ake--why not that
of Manoa? Pizarro and Cortez, again, were led on to their desperate
enterprises by the sight of small quantities of gold among savages, who
told them of a civilized gold-country near at hand; and they found that
those savages spoke truth. Why was the unanimous report of the Carib
tribes of the Orinoco to be disbelieved, when they told a similar tale?
Sir Richard Schomburgk's admirable preface to Raleigh's Guiana proves,
surely, that the Indians themselves were deceived, as well as deceivers.
It was known, again, that vast quantities of the Peruvian treasure had
been concealed by the priests, and that members of the Inca family had
fled across the Andes, and held out against the Spaniards. Barely fifty
years had elapsed since then;--what more probable than that this remnant
of the Peruvian dynasty and treasure still existed? Even the story of
the Amazons, though it may serve Hume as a point for his ungenerous and
untruthful attempt to make Raleigh out either fool or villain, has
come from Spaniards, who had with their own eyes seen the Indian women
fighting by their husbands' sides, and from Indians, who asserted the
existence of an Amazonian tribe. What right had Amyas, or any man, to
disbelieve the story? The existence of the Amazons in ancient Asia, and
of their intercourse with Alexander the Great, was then an accredited
part of history, which it would have been gratuitous impertinence to
deny. And what if some stories connected these warlike women with the
Emperor of Manoa, and the capital itself? This generation ought surely
to be the last to laugh at such a story, at least as long as the
Amazonian guards of the King of Dahomey continue to outvie the men in
that relentless ferocity, with which they have subdued every neighboring
tribe, save the Christians of Abbeokuta. In this case, as in a hundred
more, fact not only outdoes, but justifies imagination; and Amyas spoke
common sense when he said to his men that day--

"Let fools laugh and stay at home. Wise men dare and win. Saul went to
look for his father's asses, and found a kingdom; and Columbus, my men,
was called a madman for only going to seek China, and never knew, they
say, until his dying day, that he had found a whole new world instead
of it. Find Manoa? God only, who made all things, knows what we may find
beside!"

So underneath that giant ceiba-tree, those valiant men, reduced by
battle and sickness to some eighty, swore a great oath