CHAPTER VI.
THE VOYAGE TO CALIFORNIA— NEW YORK TO CHAGRES.
Some set out, like crusaders of old, with a glorious equipment of hope and enthusiasm, and get broken by the way, wanting patience with each other and the world. — Geonje Eiiot.
Everybody is supposed to know, though everybody does not know, that Phryxos fled from the wrath of his father Athamas, king of Orchomenus, in Boeotia, riding through the air to Colchis upon the ram with the golden fleece, which was the gift of Hermes. The ram was then sacrificed to Zeus, and the fleece given to King ^tes, who hung it upon a sacred oak in the grove of Ares, where it was guarded night and day by an ever- watchful dragon. Pelias, king of lolcos, in Thessaly, sent Jason his half brother s son, who claimed the sovereignty, with the chief heroes of Greece, in the ship Argo to fetch the golden fleece. Jason obtained the fleece, though Pelias had hoped he should have been destroyed. Of the Argonauts there were fifty in number, and among them Hercules, and the singer Orpheus, Castor and Pollux, Zetes and Calais, Mopus, Theseus, and others, the stories con- cerning whose enterprise, it is thought, grew out of the commercial expeditions of the Munyans to the coasts of the Euxine. Ulysses, returning from the seige of Troy, made a ten year's voyage, being driven about by tempests, during which time he underwent many strange adventures. Other Mediterranean mythological voyages there were, and hypothetical navigations to the near shores and islands of the Atlantic and Indian oceans; folio wino- which were
