On the 29th of December following, the "Monitor" herself was lost, having been foundered and sunk with sixteen of her crew, in a heavy gale, a few miles south of Cape Hatteras. But the test to which the "Monitor" had been subjected in her battle with the "Merrimac" proved beyond doubt that iron was destined to take the place of wood in the construction of our men-of-war thereafter, and the confidence of John Ericsson in the ultimate success of his experiment, after many discouragements and rebuffs on the part of the naval authorities, was fully justified in its final results, and the honors which the nation showered upon him in the evening of his life, and the tribute which it paid to his genius after his death, were merited by him quite as much as the perpetuation of his memory through this stirring canvas of the great artist, as is also the memory, in the second painting of this series, of that other Erickson, his ancestor, who, almost a thousand years before, was the first white man known to have set foot on American soil. RETURN OF THE CONQUERORS Typifying Our Victory in the Late Spanish-American War (_September 29, 1899_) [Illustration: Copyright, 1898, by Edward Moran.] XIII. RETURN OF THE CONQUERORS. TYPIFYING OUR VICTORY IN THE LATE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR, SEPTEMBER 29, 1899.[Q] As a fitting close to the grand pictorial illustration of our marine history, this canvas represents one of the most magnificent pageants ever seen on our waters, in commemoration of the victorious close of the last great war, in which our navy added fresh leaves to its laurel wreath of heroic achievement. It, at the same time, depicts the culminating stage in the evolution of naval construction from the time when the Norsemen in their drakkars, and Columbus in his caravels, braved the perils of the ocean, until the steel-clad battleships of Dewey and Schley and Sampson met in conflict the no less formidable floating fortresses of Cervera and Montojo. It is a picture of to-day, with the well-defined outlines of the Statue of Liberty in allegorical suggestion at the mouth of the great river up which the little "Half Moon" first sailed, also on a September day, just two hundred and ninety years before. It suggests--in the great, grim, steel-clad leviathans of the ocean steaming up the river, with their powerful armament and each representing millions of dollars in its construction, along the shores of the second largest city in the world, and with flags and banners flying proudly from every mast and spar--not only the victory of our arms but the growth of the nation, from the sparse settlements in the days of the Pilgrim Fathers to a population of 80,000,000 souls, and from the thirteen little struggling provinces, at the outbreak of the Revolution, to the forty-five great States and four Territories of the Union, with its possessions even beyond the confines of the continent--imperial in its power and greatness, not dreamt of even when,