their salvation,' replied the captain, without emotion; 'we
will make Christians of them.'

On approaching the Vermilion Sea, a deep gulf which separates
California from the American continent, and makes it almost an island,
the Malays were rubbed with a mixture of tar and dragon's blood,
dissolved in a caustic oil, to give to their olive skins a deeper
shade, and their flat noses and silky hair making them pass for Yolof
negroes, they were exchanged at Cape St. Lucas, along with the rest,
for pearls and native productions.

The young mate thought this proceeding not less mean and dishonorable
than the first; he made new observations.

'Nothing now remains to be done, captain,' said he, 'but to shave and
besmear with tar the monkey you have just bought, and to include it
among your new race of negroes.'

This time, the captain looked at him askance, and shrugged his
shoulders without replying.

The storm was beginning to growl in the distance.

It was not without a secret object that, in his course through the
Southern Sea, Stradling had first of all aimed at California.

He devoted an entire month to cruising along both shores of this
almost island, and penetrating all the bays of the Vermilion Sea; he
hoped to find there a passage to an unknown land, then predicted and
coveted by all navigators. What was this land? The _Eldorado_!

Although I would hasten over these details of the voyage to arrive at
the more important events of this history; now that the recent
discovery of the immense mines of gold buried beneath the hills of
California has aroused the entire world, that the name alone of
_Sacramento_ seems to fill with gold the mouth which pronounces it,
there is a curious fact, perhaps entirely unknown, which I cannot pass
over in silence.

After the middle of the sixteenth century, and long before the
seventeenth, a vague rumor, a confused tradition, had located, in the
neighborhood of the Vermilion Sea, a famed land, whose rivers rolled
over gold, and whose mountains rested on golden foundations; the
treasures of Mexico and Peru were nothing in comparison with those
which were to be gathered there. An ingot of native gold was talked
of, of a _pepite_ or eighty pounds weight.

It was a grape from the promised land.

This marvellous country had been named, in advance, _Eldorado_.

Among the bold Argonauts of these two centuries, there was a contest
as to who should first raise his flag over this new