Colchis, defended,
it was said, by the Apaches, a terrible, sanguinary and cannibal race,
whom Cortez himself could not subdue. This land of gold some had
located in New Biscay or New Mexico; others, in the pretended kingdoms
of Sonora and Quivira; then, after several ineffectual attempts, the
possibility of reaching it was denied; learned men, from the various
academies of Europe, proved that the _Eldorado_ was not a country, but
a dream; on this subject the Old World laughed at the New; the
Argonauts became discouraged, and during a century the subject was
named only to be ridiculed.

And yet, in spite of sceptics and scoffers, the _Eldorado_ existed. It
existed where tradition had placed it, on the shores of this Vermilion
Sea, now the Gulf of California. For once, popular opinion had the
advantage over scientific dissertations and philosophic denials;
there, where, according to the Dictionary of Alcedo, nothing had been
discovered but mines of pewter! where Jacques Baegert had indeed
acknowledged the presence of gold, but _in meagre veins_; where Raynal
had named as curiosities only fishes and pearls, declaring, in
California, _the sea richer than the land_; where in our own times M.
Humboldt discovered nothing but cylindrical cacti, on a sandy soil,
remained buried, as a deposit for future ages, this treasure of the
world, which seemed to be waiting in order to leave its native soil,
the moment of falling into the hands of a commercial and industrious
people, that of the United States.

This _Eldorado_, Stradling sought in vain; he therefore decided to
pursue his route along the coast of Mexico, now under the French flag,
when he found an opportunity for traffic with the natives, colonists
or savages; now under the English flag, when he wished to exercise his
trade of corsair, an easy profession, for since the disaster of Vigo,
the Spanish had abandoned their transatlantic possessions to
themselves.

The Spanish soldiery of America then found themselves, in the presence
of European adventurers, in that state of pusillanimous inferiority in
which had been, at the period of the conquest, the subjects of the
Incas and Montezuma before the soldiers of Cortez and Pizarro. The
time was not already far passed, when a few bands of freebooters, from
France, England and Holland, had well nigh wrested from his Majesty,
the King of Spain and the Indies, the most extensive and wealthy of
his twenty-two hereditary kingdoms.