Only one of the little vessels ever got back to Spain. Returning by way of Africa, she arrived at the Guadalquivir in September, a year after she had set out, and with but eighteen survivors of the expedition. “What a picture!” the historian exclaims—“those eighteen seaworn mariners in their battered craft, survivors of the greatest feat of navigation that has ever been performed. What a poem is their story, what an event in the history of mankind! What reward did Magellan have? None that mortal could bestow. He was dead and his wife and son had also died. Del Cano, the captain of the ship, was given a crest, with the legend, on a terrestrial globe, ‘_Primus circumdedisti me_,’ together with a pension of five hundred ducats, and Espinosa was likewise pensioned and ennobled. But every mariner who sails the seas knows Magellan and the story of his exploit, and mankind accords him the honor that Spain could not bestow. Of all the great explorers, he is perhaps the one whose character and deeds we can contemplate with the most unalloyed satisfaction.” IV Until the great Dutch navigator, Willim Cornelis Schouten, found the way around Cape Horn nearly a hundred years later, however, no practical advantage over her rival resulted to Spain from Magellan’s discoveries—so far as trade with the East Indies was concerned, that is. The passage through the Strait was too perilous for sailing vessels, the distance across the Pacific too great. Yet only a year before Magellan set out on his famous voyage an era began in her new possessions that was to pour into her coffers a stream of gold in comparison with which the profits Portugal was deriving from her trade with the Orient seemed trivial. For in that year Hernando Cortés, the greatest soldier and statesman Spain ever sent to the new world, began his conquest of Mexico. Except for the spirit of emulation it inspired, except for the knowledge it brought of the existence in the newly discovered countries of a people less barbarous than the aborigines of the Antilles, of mines that were worth while and of enormous hoards of treasure, the story of that conquest has no place in the history of South America, and, therefore, will not be gone into here. It is related somewhere as an interesting commentary that in an obscure little house in the City of Mexico still lives a modest, well-educated gentleman who is directly descended from the Emperor of the Aztecs. Señor Montezuma entertains no hope of a restoration, it is said, but quietly accepts the meager pension allowed him by the present government, while the heirs of Cortés receive immense revenues from their Mexican estates and the Marquis del Valle, as the present-day Cortés is called, lives in luxury and is a man of influence and power in the land.