The Amazon is born amid the high ranges and the snowy peaks of the Andes--the greatest mountain range in the world being a fit parent of the earth's greatest river. These high streams watered the territories where dwelt a civilization or native culture, moreover, as ancient perhaps as that of Egypt, the Andine people, and their successors the Incas of Peru, the remains of whose temples and habitations are still to be encountered on headland and plateau in those high regions of the great Cordillera, as we have already had occasion to see. Except for a few towns upon its main stream, which were brought into being by reason principally of one natural product--the rubber of the forests--the presence of civilized mankind upon its waters or its shores is almost a negligible quantity. The first echo of the white man's voice in the woods and across the waters of the Amazon was in the year 1540, when a party of intrepid Spaniards, after the Conquest of Peru, trusted their fortunes to its mighty bosom and floated eastwards into a world of which they had no knowledge, and, borne down by the current across an entire continent for nearly three thousand miles, were carried into the Atlantic Ocean. The voyage is one of the most remarkable in the history of fluvial, or indeed of any navigation. Let us briefly recall it. One day early in the above-mentioned year there was movement in the city of Quito, the ancient capital of the Shiris, in the northern kingdom of the conquered Incas, when a body of Spaniards, captained by Gonzalo Pizarro, brother of the famous Conquistador of Peru, Hernando, set forth to reach a fabled land of gold, an unknown El Dorado, which Indians, imaginative or deceptive, told their white masters lay far within the forest fastnesses beyond the Andes, a land of "Oriental spices," an empire in some beautiful and languorous region which might far surpass in riches and enjoyment anything which even Peru had yielded. A clever guerilla captain, esteemed the best lance and master of horse in Peru, Gonzalo Pizarro, fired by the idea of this fresh conquest, called together over three hundred Spaniards, part of the retinue of the Government of Quito to which his brother had appointed him. Half the company were mounted, all were well equipped: a mountain of provisions was borne by a band of four thousand Indian servants; a great herd of swine was driven in the rear, further to furnish food for the party; and a thousand dogs, some of a ferocious breed, to hunt down Indians should such be necessary, completed the outfit. Quito lies in a broad recess of the Andes, leaving which the expedition climbed the forbidding and snow-crowned slopes which lay between them and the forests beyond, and disappeared. Little did the members of this eager band, or the folk of Quito, know of what lay in store, or how the forces of Nature should overwhelm even so well-prepared an expedition.