way through the strait which
bears his name, and held on westward across the Pacific, making the
first circumnavigation of the globe, a feat so startling in audacity
that there is none in our day to compare with it, except, perhaps, a
journey to another planet. Magellan himself never again saw Europe,
meeting his death in a fight with the natives of the Philippines, but
one of his ships, with eighteen men, struggled south along the coast of
Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and so home.

Half a century was to elapse before the feat was repeated--this time by
that slave-trader, pirate, and doughty scourge of the Spaniard, Sir
Francis Drake, who, following in Magellan's wake, and pausing only long
enough to harry the Spanish settlements in Chili and Peru and capture a
Spanish treasureship, held northward along the coast as far as southern
Oregon, and then turned westward across the Pacific, around the Cape of
Good Hope, and home again, where Elizabeth, in spite of Spanish
protests, was waiting to reward him with a touch of sword to shoulder.
The Muse of History smiles ironically when she records that Drake's
principal discovery in the New World was that of the potato, which he
introduced into England.

Not until Drake's voyage was completed was the vast extent of the North
American continent even suspected, although its interior had been
explored in many directions. Hernando de Soto, with an experience gained
with Pizarro in the conquest of Peru, and succeeding Ponce de Leon in
the governorship of Florida, marched with a great expedition through
what is now South Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia, and came out, at
last, upon the Mississippi, only to find burial beneath its waters,
while the tattered remnant of his force staggered back to Mexico.

Francisco de Coronado, marching northward from Mexico, in search of the
fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, found only the squalid villages of the
Zuni Indians, after stumbling on the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, and
marching as far north as the southern line of Kansas. Jacques Cartier,
following another will-o'-the-wisp to the north, and searching for the
storied city of Norembega, supposed to exist somewhere in the wilderness
south of Cape Breton, found it not, indeed, but laid the foundations for
the great empire which France was to establish along the St. Lawrence.

And Henry Hudson, in the little Half-Moon, chartered by a company of
thrifty Dutchmen to search for the north