governor of Cuba, in just indignation,
despatched a force under Narvaez to bring him back. Cortez came down
from the interior to the coast, deprived Narvaez of his command, and
took possession of his men. With this unexpected reinforcement he was
able to conquer Mexico, the capital of an illimitable empire. There
was plenty of hard fighting, for the dominant race about the king was
warlike. They were invaders, who reigned by force, and as they
worshipped beings of the nether world who were propitiated with human
sacrifice, they took their victims from the subject people, and their
tyranny was the most hateful upon earth. The Spaniards, coming as
deliverers, easily found auxiliaries against the government that
practised unholy rites in the royal city. When Mexico fell Cortez
sent a report to Charles V, with the first-fruits of his victory.
Then, that no protesting narrative might follow and weaken his own,
that his men might have no hope except in his success, he took the
most daring resolution of his life, and scuttled his ships. Fonseca
had signed the order for his arrest, when the most marvellous tale in
that sequence of marvels reached his hands, and the disgraced mutineer
was found to have added to the Emperor's dominions a region many times
vaster and wealthier than all he possessed in Europe. In 1522 the
accumulated treasure which had been extracted from Mexican mines since
the beginning of ages came pouring into the imperial exchequer, and
the desire of so many explorers during thirty unprofitable years was
fulfilled at last.

Cortez was not only the most heroic of the Conquistadors, for there
was no lack of good soldiers, but he was an educated man, careful to
import the plants and quadrupeds needed for civilisation, and a
statesman capable of ruling mixed races without help from home. From
the moment of his appearance the New World ceased to be a perplexing
burden to Spain, and began to foreshadow danger and temptation to
other nations. And a man immeasurably inferior to him, a man who
could not write his name, whose career, in its glory and its shame,
was a servile imitation, almost a parody, of his own, succeeded
thereby in establishing a South American empire equal to that of
Cortez in the North. One of the ships sailing from the islands to the
isthmus carried a stowaway hidden in a cask, whose name was Balboa,
and who discovered the Pacific.

The third name is Francisco Pizarro. He stood by a