"...Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

That image has been with me since the very first time I encountered this poem;
the exhausted Conquistadors in their rusty armor, covered in grime and sweat, sunburnt and mosquitobitten, months after a grueling march through swamp and jungle and rugged mountains, suddenly standing speechless together on a windy hilltop and seeing the endless Pacific stretching across half the world.