Page:Romance of History, Mexico.djvu/50

 To Cuba there returned one day a battered ship with a well-nigh exhausted crew. Sore wounded though he was and near to death, the captain, a gallant hidalgo named Cordova, was carried at once to Velasquez. Strange was the story which this man with his dying breath poured into the Governor's hungry ears. Cruising among the islands to the north of Cuba in search of slaves, he had been driven by a furious gale far to the south, and had reached at last an unknown coast. Here, instead of huts of reeds and rushes, houses of stone rose before his astonished eyes. Landing, he was met by natives dressed in the finest cotton, and decorated with ornaments of wrought gold, who greeted him with cold, unfriendly looks. "What is this country?" he asked in the Indian dialect of Cuba. The reply came in a strange tongue. "Tectetan," "I do not understand you." But to the Spaniards the country became forthwith Yucatan. Hostility did not stop at looks. So fierce an attack was made on the unwelcome visitors that it was only with great difficulty and loss they regained their ships.

Yet curiosity drove the undaunted Spaniards to persist in their efforts to obtain some nearer knowledge of this race so superior in civilisation and spirit to the ignorant and nerveless inhabitants of the isles. Coasting westwards from Cape Catoche, the eastern point of the large peninsula, they made several attempts to explore the country, but every landing cost them dear. Of the crew, half left their bones on that inhospitable shore, and but one man returned scatheless. 30