gers of the Magellan passage to appreciate the boundless value of a
road to the East Indies which would (as all supposed then) save half the
distance, and be as it were a private possession of the English, safe
from Spanish interference; and he listened reverently to Sir Humphrey's
quaint proofs, half true, half fantastic, of such a passage, which
Raleigh detailed to him--of the Primum Mobile, and its diurnal motion
from east to west, in obedience to which the sea-current flowed westward
ever round the Cape of Good Hope, and being unable to pass through the
narrow strait between South America and the Antarctic Continent, rushed
up the American shore, as the Gulf Stream, and poured northwestward
between Greenland and Labrador towards Cathay and India; of that most
crafty argument of Sir Humphrey's--how Aristotle in his book "De Mundo,"
and Simon Gryneus in his annotations thereon, declare that the world
(the Old World) is an island, compassed by that which Homer calls the
river Oceanus; ergo, the New World is an island also, and there is
a North-West passage; of the three brothers (names unknown) who had
actually made the voyage, and named what was afterwards called Davis's
Strait after themselves; of the Indians who were cast ashore in Germany
in the reign of Frederic Barbarossa who, as Sir Humphrey had learnedly
proved per modum tollendi, could have come only by the North-West; and
above all, of Salvaterra, the Spaniard, who in 1568 had told Sir Henry
Sidney (Philip's father), there in Ireland, how he had spoken with a
Mexican friar named Urdaneta, who had himself come from Mar del Zur (the
Pacific) into Germany by that very North-West passage; at which last
Amyas shook his head, and said that friars were liars, and seeing
believing; "but if you must needs have an adventure, you insatiable soul
you, why not try for the golden city of Manoa?"

"Manoa?" asked Raleigh, who had heard, as most had, dim rumors of the
place. "What do you know of it?"

Whereon Amyas told him all that he had gathered from the Spaniard; and
Raleigh, in his turn, believed every word.

"Humph!" said he after a long silence. "To find that golden emperor;
offer him help and friendship from the queen of England; defend him
against the Spaniards; if we became strong enough, conquer back all Peru
from the Popish tyrants, and reinstate him on the throne of the Incas,
with ourselves for his body-guard, as the Norman Varangians were to
the effeminate em