this, attempted by Almagro in 1537, was carried out by Pedro de Valdivia, who, however, was checked by the redoubtable Araucanian Indians. These form one of the chief admixtures of the Chileans to-day, a hardy and enterprising nation, in contrast with the Peruvians of a more sentimental temperament, with a basis of the Quichua Indians of the Incas. Terrible excesses were committed upon the Indians on these expeditions. A terrible end was visited upon the Spanish leader by the Indians. "You have come for gold," said the savage chief who captured him. "You shall have your fill." And he caused molten burning gold to be poured into his mouth. Then he was cut to pieces with sharpened oyster shells.

From the Southern Andes, the Spaniards, in the following years, descended to the great plains which now form the republics of the River Plate, Argentine, Uruguay and Paraguay. The exploration of Brazil had been begun in 1510, and the region was traversed by Orellana in his descent of the Amazon from Quito, and it was gradually settled by the Portuguese.

The lands lying between Panama and Mexico, which to-day form the Central American States, Guatemala, Costa Rica and others, were conquered after the fall of Mexico. Here were evidences of a splendid past, in the beautiful temples of sculptured stone found in their forests and deserts, ruins even then abandoned. These remains astounded Europe, when they were first revealed.

Thus did all this enormous region of Latin America, from tropical Mexico—indeed, from California—to the frigid extremity of Patagonia, fall into the possession of Spain and Portugal. In some respects it is a dreadful history. The Spaniards overthrew civilizations in Mexico and Peru which in many respects were superior to their own, civilizations that had developed marvellously without the resources that the Old World commanded, for there was neither ox nor horse, nor even iron nor gunpowder. The Spaniards destroyed everything that these people had done. For centuries unknown they had evolved their arts and crafts and laws; laws, in the case of the Incas of Peru, far more beneficial and democratic than anything Europe had produced at that period, and millions of these people were most ruthlessly destroyed.

To read the accounts of the happenings of those times is enough to break one's heart. To-day, throughout the length and breadth of this vast territory—of which not an acre now belongs to Spain—the spirit of the Indian has so far remained faithful that there is not a single statue raised to Cortes or Pizarro. Columbus, of course, is commemorated by his monuments in every capital.

These great New World territories, by virtue of the papal Bull, were held as the peculiar property of the Sovereign. The Spanish possessions were divided into two "kingdoms," the Kingdom of New Spain, consisting of Mexico and all lands to and including Venezuela, and New Castile, later called Peru. This last viceroyalty was found unwieldy, and New Granada and the River Plate regions were constituted apart under viceroys. The administrative powers of these functionaries were very great, but they were held in some control by the Laws of the Indies: measures passed for native protection. Even the frightful dominance of the Inquisition did not extend to the Indians, who were regarded as merely catechumens. Queen Isabella of Spain, by whose imagination and aid discovery of the New World had been rendered possible, would not permit—and her memory should be revered for it—the enslavement of the Indians, if she could prevent it, and when Columbus returned home with a cargo of natives, whom he proposed to sell as slaves, Isabella interfered. Let them be set at liberty, she said, and sent back to their homes. Columbus has in general been represented as a protector of the Indians, and must not necessarily be judged in the light of this incident.

In the general condemnation of Spain at that period, these facts should be recollected. It was declared by the home government that the Indians were to enjoy the privilege of free subjects, and that their native princes were to be upheld in their authority. Censure was frequently visited upon the conquerors and governors of Mexico and Peru, from home, for their displacement or execution of these, as any who will study Spanish colonial history may see. Some modern writers, in their democratic zeal, have overlooked this. The declaration was opposed by the colonists, as well as the colonial authorities, and indeed by the clergy. Some compulsion was necessary, of course, if civilization was to make its way among the Indians, for they were often loath to work, and stood sullenly aloof from the white race. The System of Repartimientos and Encomiendas—the assigning of bodies of Indians to the industrial charge of colonists—was well meant, but the greed of the colonists and their callous habit as regarded human life offset these influences.

Another side of the question also presents itself. Under Philip II, the colonies were governed not so much in their own interests, as for the enrichment of Spain and its predominance. He yearned to injure Protestant England, and the colonists were taxed and goaded to produce wealth, and their interests sacrificed in the furtherance of this end. Those into whose hands the unfortunate Indians had been delivered body and soul, drove the unfortunates into the mines, branded them on the face, flogged them to death, chucked their miserable carcasses aside, when they fell from exhaustion, a prey to the dogs.

We know what these things led to. England and other European nations refused to recognize the exclusive control of the American continents by the Peninsula Powers, and hardy buccaneers and privateers streamed forth to dispute Spanish pretensions. Drake intercepted the stream of gold with which Philip was enabled to equip his armadas and thus performed a marked strategic service for England.

Moreover, such pretensions would never have been respected, especially under the influence of the Renaissance and the Reformation.

The restrictions upon colonial trade by Spain were, we see further, an element in the downfall of the empire. The natural development of South America was seriously hindered. All trade must come via Panama, and anything opposed to Spanish interests was suppressed. The growing trade between Acapulco and China was suppressed; Hidalgo's vineyard in Mexico was destroyed by the Spanish authorities because Spain alone must grow grapes. "Learn to be silent and obey, and not to discuss politics," ran the proclamation of a Mexican viceroy, near the end of the eighteenth century.

When—unlawfully—the throne of Spain came to be occupied with kings having French sympathies, these short-sighted methods were modified. Audiencias or law courts, of which, from the reign of Philip IV there were eleven, in Santo Domingo, Mexico, Panama, Lima, Guatemala, Guadalajara, Bogota, La Plata, Chile, and Buenos Ayres, acted as counsel to the Governors, with civil and criminal jurisdiction. Appeal could be had to the Council of the Indies, that great colonial body at Seville. For centuries the history of Spanish America is made up of the deeds and misdeeds of the viceroys.

The political and commercial control of the colonies was thus entirely in the hands of the Crown. The territories were expected to send quantities of gold and other precious metals home to Spain with regularity, and indeed Spain later became a mere sieve into which this treasure from the Indies was poured. They were also bound to send raw material and to take all their manufactured goods from the Mother Country.

It must be recollected that the ill-treatment meted out to the natives of these lands was mainly the work of the Spanish settlers. They generally both despised the Indians, and wished to enrich themselves from their labours. They were, for the man of Iberian race, inferior creatures, to be used at his will, and the forced labour in the mines was a cause of the reduction of the population. Questions have been raised by historians as to whether the dreadful treatment of the American native by the Spaniard was worse than that meted out to him by the Anglo-Saxon settlers in North America. There have been grave abuses in the latter field. The Indians in Spanish America, however, numbered many millions, as against a few hundred thousand elsewhere. The Spanish Crown and Government certainly did not countenance the excesses carried on by the colonists, but strove to protect the Indians.

As for the English colonies in America, they enjoyed a greater measure of self-government and had taken firm root under more prosaic but more fruitful form. The same policy, however, on the part of the Mother Country was enacted in commercial matters; that trade should consist almost exclusively of exchange of colonial raw material for English manufactured articles. French colonies in America were less noteworthy or prosperous, but they played their part in history, for the fall of French control in North America was in reality the beginning of independence for all colonies in the New World; as did the ideas of the French philosophers, which found a ready soil in the Spanish American folk. The establishment of the United States was but the precursor to the establishment of the numerous Latin American States. The Spanish Government saw its danger, but was too apathetic to move. However, some reforms were introduced, and it may be said that Spanish America was well governed at the time of revolution, and was prosperous.

But it has been said that "across the face of all human reform are written the words 'too late,'" and this is in effect what happened in Spanish America. The French Revolution, and the defeat of British expeditions to Buenos Ayres by the colonists in 1806 and 1807 had their effect. The struggle for Independence lasted from 1810 to 1826, until the flag of Spain was entirely ousted from the vast territory of Spanish America, upon which she had stamped her individuality, language, laws and all else, with much that was splendid and enduring, and much that in the future development of the world may have a value so far scarcely apparent.

The dark pictures of misrule of the century of republican life of the twenty Latin Republics are interspersed with pages of a more pleasing nature, but it is a chequered history, whose end we cannot yet foresee.

Among elements making for disorder and bloodshed in Spanish America, religion has played a prominent part. Many States developed bitter antagonism between clerical and non-clerical parties. Some would overthrow the Church and the all-pervading priestly power; others would uphold it, whether out of pious conviction, whether because it was a convenient party upon which to hang their own pretensions and ambitions. Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Central America, Chile—in fact, all have as part of their history the deadly struggles between these factions. To-day this very fierceness has flamed out, in the main, to be succeeded by a thinly veiled materialism. What more can be expected of a hemisphere which was cursed by the Inquisition?

In many instances the "reform" parties of these States having triumphed by force of arms, confiscates all Church property—and this often was enormous—which was handed to secular and public purposes, or enriched the pockets of politicians. In Mexico, where at one time it was not safe to pass along the street unless seeming to be muttering a prayer, the power of the Church was entirely overthrown, and convents, monasteries and other religious establishments were forbidden to exist. In Ecuador similar things were brought about, accompanied by massacre and other dreadful deeds. But it would be unjust to pick out any state as over-prominent in these acts.

The Church, in large degree, brought these troubles upon itself. It sought for too much power, spiritual and temporal. The priests exploited the superstition and needs of the poor, of the Indian, and themselves often lived immoral and corrupt lives. But let us do it justice. It protected the poor and oppressed often against the grinding exactions of the civil authorities; its vicars often exposed themselves in humane works. Often priests dashed in with upraised crucifix to save the victims of dreadful passionate and sanguinary revolutions, and themselves were torn to pieces. Often the devout fathers spent their lives in the most desolate and savage regions of the untamed wilderness, seeking by their piety and devotion to better the lives of the poor Indians, the poor, ignorant children of the mountain and the forest.

The Roman Catholic religion ingrafted itself with wonderful strength upon the mind of the aboriginal of Spanish America. In some respects it seemed a development of his own earlier superstitious culture, and became blended with it. Tawdry images held for them and their miserable lives the hope of eternal joy, of reprieve of sin, of comfort in misery, and to-day we cannot enter a simple church of the remote villages in those boundless Cordilleras and deserts without stumbling over the prostrate forms, bent upon the earthern floors, of poor, black-clothed Indian women passing their silent hour in supplication and orisons. Men are not there: the women, as ever, seem to link the material and the spiritual. May heaven succour these poor Indian women-folk, and bring them a happier destiny yet.

A glance now at the earlier cultures of these lands and the earlier religions of their people.

Who, upon beholding the beautiful ruined structures of the early folk of America—for by America here we mean Spanish America, where alone these vestiges are found—in the decaying sculptured walls of their temples, or the massive stories of their fortresses and palaces, or of the strange pyramids they raised, has not felt his conception of the New World undergo a change? Nay, do we even study the printed page which sets them forth, not having had the privilege of journeying to where they stand, wrapped in the silence of the jungle or stark upon the rocky ranges of the hills, we feel that here is a page in the book of mankind whose turning opens to us a vista little dreamt of.

The story of those strange old cultures of Mexico and Peru has always fascinated us: the Aztec and the Inca stand forth from the dry lore of archæology with a peculiar charm, which we may not have felt even in contemplating the more wonderful and ancient cultures of the Old World. For here we feel that the intellect and art of man sprang unaided from the dust, to write his pathetic story in the stones of a continent unvisited by the Jehovah of the Israelites, unknown to history, unblessed of Christianity, unrecorded and obscure. Here the reaction of man from his environment came forth from no recorded Eden; no tree of knowledge, of good and evil, opened his eyes; no Abraham here walked with God, no Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar brought visions and dreams to these more sombre pages, and no divine wisdom seemed to shed its light within these sculptured walls.

There is the credit due to early America, to the ability of her autochthonous cultures, even if they formed no permanent link in the chain of human development, but were too early cut off and faded away like the untimely fruit of a woman, that at least man rose here, in accordance with the divine mandate, arose from the dust, and if he did but build him "fanes of fruitless prayer" to strange idols and savage deities, he had that in common with the majority of the cultures of the Old World of Asia, Africa and India, where men raised temples of the utmost beauty to shelter the most inane rites or bloody religions.

Before Mitla and Palenque or Teotihuacan and Tiahuanako let us mark the skill which carved these intricate walls or raised their terraces and monoliths, the greater wonder because all that has descended from those skilled craftsmen of a bygone age on the American soil are the stolid Indian, incapable of squaring stone to stone, ignorant of the bronze chisel, degenerate and fallen. The skill and imagination which would have done credit to the Greeks or the Chaldeans lies buried in the dust, nor is likely yet to be resuscitated.

We have spoken of Teotihuacan—the name means in the ancient tongue of Mexico the "house of God"—and this, the great pyramid of the sun, the work of the shadowy Toltecs, may be seen by the traveller to-day who, taking steamer and train, will convey himself to the high plateau of Mexico, a few miles north of the capital. It is a structure of stone and rubble seven hundred feet upon its broadest side and two hundred feet high, and, anciently, upon its summit stood the golden image of Tonatiuah, whose breastplate flashed back the rays of the rising sun, what time the attendant priests chanted their savage refrain upon the terraces beneath. Restored by the Government of the Republic under President Diaz, the great monument stands up much the same as it did in days of yore. How many centuries have beaten upon it we can scarcely conjecture. It was in ruins when the defeated Cortes and his Spaniards, after the dreadful experience of the Noche Triste, the sorrowful night passed beneath its shadow and wept thereunder for his fallen comrades and his ruined enterprise.

If little we know of Teotihuacan, what shall be said of Mitla, whose mysterious halls and corridors, scarcely defaced by time, arise from the sands of Oaxaca.

And the builders of these temples, have they produced no songs of beauty, no enduring psalms? Had their dreadful religious rites nothing in common with the idea of a true Providence? Hear the psalm of Nezahual-Coyotl, the Solomon of Mexico. This is what he sang:

Truly the gods which I adore—

The idols of stone and wood,

They speak not nor do they feel,

Neither could they fashion the beauty of the heavens,

Nor yet that of the earth and the streams,

Nor of the trees and the plants which beautify it.

Some powerful, hidden and unknown God—

He must be the Creator of the Universe,

He alone can console me in my affliction.

He alone can still the bitter anguish of this heart.

So spake Nezahual-Coyotl, in what has been termed the Golden Age of Texcoco, whose historians, arts and poets were in their time renowned among the nations of Anahuac, on the high Mexican Plateau. This person was a philosopher and a poet, but the writings of the period—the picture-writings—were perversely destroyed by Zumarraga, the first Archbishop of Mexico after the Conquest—an irremediable loss.

Hear also the Inca prayer to the Creator, as chanted by the priests and nobles of Peru:

Oh Creator: Thou art without equal unto the ends of the earth! Thou who givest life and strength to mankind, saying, let this be a man and let this be a woman. And as thou sayest, so thou givest life, and vouchsafest that man shall live in health and peace, and free from danger. Thou who dwellest in the heights of heaven, in the thunder and in the storm-clouds, hear us. Grant us eternal life and have us in thy keeping.

THE ANCIENT CIVILIZATION: RUINS OF MITLA, MEXICO.

Vol. I. To face p. 60.

This last is from the Rites and Laws of the Incas.[5] It is but one of many similar prayers, which, as regards sentiment and language, might be taken from the Bible and Church Service.

These prayers to the Unknown God, written by the early people of America, cut off from any contact with the Old World, would seem to show that man, in the reaction from his environment, inevitably develops within him the conception of a supreme deity.

It now remains for us to choose how we shall approach the Spanish American lands. Shall we cross the Spanish Main, and land where Cortes did at Vera Cruz, the city of the True Cross, and so enter Mexico? Or shall we, still crossing the American Mediterranean, land on the Isthmus of Panama and thence, as Pizarro did, voyage along the great Pacific coast to mysterious Peru? Or shall we take steamer to the River Plate, that more prosaic route to the lands of corn and cattle? Or shall we go round the Horn? Perhaps the middle course is best, and, at the isthmus, we will first explore Central America.

Then we may say with the poet Keats:

Oft have I travelled in the Land of Gold

… Or like stout Cortes … and all his men

Gazed on the Pacific … silent upon a peak in Darien.

Keats, however, was in error. It was not Cortes, but another who gazed from the peak, as presently we shall see.