Partly with the object of recouping his fortune, Raleigh sailed, in 1595, to Guiana, a voyage of exploration and conquest, with the main object of finding that El Dorado which was so strong an obsession of Elizabethan times, imagined to be hidden somewhere amid the Cordillera or forests of Spanish America. His book, recounting the incidents of this voyage, _The Discoverie of Guiana_, which he published upon his return home, is one of the most thrilling adventurous narratives of the period, although it has been said that it contains much that was romance rather than fact: and incredulity marked its reception. On his second expedition, after Elizabeth's death--an expedition which was perhaps one of the saddest of forlorn hopes, whereby Raleigh hoped, trusting perhaps to a chapter of accidents, to escape from the dreadful position of disfavour and threatened execution into which he had fallen in the reign of James I--he reached Trinidad and sailed up the Orinoco, fell sick of a fever and suffered many disasters in the endeavour to carry out his undertaking to find a vast gold mine upon territory not belonging to Spain. Should he fail, or trespass upon Spanish territory, he was to be executed as a pirate, a fate which practically befell him, though he was executed under his old sentence of conspiracy. The illustrious Raleigh--whose name some writers love to belittle--"took a pipe of tobacco a little before he went to the scaffold," for the habit of smoking tobacco--that beautiful gift of the Spanish American Indian to the Old World--had become rooted among the Elizabethan courtiers. But to return to Guiana. The topography of this part of South America is full of interest and variety, as are the history and customs of its people, aboriginal and other, although much of the past is marked by dreadful happenings. Wars, the deeds of buccaneers, rebellions of negroes, massacre of the whites, deaths from fevers and so forth stand out from its pages. It is a magnificent country, with grand rivers, cascades and the most wonderful mountains and scenery, which it is difficult to surpass in any part of South America. And here the traveller and the naturalist may revel in the works of Nature.