He had probably been within less than two hundred miles of the place where Coronado, about the same time, sent his army back. They had rumours of the presence of Coronado, but the nature of the country was so forbidding they feared to proceed. Moscoso was even more brutal than Soto. He punished natives by cutting off their noses and their right hands; or, by another method not unusual with the early Spaniards, setting hungry dogs on a victim to tear him to pieces before their eyes. At last this remnant of the expedition, that had started with high hopes, succeeded in building boats with which they descended the Mississippi and coasted westward, reaching the province of Panuco, in north-eastern Mexico. A great deal of misery and death had been brought to the people of the new land, but, aside from ground for an additional Spanish claim, little more had been accomplished by this than by the Narvaez expedition. [Illustration: Barriers of Adamant—Mission Range. Photograph by R. H. Chapman, U. S. Geol. Survey.] Although the Spaniards opposed vigorously the coming to the New World of any other people, New Spain soon found a rival in New France, and then in New England. Cortez had barely finished the overthrow of the Aztecs before Verrazano, for the French King, cruised along the Atlantic coast from Hatteras northward to where French fishermen already had been, and where Cartier in 1534, ten years later, discovered the great island we call Newfoundland and his Gulf of St. Lawrence. The next year he sailed up the great river, to which he gave the same name, and thereby opened the real gate to our Wilderness; for it was by this route, and not by the south, that the best early entrance was offered, on account of the numerous closely connected lakes and waterways of various kinds. Travel in a new country is always easier by boat than by any other method, for, if there are plenty of waterways, a canoe and its cargo can be carried from the head of one stream, or lake, to the next nearest one, and so a practically continuous passage effected with quantities of goods, which otherwise could not be transported without a large number of pack-animals or waggons, and pack-animals frequently need a way cleared for them, while a waggon in a new land is often impossible. So by these waterways, numerously ramifying from the mouth of the St. Lawrence into the vast western Unknown, the Frenchmen, with the beautiful birch-bark canoe of the Amerind, whose skill they also speedily acquired, entered the Wilderness with a sailor's light-heartedness, singing their gay chansons as they paddled along; songs with little sense but much rhythm, like all the ditties sailors use for expediting their labours, which, like rowing or paddling, require to be accomplished in unison. As New France developed into Canada the _Voyageur_ became a familiar and distinct character; a creation of the New World. He was as competent