Six long weeks of hunger and misery had elapsed, when the ship returned with good store of provisions. Revived by the seasonable supply, the adventurers were now as eager to prosecute their voyage as they shortly before had been to abandon it; and leaving Famine Port, the name given by Pizarro to the scene of their sufferings, they again sailed southwards. When next they landed, it was to plunder an Indian village of its provisions and gold. Here they found traces of cannibalism. “In the pots for the dinner, which stood upon the fire,” says Herrera, in his _Historia General de las Indias_, “amongst the flesh which they took out, were feet and hands of men, whence they knew that those Indians were Caribs,”--the Caribs being the only cannibals as yet known in that part of the New World. This discovery drove the horrified Spaniards to their ships, from which they again landed at Punto Quemado, the limit of this first expedition. The sturdy resistance they there met from some warlike savages, in a skirmish with whom they had two men killed and many wounded, (Pizarro himself receiving seven wounds,) made them reflect on the temerity of proceeding further with such a scanty force. Their ship, too, was in a crippled state, and in a council of war it was decided to return to Panama, and seek the countenance and assistance of the governor for the further prosecution of the enterprise. Without attempting to follow Mr Prescott through his detailed and interesting account of Pizarro’s difficulties, struggles, and adventures, during the six years that intervened between his first departure from Panama, and his commencement of the conquest of Peru, we will glance at the character and deeds of a few of his comrades. The principal of these was Diego de Almagro, a brave and honourable soldier, who placed a confidence in his leader which the sequel shows was scarcely merited. A foundling like Pizarro, like him he was uneducated, and unable to sign his name to the singular covenant by which the two, in concert with Father Luque, (the Spanish ecclesiastic, who found the funds for the expedition,) agreed, upon oath, and in the name of God and the Holy Evangelists, to divide amongst them in equal shares, all the lands, treasures, gold, silver, precious stones, and other property, that might accrue as the result of their enterprise. For in such terms “three obscure individuals coolly carved out, and partitioned amongst themselves, an empire of whose extent, power, and resources, of whose situation, of whose existence even, they had no sure and precise knowledge.” Contented at first with the post of second in command, it does not appear whether it was on his own solicitation that Almagro was named by the governor of Panama Pizarro’s equal in the second expedition. This domination greatly mortified Pizarro, who suspected Almagro of having sought it, and did not neglect, when the opportunity offered, on his visit to the court of Charles the Fifth, to repay him in