is now the United
States.

Cabeza de Vaca was the first European really to penetrate the then "Dark
Continent" of North America, as he was by centuries the first to _cross_
the continent. His nine years of wandering on foot, unarmed, naked,
starving, among wild beasts and wilder men, with no other attendants
than three as ill-fated comrades, gave the world its first glimpse of
the United States inland, and led to some of the most stirring and
important achievements connected with its early history. Nearly a
century before the Pilgrim Fathers planted their noble commonwealth on
the edge of Massachusetts, seventy-five years before the first English
settlement was made in the New World, and more than a generation before
there was a single Caucasian settler of _any_ blood within the area of
the present United States, Vaca and his gaunt followers had trudged
across this unknown land.

It is a long way back to those days. Henry VIII. was then king of
England, and sixteen rulers have since occupied that throne. Elizabeth,
the Virgin Queen, was not born when Vaca started on his appalling
journey, and did not begin to reign until twenty years after he had
ended it. It was fifty years before the birth of Captain John Smith, the
founder of Virginia; a generation before the birth of Shakspere, and two
and a half generations before Milton. Henry Hudson, the famous explorer
for whom one of our chief rivers is named, was not yet born. Columbus
himself had been dead less than twenty-five years, and the conqueror of
Mexico had seventeen yet to live. It was sixty years before the world
had heard of such a thing as a newspaper, and the best geographers still
thought it possible to sail through America to Asia. There was not a
white man in North America above the middle of Mexico; nor had one gone
two hundred miles inland in this continental wilderness, of which the
world knew almost less than we know now of the moon.

The name of Cabeza de Vaca may seem to us a curious one. It means "Head
of a Cow." But this quaint family name was an honorable one in Spain,
and had a brave winning: it was earned at the battle of Naves de Tolosa
in the thirteenth century, one of the decisive engagements of all those
centuries of war with the Moors. Alvar's grandfather was also a man of
some note, being the conqueror of the Canary Islands.

Alvar was born in Xeres[9] de la Frontera, Spain, toward the last of the
fifteenth century. Of his early life we