This last is from the _Rites and Laws of the Incas_.[5] It is but one of many similar prayers, which, as regards sentiment and language, might be taken from the Bible and Church Service. [5] _Molina_, Hakluyt Series, Markham translation. These prayers to the Unknown God, written by the early people of America, cut off from any contact with the Old World, would seem to show that man, in the reaction from his environment, inevitably develops within him the conception of a supreme deity. It now remains for us to choose how we shall approach the Spanish American lands. Shall we cross the Spanish Main, and land where Cortes did at Vera Cruz, the city of the True Cross, and so enter Mexico? Or shall we, still crossing the American Mediterranean, land on the Isthmus of Panama and thence, as Pizarro did, voyage along the great Pacific coast to mysterious Peru? Or shall we take steamer to the River Plate, that more prosaic route to the lands of corn and cattle? Or shall we go round the Horn? Perhaps the middle course is best, and, at the isthmus, we will first explore Central America. Then we may say with the poet Keats: Oft have I travelled in the Land of Gold ... Or like stout Cortes ... and all his men Gazed on the Pacific ... silent upon a peak in Darien. Keats, however, was in error. It was not Cortes, but another who gazed from the peak, as presently we shall see. CHAPTER III CENTRAL AMERICA GUATEMALA, HONDURAS, BRITISH HONDURAS, NICARAGUA, SALVADOR, COSTA RICA, PANAMA On Michaelmas Day, in the year 1513, a Spanish adventurer, surrounded by his followers--they had sailed from Hispaniola, or Santo Domingo, on an expedition of discovery--found himself on the high ridge of the land called Darien. His eyes, seeking the horizon, fell, not on an endless expanse of mountain and forest, such as here might have been expected to stretch away into the unknown solitudes, but upon the sheen of waters. A smothered exclamation fell from his lips. "_El Mar!_" ("the Sea!") he cried, and he and his followers remained a space in the silence of astonishment. The Spaniard was Vasco Nuñez de Balboa. It was one of the most dramatic of geographical discoveries. They had but traversed an isthmus, where they had expected a continent--to-day the Isthmus of Panama. They had discovered an ocean; they realized in that moment much that before had been a mystery. Descending to the shore and wading deep into the waters, Balboa drew his sword, and waving it thereover took possession of that ocean and whatsoever shores it might wash for the King of Spain, naming it the "South Seas," for, from the curvature of the isthmus, he was looking towards the south, having crossed from the north. Thus was the great Pacific Ocean first beheld by the white man, as far as history records.