--It is
minute incidents like these with which we have been occupied, that
enable one to comprehend the extremity of suffering to which the
Spanish adventurer was subjected in the prosecution of his great work of
discovery.
Revived by the substantial nourishment to which they had so long been
strangers, the Spanish cavaliers, with the buoyancy that belongs to men
of a hazardous and roving life, forgot their past distresses in their
eagerness to prosecute their enterprise. Reembarking therefore on board
his vessel, Pizarro bade adieu to the scene of so much suffering, which
he branded with the appropriate name of Puerto de la Hambre, the Port
of Famine, and again opened his sails to a favorable breeze that bore him
onwards towards the south.
Had he struck boldly out into the deep, instead of hugging the
inhospitable shore, where he had hitherto found so little to recompense
him, he might have spared himself the repetition of wearisome and
unprofitable adventures, and reached by a shorter route the point of his
destination. But the Spanish mariner groped his way along these
unknown coasts, landing at every convenient headland, as if fearful lest
some fruitful region or precious mine might be overlooked, should a
single break occur in the line of survey. Yet it should be remembered,
that, though the true point of Pizarro's destination is obvious to us,
familiar with the topography of these countries, he was wandering in the
dark, feeling his way along, inch by inch, as it were, without chart to
guide him, without knowledge of the seas or of the bearings of the coast,
and even with no better defined idea of the object at which he aimed than
that of a land teeming with gold, that lay somewhere at the south! It was
a hunt after an El Dorado; on information scarcely more circumstantial
or authentic than that which furnished the basis of so many chimerical
enterprises in this land of wonders.
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