one at Darien and
unfurled the flag of Spain by the waters of the Pacific. With wondrous
zeal did Spanish explorers beat up and down the western shore of the
Gulf of Mexico, seeking for an opening through. Cortez had no sooner
secured possession of Mexico, after his frightful slaughter of the
Aztecs, than he began pushing out to the west and northwest--along the
"upper coasts of the South Sea"--in search of the strait which
Montezuma told him existed.

It is unlikely that Montezuma's knowledge of North American geography
was much greater than that of his conqueror. But in every age and land
aborigines have first ascertained what visiting strangers most sought,
whether it be gold or waterways, and assured them that somewhere
beyond the neighboring horizon these objects were to be found in
plenty. Spanish, French, and English have each in their turn chased
American rainbows that existed only in the brains of imaginative
tribesmen who had little other thought than a childish desire to
gratify their guests.

Cortez undertook, at his own charge, several of these expensive
exploring expeditions to discover the strait of which Montezuma had
spoken, and one of them he conducted in person. In 1528--the year he
visited Spain to meet his accusers--we find him dispatching Maldonado
northward along the Pacific coast for three hundred miles; and five
years later Grijalva and Jimenez were claiming for Spain the southern
portion of Lower California. A full hundred years before Jean Nicolet
related to the French authorities at their feeble outpost on the rock
of Quebec the story of his daring progress into the wilds of the upper
Mississippi Valley, and the rumors he had there heard of the great
river which flowed into the South Sea, Spanish officials in the halls
of Montezuma were receiving the tales of their adventurers, who had
penetrated to strange lands laved by the waters of this selfsame
ocean.

It was about the year 1530 when the Spaniards in Mexico first received
word, through an itinerant monk, Marcos de Niza, of certain powerful
semi-civilized tribes dwelling some six hundred miles north of the
capital of the Aztecs. These strange people were said to possess in
great store domestic utensils and ornaments made of gold and silver;
to be massed in seven large cities composed of houses built with
stone; and to be proficient in many of the arts of the Europeans. The
search for "the seven cities of Cibola," as these reputed comm