Early in January, 1531, Francisco Pizarro sailed from Panama on his third and last voyage to the south. He had in his three vessels one hundred and eighty men and twenty-seven horses. That was not an imposing army, truly, to explore and conquer a great country; but it was all he could get, and Pizarro was bound to try. He made the real conquest of Peru with a handful of rough heroes; indeed, he would certainly have tried, and very possibly would have succeeded in the vast undertaking, if he had had but fifty soldiers; for it was very much more the one man who conquered Peru than his one hundred and eighty followers. Almagro was again left behind at Panama to try to drum up recruits. Pizarro intended to sail straight to Tumbez, and there effect his landing; but storms beat back the weak ships, so that he was obliged to change his plan. After thirteen days he landed in the Bay of San Mateo (St. Matthew), and led his men by land, while the vessels coasted along southward. It was an enormously difficult tramp on that inhospitable shore, and the men could scarcely stagger on. But Pizarro acted as guide, and cheered them up by words and example. It was the old story with him. Everywhere he had fairly to _carry_ his company. Their legs no doubt were as strong as his, though he must have had a very wonderful constitution; but there is a mental muscle which is harder and more enduring, and has held up many a tottering body,--the muscle of pluck. And that pluck of Pizarro was never surpassed on earth. You might almost say it had to carry his army pick-a-back. Wild as the region was, it had some mineral wealth. Pizarro collected (so Pedro Pizarro[25] says) two hundred thousand _castellanos_ (each weighing a dollar) of gold. This he sent back to Panama by his vessels to speak for him. _It_ was the kind of argument the rude adventurers on the Isthmus could understand, and he trusted to its yellow logic to bring him recruits. But while the vessels had gone on this important errand, the little army, trudging down the coast, was suffering greatly. The deep sands, the tropic heat, the weight of their arms and armor were almost unendurable. A strange and horrible pestilence broke out, and many perished. The country grew more forbidding, and again the suffering soldiers lost hope. At Puerto Viejo they were joined by thirty men under Sebastian de Belalcazar, who afterward distinguished himself in a brave chase of that golden butterfly which so many pursued to their death, and none ever captured,--the myth of the Dorado.