h America. Seeking gold and the fountain of
perpetual youth, Ponce de Leon explored Florida in 1513, and in 1521 and
1525 Allyon and Gomez skirted the eastern coast as far north as
Labrador. They found no fountain of youth, nor any passage to the South
Sea, nor treasure. It was twenty-five years after Columbus's first
voyage, when Velasquez reached Cozumel off the coast of Yucatan, that
the Spanish explorers first encountered a people advanced beyond
savagery, and came upon evidences of that wealth which determined the
future of their empire. Two years later Hernando Cortez, the greatest of
the Conquistadores, was given command of the expedition which ended in
the capture of Mexico and the overthrow of the Aztec power. The simple
Mexicans, who had never seen a white man, first welcomed Cortez as the
long expected Culture God, and the hapless Montezuma gathered as a
present for the invader treasure equal in present value to the sum of
six and a half million dollars. Most of this was lost in the lake during
the fatal retreat from the city; but when the conqueror returned to
Spain in 1528, he brought with him, to that very port of Palos where
Columbus had landed in 1493, three hundred thousand _pesos_[1] of gold
and fifteen hundred marks of silver.

The silver mines of Mexico were not exploited until many years later,
but the conquest gave an immense impetus to further exploration. It was
the hope of rivaling the brilliant success of Cortez that inspired those
fruitless expeditions through what is now the southern part of the
United States. Cabeza de Vaca and three companions, sole survivors of
Narvaez's ill-fated expedition to conquer an empire in Florida, wandered
for many years over the country between the Mississippi and the Gulf of
California. Picked up in 1536 by Spanish slavers, De Vaca's report of
the vast country to the north induced Mendoza, the Governor of New
Spain, to send out Friar Marcos from Mexico in 1539 to find the famous
Seven Cities. The friar found no cities, but during the next three years
the search was continued by Coronado, who penetrated as far north as the
present State of Kansas. It was also in 1539 that De Soto, who had
accompanied Pizarro in the conquest of the Incas cities, set out from
Florida in search of another Peru. After three years of untold hardship
he died of swamp fever in the region of the great river which he
discovered and in which he lies buried. The only result of all these
ex