stirring canvas of the great
artist, as is also the memory, in the second painting of this series, of
that other Erickson, his ancestor, who, almost a thousand years before,
was the first white man known to have set foot on American soil.

RETURN OF THE CONQUERORS
Typifying Our Victory in the Late Spanish-American War

(_September 29, 1899_)

[Illustration: Copyright, 1898, by Edward Moran.]

XIII.

RETURN OF THE CONQUERORS. TYPIFYING OUR VICTORY IN THE LATE
SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR, SEPTEMBER 29, 1899.[Q]

As a fitting close to the grand pictorial illustration of our marine
history, this canvas represents one of the most magnificent pageants
ever seen on our waters, in commemoration of the victorious close of the
last great war, in which our navy added fresh leaves to its laurel
wreath of heroic achievement. It, at the same time, depicts the
culminating stage in the evolution of naval construction from the time
when the Norsemen in their drakkars, and Columbus in his caravels,
braved the perils of the ocean, until the steel-clad battleships of
Dewey and Schley and Sampson met in conflict the no less formidable
floating fortresses of Cervera and Montojo. It is a picture of to-day,
with the well-defined outlines of the Statue of Liberty in allegorical
suggestion at the mouth of the great river up which the little "Half
Moon" first sailed, also on a September day, just two hundred and ninety
years before. It suggests--in the great, grim, steel-clad leviathans of
the ocean steaming up the river, with their powerful armament and each
representing millions of dollars in its construction, along the shores
of the second largest city in the world, and with flags and banners
flying proudly from every mast and spar--not only the victory of our
arms but the growth of the nation, from the sparse settlements in the
days of the Pilgrim Fathers to a population of 80,000,000 souls, and
from the thirteen little struggling provinces, at the outbreak of the
Revolution, to the forty-five great States and four Territories of the
Union, with its possessions even beyond the confines of the
continent--imperial in its power and greatness, not dreamt of even when,
only about a century before, Paul Jones and Decatur and Captain Reid
performed the feats of daring which are immortalized in the earlier of
these paintings.

It typifies, as the artist himself points out in his title, our
conquering arms--in the very motion o