ortant letters and a rich tribute of
gold, to get supplies and reinforcements for the colony. Shipwreck would
be disastrous to Balboa and his people as well as to the voyagers.

Headlong the staggering ship was driven upon Los Viboros, (The Vipers)
that infamous group of hidden rocks off Jamaica. She was pounded to
pieces almost before Valdivia could get his one boat into the water,
with its crew of twenty men. Without food or drink, sails or proper
oars, the survivors tossed for thirteen dreadful days on the uncharted
cross-currents of unknown seas. Seven died of hunger, thirst and
exposure before the tide that drifted northwest along the coast of the
mainland caught them and swept them ashore.

None of them had ever seen this coast. Valdivia cherished a faint hope
that it might be a part of the kingdom of walled cities and golden
temples, of which they had all heard. There were traces of human
presence, and they could see a cone-shaped low hill with a stone temple
or building of some kind on the top. Natives presently appeared, but
they broke the boat in pieces and dragged the castaways inland through
the forest to the house of their cacique.

That chief, a villainous looking savage in a thatched hut, looked at
them as if they had been cattle--or slaves--or condemned heretics. What
they thought, felt or hoped was nothing to him. He ordered them taken to
a kind of pen, where they were fed. So great is the power of the body
over the mind that for a few days they hardly thought of anything but
the unspeakable joy of having enough to eat and drink, and nothing to do
but sleep. The cacique visited the enclosure now and then, and looked
them over with a calculating eye. Aguilar was haunted by the idea that
this inspection meant something unpleasant.

All too soon the meaning was made known to them. Valdivia and four other
men who were now less gaunt and famine-stricken than when captured, were
seized and taken away, to be sacrificed to the gods.

It was the custom of the Mayas of Yucatan to sacrifice human beings,
captives or slaves for choice, to the gods in whose honor the stone
pyramids were raised. When the victim had been led up the winding
stairway to the top, the central figure in a procession of priests and
attendants, he was laid upon a stone altar and his heart was cut out and
offered to the idol, after which the body was eaten at a ceremonial
feast. The eight captives who remained now understood that the food