Magellan, the intrepid Portuguese navigator of early times, whose name the Strait bears, bore bravely out into the great south sea which he named the Pacific. His crew were weak with cold and hunger. But he would push on, "even if they had to eat the leather of the rigging." Ox-hides, rats and sawdust, indeed, they did eat. On to the west the vessels sailed, across the unknown sea—"almost beyond the grasp of man for vastness"—to circumnavigate the globe for home.
Magellan himself did not finish the voyage, although he crossed the Pacific, for his earthly race was run; he left his bones in the Philippines. But the ship and his pilot, Sebastian del Cano, a Spaniard, reached home, and Cano was given the arms of nobility, with the device of a ship and globe and the inscription Tu Solus circumdedesti me.
From the Pacific coast we shall now ascend to the great chain of the Andes, to follow the same series of countries in that high region.
[CHAPTER VII]
THE CORDILLERA OF THE ANDES
IN ECUADOR, PERU AND BOLIVIA
Siste, viator; draw rein: your mule will stop willingly; he is stricken with soroche perhaps, the malady of the mountain, which you yourself may suffer if at this elevation, where but half an atmosphere presses upon us and oxygen is scant, you attempt to run or climb. Draw rein upon this summit and look beyond. There is a panorama it were worth a journey over a hemisphere to see. Range and peak are clothed with perpetual snow, which gleams like porcelain in the sun.