“The years 1519, 1520 and 1521 were occupied by this, the greatest of all the enterprises undertaken by Spain in the New World. Nor was there any lack of activity in other directions. Juan Ponce sailed from Porto Rico, in 1512, in search of a spring whose waters insured perennial youth to whoever drank of them, and found and annexed Florida instead. More than one navigator cruised southward as far as the Rio de la Plata, and in 1520 Magellan reached the extremity of the southern continent, and passed through the straits which bear his name. Nor was Cortes idle after he had accomplished his great work. North and south he sought to add to the territory of New Spain, until all the countries of Central America on one side, and the peninsula of California on the other, were brought under its sway. In less than half a century from the day Columbus first set foot on San Salvador, the entire continent, from Labrador to Patagonia, had been visited, and by far the greater part of it annexed to, and nominally ruled by, the Castilian crown. “To return, however, to Hispaniola. The rapid exhaustion which mismanagement produced there, joined to the absence of gold, led to the creation of other colonies. The discovery of the fisheries, first at Paria, and then in the islands of the Pacific, opened up an unexpected source of wealth; but it was not until Montezuma offered his munificent gifts to Cortes, to induce the latter to quit the shores of Mexico, that the first great reservoir of the precious metals was tapped. Still, it must be remembered that the great stores of gold discovered, first in Mexico, and subsequently in Peru, did not in themselves imply that these countries were capable of continuing to produce unlimited quantities. They were the accumulations of many years, possibly of many centuries; for, as there was no foreign trade, everything produced which could not be consumed had necessarily to be preserved or destroyed.