Not until Drake's voyage was completed was the vast extent of the North American continent even suspected, although its interior had been explored in many directions. Hernando de Soto, with an experience gained with Pizarro in the conquest of Peru, and succeeding Ponce de Leon in the governorship of Florida, marched with a great expedition through what is now South Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia, and came out, at last, upon the Mississippi, only to find burial beneath its waters, while the tattered remnant of his force staggered back to Mexico. Francisco de Coronado, marching northward from Mexico, in search of the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, found only the squalid villages of the Zuni Indians, after stumbling on the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, and marching as far north as the southern line of Kansas. Jacques Cartier, following another will-o'-the-wisp to the north, and searching for the storied city of Norembega, supposed to exist somewhere in the wilderness south of Cape Breton, found it not, indeed, but laid the foundations for the great empire which France was to establish along the St. Lawrence. And Henry Hudson, in the little Half-Moon, chartered by a company of thrifty Dutchmen to search for the northwest passage, blundered instead upon the mighty river which bears his name, explored it as far north as the present city of Albany, and paved the way for that picturesque Dutch settlement which grew into the greatest city of the New World. He did more than that, for, persevering in the search and sailing far to the north, he came, at last, into the great bay also named for him, where tragic fate lay waiting. For there, in that icy fastness of the north, his mutinous crew bound him, set him adrift in a small boat, and sailed away and left him. So, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the New World was fairly well defined upon the maps which the map-makers were always industriously drawing; and so were the spheres of influence where each nation was to be for a time paramount; the Spaniards in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch along the Hudson, the French on the St. Lawrence, and the English on the long coast to the south. But in all the leagues and leagues from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf, nowhere had the white man as yet succeeded in gaining a permanent foothold. * * * * *