Certain it is that the bald-headed little great man of old Rome, who crowds the page of ancient history, did nothing greater than each of those four Spanish heroes, who with a few tattered Spaniards in place of the iron legions of Rome conquered each an inconceivable wilderness as savage as Caesar found, and five times as big. Popular opinion long did a vast injustice to these and all other of the Spanish _conquistadores_, belittling their military achievements on account of their alleged great superiority of weapons over the savages, and taxing them with a cruel and relentless extermination of the aborigines. The clear, cold light of true history tells a different tale. In the first place, the advantage of weapons was hardly more than a moral advantage in inspiring awe among the savages at first, for the sadly clumsy and ineffective firearms of the day were scarcely more dangerous than the aboriginal bows which opposed them. They were effective at not much greater range than arrows, and were tenfold slower of delivery. As to the cumbrous and usually dilapidated armor of the Spaniard and his horse, it by no means fully protected either from the agate-tipped arrows of the savages; and it rendered both man and beast ill-fitted to cope with their agile foes in any extremity, besides being a frightful burden in those tropic heats. The "artillery" of the times was almost as worthless as the ridiculous arquebuses. As to their treatment of the natives, there was incomparably less cruelty suffered by the Indians who opposed the Spaniards than by those who lay in the path of any other European colonizers. The Spanish did not obliterate _any_ aboriginal nation,--as our ancestors obliterated scores,--but followed the first necessarily bloody lesson with humane education and care. Indeed, the actual Indian population of the Spanish possessions in America is larger to-day than it was at the time of the conquest; and in that astounding contrast of conditions, and its lesson as to contrast of methods, is sufficient answer to the distorters of history. Before we come to the great conquerors, however, we must outline the eventful career and tragic end of the discoverer of the Pacific Ocean, Vasco Nunez de Balboa. In one of the noblest poems in the English language we read,-- "Like stout Cortes, when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific, and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise, Silent upon a peak in Darien." But Keats was mistaken. It was not Cortez who first saw the Pacific, but Balboa,--five years before Cortez came to the mainland of America at all.