Father Acosta returned to Spain with the fleet of 1587. In his boat were twelve chests of gold, each weighing a hundred pounds; eleven million pieces of silver, and two chests of emeralds, each weighing one hundred pounds. “The reason why there is so great an abundance of metals at the Indies,” he wrote, “is the will of the Creator, who hath imparted His gifts as it pleased Him.” Von Tschudi says that in the first twenty-five years the Spaniards got four hundred millions of ducats of gold and silver, which was, however, only a small part of the vast amount buried or thrown into the mountain lakes whose deep waters concealed it in underground caves. “The Indians, taking a handful of grain from a whole measure, said: ‘Thus much the Christians have gained and the remainder is lodged where neither we nor any one else is able to assign.’” Humboldt says that from the discovery of Peru until 1800, the Old World received £516,471,344 worth of treasure from the New World. No wonder Europe felt that gold lay about in this land of gold, and that it was only necessary to go and pick it up. No wonder Europe still has an idea of America little changed through four hundred years. And yet only one fifth of the treasure of mines and grave-mounds was supposed to be sent to Spain, whose galleons came to the far-away West Indies to receive it. It was not long before pirates descended upon Peru. Brittany was the first to fit out fleets for the Indies “on pretense of carrying merchandise thither,” in fact, to molest vessels coming from Peru. Next, English buccaneers intercepted the Spanish vessels, slow-sailing under weight of gold. “With the fruit of Aladdin’s garden clustering thick in her hold, With rubies a-wash in her scuppers, and her bilge a-blaze with gold, A world in arms behind her to sever her heart from home, The _Golden Hynde_ drove onward, over the glittering foam.” Sir Francis Drake, with sixty armed ships, looted the Pacific in the _Golden Hynde_. His ballast was silver, his cargo gold and emeralds. He dined alone with music. In 1578 he took from the Spanish galleon _Cacafuego_ “twenty tons of silver bullion, thirteen chests of silver coins, a hundred-weight of gold, gold nuggets in indefinite quantity, a great store of pearls, emeralds, and diamonds, ... and many, many other things.” Only Queen Elizabeth and Drake knew the exact amount that was taken. For three centuries pirates and freebooters harried the treasure-fleets of Spain. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, the English Calendar of State Papers compassionately remarks that foreign gluttony “keeps the poor Spaniards in arms all along the coast of Peru and puts them into strange apprehension, all mankind seeming to conspire the murdering and destroying them as common enemies, not because they do worse, but have more than ordinary.” Much of the twice-looted treasure never reached Europe, for, following the example of