gracefully outlined promontories, and glistening white from behind legended hills, leading them every moment to anticipate the discovery of some magnificent city, such as in our day has been revealed to an admiring posterity; for while the East buries her ancient cities in dust, the West none the less effectually hides hers in foliage. And of the monuments to the greatness of the past, and of the profitless millions here engendered, who shall speak? And why do men call nature considerate or kind? Does she not create only to destroy, and bestow blessings and cursings with the same merciless indifference? Surpassingly lovely, she is at once siren, nurse, and sanguinary beldam. This barren border of the peninsula rested under a canopy of clear or curtained sky, and glared in mingled gloom and brightness beside the fickle gulf; and from the irregular plains of the interior came the heated, perfumed air, telling here of treeless table-lands, of languid vegetation, and there of forests and evergreen groves. “It is like Spain,” cried one. And so they called the country Nueva España,9 which name, at first applied only to the peninsula of Yucatan, finally spread over the whole of the territory afterward known as Mexico.
At Campeche, or more probably at Champoton,10 occurred a notable affray. The fleet anchored toward sunset, half a league from shore. The natives immediately put on a warlike front, bent on terrible intimidations, which they continued in the form of shouts and drum-beating during the entire night. So great was their necessity for water that the Spaniards did not wait for the morning, but amidst the arrows, stones, and spears of the natives, they landed the artillery and one hundred men before daybreak, another hundred quickly following. But for their cotton armor the invaders would have suffered severely during this operation. Having reached the shore, however, the guns were planted, and the natives