At the close of the fifteenth, and the beginning of the sixteenth century, Europe saw, in those parts of the New World discovered by Columbus, Ojeda, Vespucci and Rodrigo de Bastidas, only the advanced capes of the vast territories of India and eastern Asia. The immense wealth of those territories in gold, diamonds, pearls and spices had been vaunted in the narratives of Benjamin de Tudela, Rubruquis, Marco Polo and Mandeville. Columbus, whose imagination was excited by these narrations, caused a deposition to be made before a notary, on the 12th of June, 1494, in which sixty of his companions, pilots, sailors and passengers certified upon oath that the southern coast of Cuba was a part of the continent of India. The description of the treasures of Cathay and Cipango, of the celestial town of Quinsay and the province of Mango, which had fired the admiral's ambition in early life, pursued him like phantoms in his declining days. In his fourth and last voyage, on approaching the coast of Cariay (Poyais or Mosquito Coast), Veragua and the Isthmus, he believed himself to be near the mouth of the Ganges.* (* Tambien dicen que la mar baxa a Ciguare, y de alli a diez jornadas es el Rio de Guangues: para que estas tierras estan con Veragua como Tortosa con Fuenterabia o Pisa con Venecia." [Also it is said that the sea lowers at Ciguara, and from thence it is a ten days' journey to the river Ganges; for these lands are, with reference to Veragua, like Tortosa with respect to Fuenterabia, or Pisa, with respect to Venice.] These words are taken from the Lettera Rarissima of Columbus, of which the original Spanish was lately found, and published by the learned M. Navarrete, in his Coleccion de Viages volume 1 page 299.) These geographical illusions, this mysterious veil, which enveloped the first discoveries, contributed to magnify every object, and to fix the attention of Europe on regions, the very names of which are, to us, scarcely known. New Cadiz, the principal seat of the pearl-fishery, was on an island which has again become uninhabited. The extremity of the rocky coast of Paria is also a desert. Several towns were founded at the mouth of the Rio Atrato, by the names of Antigua del Darien, Uraba or San Sebastian de Buenavista. In these spots, so celebrated at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the historians of the conquest tell us that the flower of the Castilian heroes were found assembled: thence Balboa set out to discover the South Sea; Pizarro marched from thence to conquer and ravage Peru; and Pedro de Cieca constantly followed the chain of the Andes, by Autioquia, Popayan and Cuzco, as far as La Plata, after having gone 900 leagues by land. These towns of Darien are destroyed; some ruins scattered on the hills of Uraba, the fruit-trees of Europe mixed with native trees, are all that mark to the traveller the spots on which those towns once stood. In almost all Spanish America the