Illustration: FERDINAND CORTES. A disastrous result ensued. Two of the ships were wrecked, and when about to prosecute his voyage in the third, Cortes was recalled to Mexico by a rebellion which had broken out in his absence. A little later, however, a certain Francisco de Ulloa, who had been throughout the companion of Cortes, spent a year in cruising about the Gulf of California, and discovered it to terminate in N. lat. 32°, in a bay resembling the Adriatic, to which he gave the name of the Sea of Cortes. In 1537, a new impulse was given to the flagging interest of the Spanish in the unknown districts to the north by the arrival at the Mexican capital of our old acquaintance, Alvaro Nunez, fresh from his wonderful experiences in Florida. His stories of his adventures, and, still more, his repetition of the rumors of gold in plenty somewhere on the north of the Gulf of Mexico, led to the sending forth in the following year of a monk named Fra Marco da Nizza, with orders to find out “what there was in the extensive regions beyond Mexico.” Starting from Culiacan, then the most northern Spanish settlement in Mexico, Da Nizza, accompanied by several Spaniards and a few Indian guides, made his painful way, first through plains already desolated by the incursions of his fellow-countrymen, and thence into the territory now called Arizona, on the borders of which he was met by some natives of California, who told him falsely, as it turned out, that their home was on an island, and that its shores were washed by waters abounding in pearls. Encouraged by this intelligence, Da Nizza passed on till he came to the encampment of a tribe of Indians who had never seen a white man, but who received him courteously, informing him that forty days’ journey to the north, on the other side of lofty mountains, there existed a vast plain full of cities inhabited by a people whose wealth far exceeded their own. Passing on in search of this new El Dorado, the Father was presently met by some Indians from the plain in question, who confirmed all that he had already been told, and, pointing to some gold ornaments he carried with him, assured him that their land abounded in similar objects. Cevola, or Cibola, was the nearest and largest of their cities. It contained lofty stone houses, large places, etc.; in a word, it seemed likely to be a second Tenotchitlan; and, after a consultation with his companions, Da Nizza resolved to send one of them, Stefano Dorantes, on in advance, with an escort of three hundred Indians, to announce his own approach, hoping thus to enhance the _eclat_ of his own entry with a view to obtaining a larger tribute for his employer.