Even the bravest were as helpless as children before warriors armed with thunder and riding upon unknown monsters.
But in no place, save in the islands, did the native races wholly disappear as they did in the English settlements.

The Spaniards came not like the Puritans, as artisans and tillers of the soil intent on founding new homes, but as military conquerors, requiring a race of helots to toil for them.

For a period anarchy reigned; the captains not only plundered the Indians but fought one another fiercely for more room--more room in the endless wilderness! Eventually, however, conditions became more stable; Spain imposed her effective control, her language, religion and institutions on a vast region, doing for South America what Rome had once done for her.
The lover of adventure will find rich reward in tracing the discovery of the Mississippi by De Soto, of Florida by Ponce de Leon, and of the whole course of {438} the Amazon by Orellana who sailed down it from Peru, or in reading of Balboa, "when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific." A resolute man could hardly set out exploring without stumbling upon some mighty river, some vast continent, or some unmeasured ocean.

But among all these fairly-tales [Transcriber's note: fairy-tales ?] there are some that are so marvellous that they would be thought too extravagant by the most daring writers of romance.
That one captain with four hundred men, and another with two hundred, should each march against an extensive and populous empire, cut down their armies at odds of a hundred to one, put their kings to the sword and their temples to the torch, and after it all reap a harvest of gold and precious stones such as for quantity had never been heard of before--all this meets us not in the tales of Ariosto or of Dumas, but in the pages of authentic history.
[Conquest of Mexico] In the tableland of Mexico dwelt the Aztecs, the most civilized and warlike of North American aborigines.

Their polity was that of a Spartan military despotism, their religion the most grewsome known to man.