472 THE PKOGKESS OP MARITIME DISCOVEEY. 



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 (1 526), 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 sailed northward till he encountered 



