[4] This mutiny against Velasquez was the first hint of the unscrupulous man who was finally to turn complete traitor to Spain.
[5] Tezozomoc, the Indian historian, graphically describes the wonder of the natives.
[6] Another specific act of treason.
VI.
A GIRDLE ROUND THE WORLD.
Before Cortez had yet conquered Mexico, or Pizarro or Valdivia seen the lands with which their names were to be linked for all time, other Spaniards—less conquerors, but as great explorers—were rapidly shaping the geography of the New World. France, too, had aroused somewhat; and in 1500 her brave son Captain de Gonneville sailed to Brazil. But between him and the next pioneer, who was a Florentine in French pay, was a gap of twenty-four years; and in that time Spain had accomplished four most important feats.
Fernão Magalhaes, whom we know as Ferdinand Magellan, was born in Portugal in 1470; and on reaching manhood adopted the seafaring life, to which his adventurous disposition prompted. The Old World was then ringing with the New; and Magellan longed to explore the Americas. Being very shabbily treated by the King of Portugal, he enlisted under the banner of Spain, where his talents found recognition. He sailed from Spain in command of a Spanish expedition, August 10, 1519; and steering farther south than ever man had sailed before, he discovered Cape Horn, and the Straits which bear his name. Fate did not spare him to carry his discoveries farther, nor to reap the reward of those he had made; for during this voyage (in 1521) he was butchered by the natives of one of the islands of the Moluccas. His heroic lieutenant, Juan Sebastian de Elcano, then took command, and continued the voyage until he had circumnavigated the globe for the first time in its history. Upon his return to Spain, the Crown rewarded his brilliant achievements, and gave him, among other honors, a coat-of-arms emblazoned with a globe and the motto, Tu primum circumdedisti me,—"Thou first didst go around me."
Juan Ponce de Leon, the discoverer of Florida,—the first State of our Union that was seen by Europeans,—was as ill-fated an explorer as Magellan; for he came to "the Flowery Land" (to which he had been lured by the wild myth of a fountain of perennial youth) only to be slain by its savages. De Leon was born in San Servas, Spain, in the latter part of the fifteenth century. He was the conqueror of the island of Puerto Rico, and sailing in 1512 to find Florida,—of which he had heard through the Indians,—discovered the new land in the same year, and took possession of it for Spain. He was given the title of adelantado of Florida, and in 1521 returned with three ships to conquer his new country, but was at once wounded mortally in a fight with the Indians, and died on his return to Cuba. He, by the way, was one of the bold Spaniards who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to America, in 1493.