But the discovery was comparatively a trifling matter. There lay the long line of coast, stretching south-eastwards from Panama; the navigator disposed to explore it, had but to spread his sails, keep the land in sight, and take the risk of the hidden shoals and reefs that might lie in his course. The seas to be crossed were often tempestuous; the country intervening between St Michael’s Gulf and the southern empire, whose rumoured wealth and civilisation wrought so potently upon Spanish imagination, was peopled by fierce and warlike tribes. Shipwreck was to be dreaded, and a landing might for weeks or months be unsafe, if not impracticable. But what were such secondary dangers contrasted with the perils, doubly terrible from their unknown and mysterious nature, incurred by the sanguine Genoese and his bold companions, when they turned their brigantine’s prow westward from Europe, and sailed--they knew not whither? Here the path was comparatively plain, and the goal ascertained; and although risks must be dared, reward was tolerably certain: for further tidings of the Peruvian empire had reached the ears of the Spaniards, less shadowy and incomplete than the vague hints received by Balboa from an Indian chief. Andagoya, the officer whom illness had compelled to abandon an expedition when it was scarcely commenced, had brought back intelligence far more explicit, obtained from Indian traders who had penetrated by land into the empire of the Incas, as far (so he says in his own manuscript, comprised in Navarrete’s collection) as its capital city of Cuzco. They spoke of a pagan but civilised land, opulent and flourishing; they described the divisions of its provinces, the wealth of its cities, the manners and usages of its inhabitants. But had their description been far more minute and glowing, the imagination of those who received the accounts would still have outstripped reality and possibility. Those were the days of golden visions and chimerical day-dreams. In the fancy of the greedy and credulous Spaniards, each corner of the New World contained treasures, compared to which the golden trees and jewelled fruits of Aladdin’s garden were paste and tinsel. The exaggerated reports of those adventurers who returned wealth-laden to Spain, were swoln by repetition to dimensions which enchantment only could have realised. No marvels were too monstrous and unwieldy for the craving gullet of popular credulity. “They listened with attentive ears to tales of Amazons, which seemed to revive the classic legends of antiquity, to stories of Patagonian giants, to flaming pictures of an _El-Dorado_, where the sands sparkled with gems, and golden pebbles as large as birds’ eggs were dragged in nets out of the rivers.” And expeditions were actually undertaken in search of a magical Fountain of Health, of golden sepulchres and temples. The Amazons and the water of life are still to be discovered; but as to