472 THE PROGRESS OF MARITIME DISCOVERY. 
Amidst interminable delays and difficulties, which, although 
not to be compared to those he had endured, would still have 
totally discouraged a mind of a less iron mould, five years 
more elapsed before the matchless perseverance of Pizarro met 
with its reward. On the 14th of April, 1531, he landed in Peru ~ 
for the second time, and in a few months the empire of the 
Incas lay prostrate at his feet. The poor adventurer of Gorgona 
was now one of the richest men on earth. 
From this time the stream of conquest and discovery con. 
tinuously rolled on to the south, so that after a few years the 
whole coast of Peru and Chili, as far as the wilds of Patagonia, 
was either known or subject to the Spaniards. 
But while Pizarro and his comrades were thus opening the 
south-west coast of America to the knowledge of mankind, the 
conqueror of Mexico was no less anxious to add to his laurels 
the glory of discovery in the Northern Pacific, whose shores his 
warriors had reached in 1521, soon after the fall of the Aztec 
capital. Desirous of opening a new passage to the East Indies, he 
fitted out a fleet (1526), which, under the command of his kins- 
man Alvaro de Saavedra, was to sail to the Moluccas, and most 
likely discovered part of the Radack and Ralick Archipelago, 
visited and described three centuries later by Kotzebue and 
Chamisso. 
In the year 1536 Cortez himself undertook a maritime ex- 
pedition to the north, discovered the peninsula of California, and 
explored the greater part of the long and narrow bay which 
separates it from the mainland. After the return of this great 
man to Spain, where, loaded with ingratitude, he died in 1547, 
Rodriguez Cabrillo (1543) sailed as far as Monterey, and sub- 
sequently the pilot of the expedition, Bartholomew Ferreto, ° 
reached 43° N. lat., where Vancouver’s Cape Oxford is situated. 
In the year 1542 Villalobos made the first attempt to establish 
a colony on the Philippine Islands with settlers from Mexico, 
but, having failed, the colonisation did not take place before 
1565. The intelligence of this success was brought to America 
by the pilot and monk, Fray Andreas Urdaneta, who sailed on 
the 1st of June from Manilla and arrived on the 3rd of October 
in the Mexican port of Acapulco. All previous attempts to sail 
from Asia to America had failed, on account of the opposing 
trade-winds; but Urdaneta seiled northward till he encountered 
