impeding its progress. Captain Barnardo, the second in command to De Fonte, carefully explored the winding of this archipelago, while De Fonte entered a large river leading into a vast lake also dotted with islands, in a bay of which he found an English ship lying at anchor, the first, according to the Indians, ever seen in these high latitudes.
On the latter portion of this story great doubt has been thrown: but again we are almost compelled to accept the truth of a visit having been paid to the labyrinth of islands, channels, etc.. now bearing the names of Graham, Moresby, and other modern explorers, from the correspondence between their appearance and the description of his archipelago given by De Fonte.
Leaving the work of Behring, Spangberg, Meares, Vancouver, Kotzebue, and other successors of De Fuca and De Fonte in the hyperborean regions, we return to the Spanish in the South, to find our next hero of discovery in an old Jesuit priest named Eusebius Francis Kino, who, in 1658, went forth alone from his Mexican monastery to try and win over the wild tribes of the North to the faith of which he was a minister. With no weapon but the cross, and no food but such as he was able to beg by the way, the father pressed on through the present province of Sonora till he came to a river supposed to have been the Santa Cruz. Following its course, he entered Arizona, and arrived at the junction of the Santa Cruz with the Gila, which in its turn joins the Colorado some miles above its mouth.
Crossing the Gila, Kino ascended its northern bank, and came to a country which he characterizes as the most wonderful ever seen by the eye of man. Its people, who were "kind, generous, and hospitable," dwelt in well-built villages clustering on the banks of streams, and employed their time in the manufacture of a kind of cotton cloth and of very beautiful feather-work. They were also skillful picture-writers, and on the walls of their public buildings was preserved a pictorial record of their history. Mines of gold and silver—which they understood how to work with considerable skill, though they set but small value on the ore when excavated—promised to yield a splendid return to the emigrant, while immense flocks of sheep and herds of cattle constituted another source of almost inexhaustible wealth.
Worshiping the sun as the one supreme God, these simple yet intelligent natives kept a fire ever burning on their altars in his honor. With its undying flame they connected their own prosperity, and they therefore showed little readiness to substitute for it any less material guarantee of well-being.
