Explore "The Spanish Pioneers" by Charles Fletcher Lummis on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
With so inadequate a force, yet much stronger than before, Pizarro and Almagro sailed again on their dangerous mission. The pilot was Bartolome Ruiz, a brave and loyal Andalusian and a good sailor. The weather was better now, and the adventurers pushed on hopefully. After a few days' sail they reached the Rio San Juan, which was as far as any European had ever sailed down that coast: it will be remembered that this was where Almagro had got discouraged and turned back. Here were more Indian settlements, and a little gold; but here too the vastness and savagery of the wilderness became more apparent. It is hard for us to conceive at all, in these easy days, how _lost_ these explorers were. Then there was not a white man in all the world who knew what lay beyond them; and the knowledge of something somewhere ahead is the most necessary prop to courage.
We can understand their situation only by supposing a band of schoolboys -- brave boys but unlearned -- carried blindfold a thousand miles, and set down in a trackless wilderness they had never heard of.