To the Spaniard's eyes the land was not inviting. Far stretching plains of waving grasses, great expanses of marsh and swamp, league after league. No palaces and temples of hewn stone, like those of Peru and Mexico, met the eye here; no promise of gold in the fat alluvial soil; no cities where the arts were practised and treasure accumulated. Such Indians as there were differed vastly from the mild serfs of the Incas. Nomad savages were these; robust, stout, and hardy, elusive of pursuit and impossible of subjection in their wandering disunity. For three hundred miles through the endless pampa-country Solis sailed onward up the stream, his hopes that this way led to the Indies gradually fading as he progressed, until he and his men fell into a trap laid for them by the pampa Indians and were slaughtered. Four years afterwards Magellan on his epoch-making voyage sailed up the great river; but he too fell a victim to the perils of the way in the Asiatic seas, and never returned to Spain to tell of his discoveries in the heart of South America. Then Sebastian Cabot, the Englishman in the service of Spain, was sent to explore, and if possible to take possession of the land for Charles V.; for the Portuguese claimed indefinite territory in this direction under the convention of Tordesillas, and it behoved Spain to assert ownership before it was too late. High up the river Paraguay Cabot found a country with different features and peopled by another race. Silver ornaments, too, he found in plenty amongst these Guaranies, to whom distant echoes of Inca influence had reached across the wastes and mountains to the west. But here, many hundreds of miles from the ocean and far from any base of supplies, it was impracticable for Cabot with the resources at his disposal to effect a settlement, and he also returned to Spain with his story of silver as an incentive for further expeditions.