Thus within a few days after landing, the commander had got all of his own followers and a powerful native tribe so bound up with his fortunes that they could not desert him without endangering their own skins. He now suggested to two of the pilots that they should report five of the ships to be in an unseaworthy condition from the borings of the teredos--in those days sheathing for hulls had not been invented, and the ship-worm was a constant danger, in tropical waters especially. At the pilots' report Cortes appeared astonished, but saying that there was nothing to do but make the best of it, ordered the ships to be dismantled, the cordage, sails and everything that could be of use brought on shore, and the stripped hulls scuttled and sunk. Then four more were condemned, leaving but one small ship. There was nearly a riot in the army, marooned in an unknown and unfriendly land. Cortes made another speech. He pointed out the fact that if they were successful in the expedition to the capital they would not need the ships; if they were not, what good would the ships do them when they were seventy leagues inland? Those who dared not take the risk with him could still return to Cuba in the one ship that was left. "They can tell there," he added in a tone which cut the deeper for being so very quiet, "how they deserted their commander and their friends, and patiently wait until we return with the spoils of the Aztecs." An instant of breathless silence followed, then somebody shouted. A hundred voices took up the cry,-- "To Mexico! To Mexico!" Of the adventures, the fighting, the wonderful sights and the narrow escapes of the march to the capital, Bernal Diaz, who was with the army, wrote afterward in bulky volumes. On the seventh day of November, 1519, the compact little force of Spaniards, little more than a battalion in all, with their Indian allies from the provinces which had rebelled against the Emperor, came in sight of the capital. The moment at which Cortes, at the head of his followers, rode into the city of Mexico is one of the most dramatic in all history. Nothing in any novel of adventure compares with it in amazing contrast or tragic possibilities. The men of the Age of Cannon met the men of the Age of Stone. The mighty Catholic Church confronted a nation of snake-worshiping cannibals. The sons of a race that lived in hardy simplicity, a race of fighters, had come into a capital where life was more luxurious than it was in Seville, Paris or Rome--a heathen capital rich in beauty, wealth and all the arts of a barbarian people.