southward again.  Though he had not found the great river, he had determined one important geographical point:  that Lower California was not, as had been supposed, an island, but was a peninsula; nevertheless for a full century thereafter it was considered an island.  Had Ulloa followed up the rush of the current he would have been the discoverer of the Colorado River, but in spite of his marvelling at the fury of it he did not seem to consider an investigation worth while; or he may have been afraid of wrecking his ships.  His inertia left it for a bolder man, who was soon in his wake.  But the intrepid soul of Cortes must have been sorely disappointed at the meagre results of this, his last expedition, which had cost him a large sum, and compelled the pawning of his wife’s jewels.  The discovery of the mouth of a great river would have bestowed on this voyage a more romantic importance, and would consequently have been somewhat healing to his injured pride, if not to his depleted purse; but his sun was setting.  This voyage of Ulloa was its last expiring ray.  With an artistic adjustment to the situation that seems remarkable, Ulloa, after turning the end of the peninsula and sailing up the Lower Californian coast, sent home one solitary vessel, and vanished then forever.  Financially wrecked, and exasperated to the last degree by the slights and indignities of his enemies and of the Mendoza government, Cortes left for Spain early in 1540 with the hope of retrieving his power by appearing in person before the monarch.  As in the case of Columbus, scant satisfaction was his, and the end was that the gallant captain, whose romantic career in the New World seems like a fairy tale, never again saw the scene of his conquests.

Mendoza, the new viceroy of New Spain, a man of fine character but utterly without sympathy for Cortes, and who was instrumental in bringing about his downfall, now determined on an expedition of great magnitude:  an expedition that should proceed by both land and water to the wonderful Seven Cities of Cibola, believed to be rich beyond computation.  The negro Estevan had lately been sent back to the marvelous northland he so glowingly described, guiding Marcos, the Franciscan monk of Savoyard birth, who was to investigate carefully, as far as possible, the glories recounted and speedily report.  They were in the north about the same time (summer of 1539) that Ulloa was sailing up the Sea of Cortes.  The negro, who had by arrangement proceeded there some days in advance of Marcos, was killed at the first Pueblo village, and Marcos, afraid of his life, and before he had seen anything of the wonderful cities except a frightened glimpse from a distant hill, beat a precipitate retreat to New Galicia, the province just north of New Spain, and of which Francis Vasquez de Coronado had recently been made governor.  Here he astonished Coronado with a description of the vast wealth and “beauty of the Seven Cities of Cibola, a description that does