Complete and unabridged, with 59 full-page plates by Jasper Francis Cropsey, James McNeill Whistler and George Inness. The Spanish conquest of the Americas told through the men who made it: Ojeda and Nicuesa on the Spanish Main, Balboa and his first sight of the Pacific, the Pizarros in Peru and the ransom of the Inca, Cortés on the road to Tenochtitlan and his meeting with Montezuma — followed by other true tales of adventure, among them the wreck of the whaler Essex. Cyrus Townsend Brady was a clergyman and naval historian, and wrote these pieces for American readers who knew little of the subject. He is partial to a good charge, and frank about the cruelty of the men he admires. Fifty-nine plates, among them Turner's seas and Church's Chimborazo, supply the landscapes and disasters these conquests and wrecks demand.