succeeding in this, they should divide the territory of Don Francisco between them; and after this they swore on the consecrated Host not to oppose one another. And some say that Almagro swore to abandon all interest in Cuzco and in the region for a hundred and twenty leagues farther south although his Majesty might concede it to him, and he took a solemn oath, saying, ‘If I shall break this oath, may it please thee, O Lord, to curse me body and soul.’ Having made this agreement and taken this oath, Don Diego made his preparations and started on his expedition with more than five hundred men who followed him, and the governor returned to Lima.” VII [Sidenote: Cieza de León in the rush for America] In the third and fourth decades of the sixteenth century the desire for adventure in the New World moved many persons to emigrate from Spain. Well-founded reports that had been made public awakened a profound interest in America, and when to these reports there were added wildly extravagant tales of rich principalities there that might be plundered, a wave of excitement swept members of all classes towards the port of departure. Men of birth and cultivation were in the race with ignorant and rough adventurers. Diego de Alvarado, Garcilaso de la Vega, and Lorenzo de Aldana represented the first of these classes, but the majority of the other class were, in many cases, men of disappointed ambitions or such persons as usually yield to the allurements of newly discovered mines of gold. Among the emigrants of this time was Pedro Cieza de León, a boy of thirteen or fourteen years of age. Like many others of his time, he left no record of his origin, save that he was born in the town of Llerena in Estremadura. Even the fleet with which he sailed is not positively known; but it is probable that he went with Rodrigo Durán, who left Cadiz in 1534, and entered the bay of Cartagena in November of that year. Three years later Cieza de León was at the town of San Sebastian on the gulf of Darien. In this year 1538, now nineteen years old, he was a private soldier in the force of four hundred Spaniards organized by Pedro Vadillo for the campaign up the valley of the Atrato. [Sidenote: Vadillo’s Expedition]