e early expeditions that sailed from that port to the New World.

Of his years of apprenticeship in the stern warfare of the times we
have no trustworthy details, until at Hispaniola, in 1510, he joined,
as second in command, Ojeda's disastrous expedition to Uraba, on the
main coast. Sanguinary fights with swarms of savages armed with
poisoned arrows, marked the fortunes of the adventurers. And when
Ojeda returned to the islands for assistance, which he did not bring,
Pizarro remained in command of the starving colony, amid hardships and
horrors from which only his resolute daring brought off a remnant
alive.

He was with Balboa in his famous march across the mountains to the
Pacific, which no European eyes had hitherto beheld; and shared with
him the joy of that discovery, which Keats wrongly ascribes to Cortes,
when the hardy band, first beholding the unknown ocean outspread
before them--

"Looked at each other with a wild surmise,
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

He remained with Balboa on the isthmus until the death of that valiant
commander, when he united his fortunes with those of the governor,
Pedrarias, and headed various expeditions along the Pacific coast and
to the islands beyond, in quest of pearls and gold. He was occupied in
this way, or in cultivating with the aid of Indian slaves a malarious
tract of land he had acquired near Panama, when a new career invited
him.

Rumors of a rich empire far to the south, where gold was as common
with the natives as iron was with the Spaniards, had long inflamed the
imaginations of the colonists; then news came of the prodigious
exploits of Cortes in Mexico. Pizarro burned to emulate his kinsman.
Having formed a partnership with Diego de Almagro, a soldier of
experience, and Hernando de Luque, a priest supplied with worldly
means, he secured an old vessel that had been designed by Balboa for a
similar expedition, refitted it with Luque's money, and with a hundred
adventurers sailed from the port of Panama in November, 1524; leaving
Almagro to follow in a smaller vessel.

Pizarro was then more than fifty years old, but still in possession of
all his masterful qualities. And he had need of all, amid the perils
of sea and land, the tempests, swamps, battles, sickness, and famine,
which rendered his first voyage down the coast a deplorable failure.
Almagro met with no better success. Both returned to the isthmus
buffeted, baffled, humiliated, but too stout of