Such were the stormy beginnings of Spanish rule in Virginia. It is not to be wondered at that with one consent the colonists soon resolved to abandon San Miguel de Guandape. The body of Ayllon was placed on board a tender, and they set sail; but it was not destined to reach a port and receive the obsequies due his rank. The little craft foundered; and of the five hundred who sailed from Santo Domingo only one hundred and fifty returned to that island. * * * * * Contemporaneous with the explorations made by and under Ayllon was an expedition in a single vessel sent out by the Spanish Government in 1524 under Stephen Gomez, a Portuguese navigator who had sailed under Magallanes, but had returned in a somewhat mutinous manner. He took part in a congress of Spanish and Portuguese pilots held at Badajoz to consider the probability of finding a strait or channel north of Florida by which vessels might reach the Moluccas. To test the question practically, Charles V. ordered Gomez to sail to the coast of Bacallaos, or Newfoundland and Labrador, and examine the coast carefully, in order to ascertain whether any such channel existed. Gomez fitted out a caravel at Corunna, in northern Spain, apparently in the autumn of 1524, and sailed across. After examining the Labrador coast, he turned southward and leisurely explored the whole coast from Cape Race to Florida, from which he steered to Santiago de Cuba, and thence to Corunna, entering that port after ten months’ absence. He failed to discover the desired channel, and no account in detail of his voyage is known; but the map of Ribeiro,[826] drawn up in 1529, records his discoveries, and on its coast-line gives names which were undoubtedly bestowed by him, confirming the statement that he sailed southerly. From this map and the descriptions of the coast in Spanish writers soon after, in which descriptions mention is made of his discoveries, we can see that he noted and named in his own fashion what we now know as Massachusetts Bay, Cape Cod, Narragansett Bay, the Connecticut, Hudson, and Delaware rivers. This voyage completed the exploration of our coast from the Rio Grande to the Bay of Fundy; yet Sebastián Cabot in 1536 declared that it was still uncertain whether a single continent stretched from the Mississippi to Newfoundland.[827] * * * * * The success of Cortés filled the Spanish mind with visions of empires in the north rivalling that of Mexico, which but awaited the courage of valiant men to conquer.