* * * * * Before Humboldt's time travelers had been mostly of the type of Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville, who discovered strange and wondrous things, such as horses with five legs, dogs that could talk, and anthropophagi with heads that grew beneath their shoulders. The temptation to be interesting at the expense of truth has always been strong upon the sailorman. Read even the history of Christopher Columbus and you will hear of islands off the coast of America inhabited exclusively by women who had only one calling-day in a year when their gentlemen friends from a neighboring island came to see them. The world needed accurate, scientific knowledge concerning those parts of the world seldom visited by man. Travel a hundred years ago was accompanied by great expense and more or less peril. Nations held themselves aloof from one another, and travelers were looked upon as renegades or spies. Alexander von Humboldt had explored deep mines, climbed high mountains, visited that strange people, the Basques of Spain, got little glimpses into Africa where the jungle was waiting for a Livingstone and a Stanley before giving up its secrets. The Corsican had thrown Europe into a fever of fear, and war was on in every direction, when in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-nine Humboldt ran the blockade and sailed out of the harbor of Coruna, Spain, on the little corvette "Pizarro," bound for the Spanish possessions in the New World. Spain had discovered America in the gross two hundred years before, but what this country really contained in way of possibilities, Spain had most certainly never discovered. Humboldt's mind had conceived the idea of a Scientific Survey, and in this he was the maker of an epoch. In this undertaking he secured the assistance of the Prime Minister, who secretly issued passports and letters of recommendation to Humboldt, first cautioning him that if the Court of Madrid should know anything about this proposed voyage of discovery it could never be made, so jealous and ignorant were the officials. Only one thing did Spain have in abundance, and that was religion. At that time the Spanish Colonies included Louisiana, Florida, Texas, California, Mexico, Cuba, Central America, most of the West Indies, and most of South America, not to mention the Philippines. These colonies covered a territory stretching over five thousand miles from North to South. Twice a year Spain sent out her trading-ships, convoyed by armed cruisers. Trade then was monopoly and extortion. The goods sent out were as cheap and tawdry as could be palmed off; all that were brought back were bartered for at the lowest possible prices. Cheating in count, weight and quality was then considered perfectly proper, and as the Government officials at home got a goodly grab into all transactions in way of perquisites, all went swimmingly--or fairly so.