The true court spirit of intrigue, reigned in Portugal in full power over everything. Magellan finding himself ill treated there, went over to Spain, where Charles V. magnificently furnished him with five ships, but not choosing to put full confidence in a Portuguese malcontent, the king associated with Magellan a Castilian. Magellan sailed between two dangers, the jealousy of the Castilian, and the vengeance of the Portuguese, who sought to assassinate him. He soon had a mutiny in the fleet, and displayed, in crushing it an indomitable heroism, and no less barbarity. The mutineers he savagely put to death, and his Castilian colleague he put into irons. To increase his troubles, some of his vessels were wrecked. His people were unwilling to proceed with him, when they saw the desolate aspect of Cape Horn, the truly discouraging aspect of Terra-del-Fuego, and Cape Forward. The islands, which form, under the name of Cape Horn, the southern point of America, seem to have been violently rent from the continent by the fury of many volcanoes, and suddenly cooled. As the result, they present a frightfully heterogeneous mass of sharp peaks, huge blocks of granite, of lava, and of basalt, all these, grotesquely, yet frightfully, arranged, in frowning confusion, and clothed in ice and snow. All had quite enough of this at a single glance, and bold Magellan's word was--"Onward!" He filled away his sails, steered now to starboard, now to larboard, then to starboard again, and at length found himself in that boundless sea which was then so _Pacific_ that it then received the name which it has ever since borne; though all who have sailed upon it, well know that at times, it can comport itself in an anything rather than pacific style. Magellan at length perished in the Philippines. Four vessels were lost. The only one which survived, was the Victory, whose crew was reduced to thirteen men. But among them was the great and intrepid Pilot, the Basque, Sebastian, who, in 1521, returned to Spain, the first of mortal men who had been completely round the globe. Nothing could be grander. The sphericity of the globe was thus made matter of certainty. That physical marvel of water uniformly extended over a globe, and constantly adhering to it, that strange mechanical postulate, was fully demonstrated. The Pacific was at length known, that grand, and till then mysterious laboratory, in which, far from our ken, Nature so profoundly labors in life-creating and life-nurturing, making new rocks, new islands, new continents. A revelation, that, of immense significance; and not only of material, but also of moral significance, which gave a hundred fold increase to man's daring, and sent him forth on another daring voyage, on the boundless Ocean of the Sciences, to circumnavigate,--with more or less of success, as it may chance,--the INFINITE! CHAPTER III. THE LAW OF STORMS.