A GIRDLE ROUND THE WORLD.

Before Cortez had yet conquered Mexico, or Pizarro or Valdivia seen the lands with which their names were to be linked for all time, other Spaniards less conquerors, but as great explorers were rapidly shaping the geography of the New World. France, too, had aroused somewhat; and in 1500 her brave son Captain de Gonneville sailed to Brazil. But between him and the next pioneer, who was a Florentine in French pay, was a gap of twenty-four years; and in that time Spain had accomplished four most important feats.

Fernao Magalhaes, whom we know as Ferdinand Magellan, was born in Portugal in 1470; and on reaching manhood adopted the seafaring life, to which his adventurous disposition prompted. The Old World was then ringing with the New; and Magellan longed to explore the Americas. Being very shabbily treated by the King of Portugal, he enlisted under the banner of Spain, where his talents found recognition. He sailed from Spain in command of a Spanish expedition, August 10, 1519; and steering farther south than ever man had sailed before, he discovered Cape Horn, and the Straits which bear his name. Fate did not spare him to carry his discoveries farther, nor to reap the reward of those he had made; for during this voyage (in 1521) he was butchered by the natives of one of the islands of the Moluccas. His heroic lieutenant, Juan Sebastian de Elcano, then took command, and continued the voyage until he had circumnavigated the globe for the first time in its history. Upon his return to Spain, the Crown rewarded his brilliant achievements, and gave him, among other honors, a coat-of-arms emblazoned with a globe and the motto, Tu primum circumdedisti me, “Thou first didst go around me.”

Juan Ponce de Leon, the discoverer of Florida, the first State of our Union that was seen by Europeans, was as ill-fated an explorer as Magellan; for he came to “the Flowery Land” (to which he had been lured by the wild myth of a fountain of perennial youth) only to be slain by its savages. De Leon was born in San Servas, Spain, in the latter part of the fifteenth century. He was the conqueror of the island of Puerto Rico, and sailing in 1512 to find Florida, of which he had heard through the Indians, discovered the new land in the same year, and took possession of it for Spain. He was given the title of adelantado of Florida, and in 1521 returned with three ships to conquer his new country, but was at once wounded mortally in a fight with the Indians, and died on his return to Cuba. He, by the way, was one of the bold Spaniards who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to America, in 1493.

More of the credit of Florida belongs to Hernando de Soto. That gallant conquistador was born in Estremadura, Spain, about 1496. Pedro Arias de Avila took a liking to his bright young kinsman, helped him to obtain a university education, and in 1519 took him along on his expedition to Darien. De Soto won golden opinions in the New World, and came to be trusted as a prudent yet fearless officer. In 1528 he commanded an expedition to explore the coast of Guatemala and Yucatan, and in 1532 led a reinforcement of three hundred men to assist Pizarro in the conquest of Peru. In that golden land De Soto captured great wealth; and the young soldier of fortune, who had landed in America with no more than his sword and shield, returned to Spain with what was in those days an enormous fortune. There he married a daughter of his benefactor De Avila, and thus became brother-in-law of the discoverer of the Pacific, Balboa. De Soto lent part of his soon-earned fortune to Charles V., whose constant wars had drained the royal coffers, and Charles sent him out as governor of Cuba and adelantado of the new province of Florida. He sailed in 1538 with an army of six hundred men, richly equipped, a company of adventurous Spaniards attracted to the banner of their famous countryman by the desire for discovery and gold. The expedition landed in Florida, at Espiritu Santo Bay, in May, 1539, and re-took possession of the unguessed wilderness for Spain.

But the brilliant success which had attended De Soto in the highlands of Peru seemed to desert him altogether in the swamps of Florida. It is note-worthy that nearly all the explorers who did wonders in South America failed when their operations were transferred to the northern continent. The physical geography of the two was so absolutely unlike, that, after becoming accustomed to the necessities of the one, the explorer seemed unable to adapt himself to the contrary conditions of the other.

De Soto and his men wandered through the southern part of what is now the United States for four ghastly years. It is probable that their travels took them through the present States of Florida, Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and the northeastern corner of Texas. In 1541 they reached the Mississippi River; and theirs were the first European eyes to look upon the Father of Waters, anywhere save at its mouth, a century and a quarter before the heroic Frenchmen Marquette and La Salle saw it. They spent that winter along the Washita; and in the early summer of 1542, as they were returning down the Mississippi, brave De Soto died, and his body was laid to rest in the bosom of the mighty river he had discovered, two centuries before any “American” saw it. His suffering and disheartened men passed a frightful winter there; and in 1543, under command of the Lieutenant Moscoso, they built rude vessels, and sailed down the Mississippi to the Gulf in nineteen days, the first navigation in our part of America. From the Delta they made their way westward along the coast, and at last reached Panuco, Mexico, after such a five years of hardship and suffering as no Saxon explorer of America ever experienced. It was nearly a century and a half after De Soto’s gaunt army of starving men had taken Louisiana for Spain that it became a French possession, which the United States bought from France over a century later yet.

So when Verazzano the Florentine sent out by France reached America in 1524, coasted the Atlantic seaboard from somewhere about South Carolina to Newfoundland, and gave the world a short description of what he saw, Spain had circumnavigated the globe, reached the southern tip of the New World, conquered a vast territory, and discovered at least half-a-dozen of our present States, since the last visit of a Frenchman to America. As for England, she was almost as unheard of still on this side of the earth as though she had never existed.

Between De Leon and De Soto, Florida was visited in 1518 by Francisco de Garay, the conqueror of Tampico. He came to subdue the Flowery Land, but failed, and died soon after in Mexico, the probability being that he was poisoned by order of Cortez. He left even less mark on Florida than did De Leon, and belongs to the class of Spanish explorers who, though real heroes, achieved unimportant results, and are too numerous to be even catalogued here.

In 1527 there sailed from Spain the most disastrous expedition which was ever sent to the New World, an expedition notable but for two things, that it was perhaps the saddest in history, and that it brought the man who first of all men crossed the American continent, and indeed made one of the most wonderful walks since the world began. Panfilo de Narvaez who had so ignominiously failed in his attempt to arrest Cortez was commander, with authority to conquer Florida; and his treasurer was Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca. In 1528 the company landed in Florida, and forthwith began a record of horror that makes the blood run cold. Shipwreck, savages, and starvation made such havoc with the doomed band that when in 1529 Vaca and three companions found themselves slaves to the Indians they were the sole survivors of the expedition.

Vaca and his companions wandered from Florida to the Gulf of California, suffering incredible dangers and tortures, reaching there after a wandering which lasted over eight years. Vaca’s heroism was rewarded. The king made him governor of Paraguay in 1540; but he was as unfit for such a post as Columbus had been for a viceroy, and soon came back in irons to Spain, where he died.

But it was through his accounts of what he saw in that astounding journey (for Vaca was an educated man, and has left us two very interesting and valuable books) that his countrymen were roused to begin in earnest the exploration and colonization of what is now the United States, to build the first cities and till the first farms of the greatest nation on earth.

The thirty years following the conquest of Mexico by Cortez saw an astounding change in the New World. They were brimful of wonders. Brilliant discovery, unparalleled exploration, gallant conquest, and heroic colonization followed one another in a bewildering rush, and but for the brave yet limited exploits of the Portuguese in South America, Spain was all alone in it. From Kansas to Cape Horn was one vast Spanish possession, save parts of Brazil where the Portuguese hero Cabral had taken a joint foothold for his country. Hundreds of Spanish towns had been built; Spanish schools, universities, printing-presses, books, and churches were beginning their work of enlightenment in the dark continents of America, and the tireless followers of Santiago were still pressing on. America, particularly Mexico, was being rapidly settled by Spaniards. The growth of the colonies was very remarkable for those times, that is, where there were any resources to support a growing population. The city of Puebla, for instance, in the Mexican State of the same name, was founded in 1532 and began with thirty-three settlers. In 1678 it had eighty thousand people, which is twenty thousand more than New York city had one hundred and twenty-two years later.