Chapter XXVIII: Appendix: The Geographical Results (1)

[Sidenote: Progress of discovery.]

There was a struggling effort of the geographical sense of the world for thirty years and more after the death of Columbus, before the fact began to be grasped that a great continent was interposed as a substantial and independent barrier in the track to India. It took nearly a half century more before men generally recognized that fact, and then in most cases it was accepted with the reservation of a possible Asiatic connection at the extreme north. It was something more than two hundred and twenty years from the death of Columbus before that severance at the north was incontestably established by the voyage of Bering, and a hundred and thirty years longer before at last the contour of the northern coast of the continent was established by the proof of the long-sought northwest passage in 1850. We must now, to complete the story of the influence of Columbus, rehearse somewhat concisely the narrative of this progressive outcome of that wonderful voyage of 1492. The spirit of western discovery, which Columbus imparted, was of long continuance.

[Sidenote: The influence of Ptolemy and his career.]

"If we wish to make ourselves thoroughly acquainted," says Dr. Kohl, "with the history of discovery in the New World, we must not only follow the navigators on their ships, but we must look into the cabinets of princes and into the counting-houses of merchants, and likewise watch the scholars in their speculative studies." There was no rallying point for the scholar of cosmography in those early days of discovery like the text and influence of Ptolemy.

We know little of this ancient geographer beyond the fact of his living in the early portion of the second century, and mainly at Alexandria, the fittest home of a geographer at that time, since this Egyptian city was peerless for commerce and learning. Here he could do best what he advises all geographers to do, consult the journals of travelers, and get information of eclipses, as the same phenomena were observed at different places; such, for instance, as that of the moon noted at Arbela in the fifth, and seen at Carthage in the second hour.

[Sidenote: Portolanos.]

The precision of Ptolemy was covered out of sight by graphic fancies among the cosmographers of succeeding ages, till about the beginning of the fourteenth century Italy and the western Mediterranean islands began to produce those atlases of sea-charts, which have come down to us under the name of "portolanos;" and still later a new impetus was given to geographical study by the manuscripts of Ptolemy, with his maps, which began to be common in western Europe in the beginning of the fifteenth century, largely through the influence of communications with the Byzantine peoples.

[From Reusner's _Icones_.]]

The portolanos, however, never lost their importance. Nordenskiöld says that, from the great number of them still extant in Italy, we may deduce that they had a greater circulation during the sixteenth century than printed cartographical works. About five hundred of these sea-charts are known in Italian libraries, and the greater proportion of them are of Italian origin.

[Sidenote: Latin text of Ptolemy.]

[Sidenote: The Donis maps.]

It is a composite Latin text, brought into final shape by Jacobus Angelus not far from 1400-1410, which was the basis of the early printed editions of Ptolemy. This version was for a while circulated in manuscript, sometimes with copies of the maps of the Old World having a Latinized nomenclature; and the public libraries of Europe contain here and there specimens of these early copies, one of which it is thought was known to Pierre d'Ailly. It is a question if Angelus supplied the maps which accompanied these early manuscripts, and which got into the Bologna edition of 1462 (wrongly dated for 1472), and into the metrical version of Berlingièri. These maps, whether always the same in the early manuscripts or not, were later superseded by a new set of maps made by a German cartographer, Nicolaus Donis, which he added to a revision of Angelus's Latin text. These later maps were close copies of the original Greek maps, and were accompanied by others of a similar workmanship, which represented better knowledge than the Greeks had. In 1478 these Donis maps were first engraved on copper, and were used in the later editions of 1490, and slightly corrected in those of 1507 and 1508. The engravers were Schweinheim and Buckinck, and their work, following copies of it in the edition of 1490, has been admirably reproduced in _The Facsimile Atlas_ of Nordenskiöld (Stockholm, 1889).

[Sidenote: Greenland in maps.]

Meanwhile, editions of the text of Angelus had been issued at Ulm in 1482, and giving additions in 1486, with woodcut maps, the same in both issues on a different projection, assigned to Dominus Nicolaus Germanus, who had, according to Nordenskiöld, completed the manuscript fifteen years earlier. It is significant, perhaps, of the slowness with which the bruit of Portuguese discoveries to the south had traveled that there is in the maps of Africa no extension of Ptolemy's knowledge. But if they are deficient in the south, they are remarkable in the north for showing the coming America in a delineation of Greenland, which, as we have already pointed out, was no new object in the manuscript portolanos, even as far back as the early part of the same century.

Two years after the death of Columbus, we find in the edition of 1508, and sometimes in the edition of 1507,--there is no difference between the two issues except in the title-page,--the first engraved map which has particular reference to the new geographical developments of the age.

[Sidenote: 1507-8. The Ruysch map.]

This Ruysch map shows the African coast discoveries of the Portuguese, with the discoveries of Marco Polo towards the east. In connection with the latter, the same material which Behaim had used in his globe seems to have been equally accessible to Ruysch. The latter's map has a legend on the sea between Iceland and Greenland, saying that an island situated there was burnt up in 1456. This statement has been connected by some with another contained in the Sagas, that from an island in this channel both Greenland and Iceland could be seen.

We also learn from another legend that Portuguese vessels had pushed down the South American coast to 50° south latitude, and the historians of these early voyages have been unable to say who the pioneers were who have left us so early a description of Brazil.

[Sidenote: Columbus and the Ruysch map.]

It is inferred from a reference of Beneventanus, in his Ptolemy, respecting this map, that some aid had been derived from a map made by one of the Columbuses, and a statement that Bartholomew Columbus, in Rome in 1505, gave a map of the new discoveries to a canon of San Giovanni di Laterano has been thought to refer to such a map, which would, if it could be established, closely connect the Ruysch map with Columbus. It is also supposed to have some relation to Cabot, since a voyage which Ruysch made to the new regions westward from England may have been, and probably was, with that navigator. In this case, the reference to that part of the coast of Asia which the English discovered may record Ruysch's personal experiences. If these things can be considered as reasonably established, it gives great interest to this map of Ruysch, and connects Columbus not only with the earliest manuscript map, La Cosa of 1500, but also with the earliest engraved map of the New World, as Ruysch's map was.

[Sidenote: Sources of the Ruysch map.]

In speaking of the Ruysch map, Henry Stevens thinks that the cartographer laid down the central archipelago of America from the printed letter of Columbus, because it was the only account in print in 1507; but why restrict the sources of information to those in print, when La Cosa's map might have been copied, or the material which La Cosa employed might have been used by others, and when the Cantino map is a familiar copy of Portuguese originals, all of which might well have been known in the varied circles with which Ruysch is seen by his map to have been familiar?

[Sidenote: Portuguese geography and maps.]

While it is a fact that central and northern Europe got its cartographical knowledge of the New World almost wholly from Portugal, owing, perhaps, to the exertions of Spain to preserve their explorers' secrets, we do not, at the same time, find a single engraved Portuguese map of the early years of this period of discovery.

[Sidenote: Portuguese portolano.]

[Sidenote: Pedro Reinel.]

A large map, to show the Portuguese discoveries during years then recent, was probably made for King Emanuel, and it has come down to us, being preserved now at Munich. This chart wholly omits the Spanish work of exploration, and records only the coasts coursed by Cabral in the south, and by the Cortereals in the north. We have a further and similar record in the chart of Pedro Reinel, which could not have been made far from the same time, and which introduces to us the same prominent cape which in La Cosa's map had been called the English cape as "Cavo Razo," a name preserved to us to-day in the Cape Race of Newfoundland.

[Sidenote: Spain and Portugal conceal their geographical secrets.]

There is abundant evidence of the non-communicative policy of Spain. This secretiveness was understood at the time Robert Thorne, in 1527, complained, as well as Sir Humphrey Gilbert in his _Discoverie_, that a similar injunction was later laid by Portugal. In Veitia Linage's _Norte_ we read of the cabinets in which these maps were preserved, and how the Spanish pilot major and royal cosmographer alone kept the keys. There exists a document by which one of the companions of Magellan was put under a penalty of two thousand ducats not to disclose the route he traversed in that famous voyage. We know how Columbus endeavored to conceal the route of his final voyage, in which he reached the coast of Veragua.

[Sidenote: A strait to India.]

In the two maps of nearly equal date, being the earliest engraved charts which we have, the Ruysch map of 1508 and the so-called Admiral's map of 1507 (1513), the question of a strait leading to the Asiatic seas, which Columbus had spent so much energy in trying to find during his last voyage, is treated differently. We have seen that La Cosa confessed his uncertain knowledge by covering the place with a vignette. In the Ruysch map there is left the possibility of such a passage; in the other there is none, for the main shore is that of Asia itself, whose coast line uninterruptedly connects with that of South America. The belief in such a strait in due time was fixed, and lingered even beyond the time when Cortes showed there was no ground for it. We find it in Schöner's globes, in the Tross gores, and even so late as 1532, in the belated map of Münster.

[Sidenote: Earliest map to show America made north of the Alps.]

The map of the _Globus Mundi_ (Strassburg, 1509) has some significance as being the earliest issued north of the Alps, recording both the Portuguese and Spanish discoveries; though it merely gives the projecting angle of the South American coast as representing the developments of the west.

[Sidenote: English references to America.]

[Sidenote: Richard Eden.]

It is doubtful if any reference to the new discoveries had appeared in English literature before Alexander Barclay produced in 1509 a translation of Brant's _Ship of Fools_, and for a few years there were only chance references which made no impression on the literary instincts of the time. It was not till after the middle of the century, in 1553, that Richard Eden, translating a section of Sebastian Münster's _Cosmographia_, published it in London as a _Treatyse of the newe India_, and English-reading people first saw a considerable account of what the rest of Europe had been doing in contrast with the English maritime apathy. Two years later (1555), Eden, drawing this time upon Peter Martyr, did much in his _Decades of the Newe World_ to enlarge the English conceptions.

[Sidenote: The naming of America.]

But the most striking and significant of all the literary movements which grew out of the new oceanic developments was that which gave a name to the New World, and has left a continent, which Columbus unwittingly found, the monument of another's fame.

[Sidenote: 1504. September. Letter of Vespucius.]

It was in September, 1504, that Vespucius, remembering an old schoolmate in Florence, Piero Soderini, who was then the perpetual Gonfalonière of that city, took what it is supposed he had written out at length concerning his experiences in the New World, and made an abstract of it in Italian. Dating this on the 4th of that month, he dispatched it to Italy. It is a question whether the original of this abridged text of Vespucius is now known, though Varnhagen, with a confidence few scholars have shared, has claimed such authenticity for a text which he has printed.

[Sidenote: St. Dié.]

[Sidenote: Duke René.]

It concerns us chiefly to know that somehow a copy of this condensed narrative of Vespucius came into the hands of his fellow-townsman, Fra Giovanni Giocondo, then in Paris at work as an architect constructing a bridge over the Seine. It is to be allowed that R. H. Major, in tracing the origin of the French text, assumes something to complete his story, and that this precise genesis of the narrative which was received by Duke René of Lorraine is open to some question. The supposition that a young Alsatian, then in Paris, Mathias Ringmann, had been a friend of Giocondo, and had been the bearer of this new version to René, is likewise a conjecture. Whether Ringmann was such a messenger or not matters little, but the time was fast approaching when this young man was to be associated with a proposition made in the little village of St. Dié, in the Vosges, which was one of those obscure but far-reaching mental premonitions so often affecting the world's history, without the backing of great names or great events. This almost unknown place was within the domain of this same Duke René, a wise man, who liked scholars and scholarly tomes. His patronage had fostered there a small college and a printing-press. There had been grouped around these agencies a number of learned men, or those ambitious of knowledge. Scholars in other parts of Europe, when they heard of this little coterie, wondered how its members had congregated there. One Walter Lud, or Gualterus Ludovicus, as they liked to Latinize his name, a dependent and secretary of Duke René, was now a man not much under sixty, and he had been the grouper and manager of this body of scholars. There had lately been brought to join them this same Mathias Ringmann, who came from Paris with all the learning that he had tried to imbibe under the tutoring of Dr. John Faber. If we believe the story as Major has worked it out, Ringmann had come to this sparse community with all the fervor for the exploits of Vespucius which he got in the French capital from associating with that Florentine's admirer, the architect Giocondo.

Coming to St. Dié, Ringmann had been made a professor of Latin, and with the usual nominal alternation had become known as Philesius; and as such he appears a little later in connection with a Latin version of the French of Giocondo, which was soon made by another of the St. Dié scholars, a canon of the cathedral there, Jean Bassin de Sandacourt. Still another young man, Walter Waldseemüller, had not long before been made a teacher of geography in the college, and his name, as was the wont, had been classicized into Hylacomylus.

There have now been brought before the reader all the actors in this little St. Dié drama, upon which we, as Americans, must gaze back through the centuries as upon the baptismal scene of a continent.

[Sidenote: Waldseemüller.]

[Sidenote: _Cosmographiæ Introductio._]

The Duke had emphasized the cosmographical studies of the age by this appointment of an energetic young student of geography, who seems to have had a deft hand at map-making. Waldseemüller had some hand, at least, in fashioning a map of the new discoveries at the west, and the Duke had caused the map to be engraved, and we find a stray note of sales of it singly as early as 1507, though it was not till 1513 that it fairly got before the world in the Ptolemy of that year. Waldseemüller had also developed out of these studies a little cosmographical treatise, which the college press was set to work upon, and to swell it to the dignity of a book, thin as it still was, the diminutive quarto was made to include Bassin's Latin version of the Vespucius narrative, set out with some Latin verses by Ringmann. The little book called _Cosmographiæ Introductio_ was brought out at this obscure college press in St. Dié, in April and August, 1507. There were some varieties in each of these issues, while that part which constituted the Vespucius narrative was further issued in a separate publication.

It was in this form that Vespucius's narrative was for the first time, unless Varnhagen's judgment to the contrary is superior to all others, brought before the world. The most significant quality of the little book, however, was the proposition which Waldseemüller, with his anonymous views on cosmography, advanced in the introductory parts. It is assumed by writers on the subject that it was not Waldseemüller alone who was responsible for the plan there given to name that part of the New World which Americus Vespucius had described after the voyager who had so graphically told his experiences on its shores. The plan, it is supposed, met with the approval of, or was the outcome of the counsels of, this little band of St. Dié scholars collectively. It is not the belief of students generally that this coterie, any more than Vespucius himself, ever imagined that the new regions were really disjoined from the Asiatic main, though Varnhagen contends that Vespucius knew they were.

[Sidenote:_Mundus Novus._]

One thing is certainly true: that there wasno intention to apply the name which was now proposed to anything more than the continental mass of the Brazilian shore which Vespucius had coasted, and which was looked upon as a distinct region from the islands which Columbus had traversed. It had come to be believed that the archipelago of Columbus was far from the paradise of luxury and wealth that his extravagant terms called for, and which the descriptions of Marco Polo had led the world to expect, supposing the regions of the overland and oceanic discoverers to be the same. Further than this, a new expectation had been aroused by the reports which had come to Europe of the vaster proportions and of the brilliant paroquets--for such trivial aspects gave emphasis--of the more southern regions. It was an instance of the eagerness with which deluded minds, to atone for their first disappointment, grasp at the chances of a newer satisfaction. This was the hope which was entertained of this _Mundus Novus_ of Vespucius,--not a new world in the sense of a new continent.

The Española and its neighboring regions of Columbus, and the Baccalaos of Cabot and Cortereal, clothed in imagination with the descriptions of Marco Polo, were nothing but the Old World approached from the east instead of from the west. It was different with the _Mundus Novus_ of Vespucius. Here was in reality a new life and habitation, doubtless connected, but how it was not known, with the great eastern world of the merchants. It corresponded with nothing, so far as understood, in the Asiatic chorography. It was ready for a new name, and it was alone associated with the man who had, in the autumn of 1502, so described it, and from no one else could its name be so acceptably taken. Europe and Asia were geographically contiguous, and so might be Asia and the new "America."

[Sidenote: Eclipse of Columbus's name.]

The sudden eclipse which the name of Columbus underwent, as the fame of Vespucius ran through the popular mind, was no unusual thing in the vicissitudes of reputations. Factitious prominence is gained without great difficulty by one or for one, if popular issues of the press are worked in his interest, and if a great variety of favoring circumstances unite in giving currency to rumors and reports which tend to invest him with exclusive interest. The curious public willingly lends itself to any end that taxes nothing but its credulity and good nature.

[Sidenote: Fame of Vespucius.]

We have associated with Vespucius just the elements of such a success, while the fame of Columbus was waning to the death, namely: a stretch of continental coast, promising something more than the scattered trifles of an insalubrious archipelago; a new southern heavens, offering other glimpses of immensity; descriptions that were calculated to replace in new variety and mystery the stale stories of Cipango and Cathay: the busy yearnings of a group of young and ardent spirits, having all the apparatus of a press to apply to the making of a public sentiment; and the enthusiasm of narrators who sought to season their marvels of discovery with new delights and honors.

The hold which Vespucius had seized upon the imagination of Europe, and which doubtless served to give him prominence in the popular appreciation, as it has served many a ready and picturesque writer since, was that glowing redundancy of description, both of the earth and the southern constellations, which forms so conspicuous a feature of his narratives. It was the later voyage of Vespucius, and not his alleged voyage of 1497, which raised, as Humboldt has pointed out, the great interest which his name suggested.

[Sidenote: Columbus and Vespucius.]

Just what the notion prevailing at the time was of the respective exploits of Columbus and Vespucius is easily gathered from a letter dated May 20, 1506, which appears in a _Dyalogus Johannis Stamler de diversarum gencium sectis, et mundi regionibus_, published in 1508. In this treatise a reference is made to the letters of Columbus (1493) and Vespucius (1503) as concerning an insular and continental space respectively. It speaks of "Cristofer Colom, the discoverer of _new islands_, and of Albericus Vespucius concerning the new discovered _world_, to both of whom our age is most largely indebted." It will be remembered that an early misnaming of Vespucius by calling him Albericus instead of Americus, which took place in one of the early editions of his narrative, remained for some time to confuse the copiers of them.

[Sidenote: Vespucius on gravitation.]

If we may judge from a diagram which Vespucius gives of a globe with two standing men on it ninety degrees apart, each dropping a line to the centre of the earth, this navigator had grasped, together with the idea of the sphericity of the globe, the essential conditions of gravitation. There could be no up-hill sailing when the zenith was always overhead. Curiously enough, the supposition of Columbus, when as he sailed on his third voyage he found the air grow colder, was that he was actually sailing up-hill, ascending a protuberance of the earth which was like the stem end of a pear, with the crowning region of the earthly paradise atop of all! Such contrasts show the lesser navigator to be the greater physicist, and they go not a small way in accounting for the levelness of head which gained the suffrages of the wise.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: 1508. Duke René died.]

[Sidenote: 1509. _Globus Mundi._]

When Duke René, upon whom so much had depended in the little community at St. Dié, died, in 1508, the geographical printing schemes of Waldseemüller and his fellows received a severe reverse, and for a few years we hear nothing more of the edition of Ptolemy which had been planned. The next year (1509), Waldseemüller, now putting his name to his little treatise, was forced, because of the failure of the college press, to go to Strassburg to have a new edition of it printed (1509). The proposals for naming the continental discoveries of Vespucius seem not in the interim to have excited any question, and so they are repeated. We look in vain in the copy of this edition which Ferdinand Columbus bought at Venice in July, 1521, and which is preserved at Seville, for any marginal protest. The author of the _Historie_, how far soever Ferdinand may have been responsible for that book, is equally reticent. There was indeed no reason why he should take any exception. The fitness of the appellation was accepted as in no way invalidating the claim of Columbus to discoveries farther to the north; and in another little tract, printed at the same time at Grüniger's Strassburg press, the anonymous _Globus Mundi_, the name "America" is adopted in the text, though the small bit of the new coast shown in its map is called by a translation of Vespucius's own designation merely "_Newe Welt_."

[Sidenote: 1513. The Strassburg Ptolemy.]

The Ptolemy scheme bore fruit at last, and at Strassburg, also, for here the edition whose maps are associated with the name of Waldseemüller, and whose text shows some of the influence of a Greek manuscript of the old geographer which Ringmann had earlier brought from Italy, came out in 1513. Here was a chance, in a book far more sure to have influence than the little anonymous tract of 1507, to impress the new name America upon the world of scholars and observers, and the opportunity was not seized. It is not easy to divine the cause of such an omission. The edition has two maps which show this Vespucian continent in precisely the same way, though but one of them shows also to its full extent the region of Columbus's explorations. On one of these maps the southern regions have no designation whatever, and on the other, the "Admiral's map," there is a legend stretched across it, assigning the discovery of the region to Columbus.

We do not know, in all the contemporary literature which has come down to us, that up to 1513 there had been any rebuke at the ignorance or temerity which appeared in its large bearing to be depriving Columbus of a rightful honor. That in 1509 Waldseemüller should have enforced the credit given to Vespucius, and in 1513 revoked it in favor of Columbus, seems to indicate qualms of conscience of which we have no other trace. Perhaps, indeed, this reversion of sympathy is of itself an evidence that Waldseemüller had less to do with the edition than has been supposed. It is too much to assert that Waldseemüller repented of his haste, but the facts in one light would indicate it.

[Sidenote: The name America begins to be accepted.]

Like many such headlong projects, however, the purpose had passed beyond the control of its promoters. The euphony, if not the fitness, of the name America had attracted attention, and there are several printed and manuscript globes and maps in existence which at an early date adopted that designation for the southern continent. Nordenskiöld (_Facsimile Atlas_, p. 42) quotes from the commentaries of the German Coclæus, contained in the _Meteorologia Aristotelis_ of Jacobus Faber (Nuremberg, 1512) a passage referring to the "Nova Americi terra."

[Sidenote: 1516-17. First in a map.]

To complicate matters still more, within a few years after this an undated edition of Waldseemüller's tract appeared at Lyons,--perhaps without his participation,--which was always found, down to 1881, without a map, though the copies known were very few; but in that year a copy with a map was discovered, now owned by an American collector, in which the proposition of the text is enforced with the name America on the representation of South America. A section of this map is here given as the Tross Gores. In the present condition of our knowledge of the matter, it was thus at a date somewhere about 1516-17 that the name appeared first in any printed map, unless, indeed, we allow a somewhat earlier date to two globes in the Hauslab collection at Vienna. On the date of these last objects there is, however, much difference of opinion, and one of them has been depicted and discussed in the _Mittheilungen_ of the Geographische Gesellschaft (1886, p. 364) of Vienna. Here, as in the descriptive texts, it must be clearly kept in mind, however, that no one at this date thought of applying the name to more than the land which Vespucius had found stretching south beyond the equator on the east side of South America, and which Balboa had shown to have a similar trend on the west. The islands and region to the north, which Columbus and Cabot had been the pioneers in discovering, still remained a mystery in their relations to Asia, and there was yet a long time to elapse before the truth should be manifest to all, that a similar expanse of ocean lay westerly at the north, as was shown by Balboa to extend in the same direction at the south.

This Vespucian baptism of South America now easily worked its way to general recognition. It is found in a contemporary set of gores which Nordenskiöld has of late brought to light, and was soon adopted by the Nuremberg globe-maker, Schöner (1515, etc.); by Vadianus at Vienna, when editing Pomponius Mela (1515); by Apian on a map used in an edition of Solinus, edited by Camers (1520); and by Lorenz Friess, who had been of Duke René's coterie and a correspondent of Vespucius, on a map introduced into the Grüniger Ptolemy, published at Strassburg (1522), which also reproduced the Waldseemüller map of 1513. This is the earliest of the Ptolemies in which we find the name accepted on its maps.

[Sidenote: 1522. The name first in a Ptolemy.]

There is one significant fact concerning the conflict of the Crown with the heirs of Columbus, which followed upon the Admiral's death, and in which the advocates of the government sought to prove that the claim of Columbus to have discovered the continental shore about the Gulf of Paria in 1498 was not to be sustained in view of visits by others at an earlier date. This significant fact is that Vespucius is not once mentioned during the litigation. It is of course possible, and perhaps probable, that it was for the interests of both parties to keep out of view a servant of Portugal trenching upon what was believed to be Spanish territories. The same impulse could hardly have influenced Ferdinand Columbus in the silent acquiescence which, as a contemporary informs us, was his attitude towards the action of the St. Dié professors. There seems little doubt of his acceptance of a view, then undoubtedly common, that there was no conflict of the claims of the respective navigators, because their different fields of exploration had not brought such claims in juxtaposition.

[Sidenote: Who first landed on the southern main?]

[Sidenote: Vespucius's maps.]

[Sidenote: Vespucius not privy to the naming.]

Following, however, upon the assertion of Waldseemüller, that Vespucius had "found" this continental tract needing a name, there grew up a belief in some quarters, and deducible from the very obscure chronology of his narrative, which formulated itself in a statement that Vespucius had really been the first to set foot on any part of this extended main. It was here that very soon the jealousy of those who had the good name of Columbus in their keeping began to manifest itself, and some time after 1527,--if we accept that year as the date of his beginning work on the _Historie_,--Las Casas, who had had some intimate relations with Columbus, tells us that the report was rife of Vespucius himself being privy to such pretensions. Unless Las Casas, or the reporters to whom he referred, had material of which no one now has knowledge, it is certain that there is no evidence connecting Vespucius with the St. Dié proposition, and it is equally certain that evidence fails to establish beyond doubt the publication of any map bearing the name America while Vespucius lived. He had been made pilot major of Spain March 22, 1508, and had died February 22, 1512. We have no chart made by Vespucius himself, though it is known that in 1518 such a chart was in the possession of Ferdinand, brother of Charles the Fifth. The recovery of this chart would doubtless render a signal service in illuminating this and other questions of early American cartography. It might show us how far, if at all, Vespucius "sinfully failed towards the Admiral," as Las Casas reports of him, and adds: "If Vespucius purposely gave currency to this belief of his first setting foot on the main, it was a great wickedness; and if it was not done intentionally, it looks like it." With all this predisposition, however, towards an implication of Vespucius, Las Casas was cautious enough to consider that, after all, it may have been the St. Dié coterie who were alone responsible for starting the rumor.

[Sidenote: "America" not used in Spain.]

[Sidenote: 1541. Mercator first applied the name to both North and South America.]

It is very clear that in Spain there had been no recognition of the name "America," nor was it ever officially recognized by the Spanish government. Las Casas understood that it had been applied by "foreigners," who had, as he says, "called America what ought to be called Columba." Just what date should attach to this protest of Las Casas is not determinable. If it was later than the gore-map of Mercator in 1541, which was the first, so far as is known, to apply the name to both North and South America, there is certainly good reason for the disquietude of Las Casas. If it was before that, it was because, with the progress of discovery, it had become more and more clear that all parts of the new regions were component parts of an absolutely new continent, upon which the name of the first discoverer of any part of it, main or insular, ought to have been bestowed. That it should be left to "foreign writers," as Las Casas said, to give a name representing a rival interest to a world that Spanish enterprise had made known was no less an indignity to Spain than to her great though adopted Admiral.

[Sidenote: Spread of the name in central Europe.]

It happens that the suggestion which sprang up in the Vosges worked steadily onward through the whole of central Europe. That it had so successful a propagation is owing, beyond a doubt, as much to the exclusive spirit of the Spanish government in keeping to itself its hydrographical progress as to any other cause. We have seen how the name spread through Germany and Austria. It was taken up by Stobnicza in Poland in 1512, in a Cracow introduction to Ptolemy; and many other of the geographical writers of central and southern Europe adopted the designation. The _New Interlude_, published in England in 1519, had used it, and towards the middle of the century the fame of Vespucius had occupied England, so far as Sir Thomas More and William Cunningham represent it, to the almost total obscuration of Columbus.

It was but a question of time when Vespucius would be charged with promoting his own glory by borrowing the plumes of Columbus. Whether Las Casas, in what has been quoted, initiated such accusations or not, the account of that writer was in manuscript and could have had but small currency.

[Sidenote: 1533. Schöner accuses Vespucius of participation in the injustice.]

The first accusation in print, so far as has been discovered, came from the German geographer, Johann Schöner, who, having already in his earlier globes adopted the name America, now in a tract called _Opusculum Geographicum_, which he printed at Nuremberg in 1533, openly charged Vespucius with attaching his own name to a region of India Superior. Two years later, Servetus, while he repeated in his Ptolemy of 1535 the earlier maps bearing the name America, entered in his text a protest against its use by alleging distinctly that Columbus was earlier than Vespucius in finding the new main.

Within a little more than a year from the death of Vespucius, and while the maps assigned to Waldseemüller were pressed on the attention of scholars, the integralness of the great southern continent, to which a name commemorating Americus had been given, was made manifest, or at least probable, by the discovery of Balboa.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: A barrier suspected.]

Let us now see how the course of discovery was finding record during these early years of the sixteenth century in respect to the great but unsuspected barrier which actually interposed in the way of those who sought Asia over against Spain.

[Sidenote: Discoveries in the north.]

[Sidenote: 1504. Normans and Bretons.]

In the north, the discoveries of the English under Cabot, and of the Portuguese under the Cortereals, soon led the Normans and Bretons from Dieppe and Saint Malo to follow in the wake of such predecessors. As early as 1504 the fishermen of these latter peoples seem to have been on the northern coasts, and we owe to them the name of Cape Breton, which is thought to be the oldest French name in our American geography. It is the "Gran Capitano" of Ramusio who credits the Bretons with these early visits at the north, though we get no positive cartographical record of such visits till 1520, in a map which is given by Kunstmann in his _Atlas_.

[Sidenote: 1505. Portuguese.]

Again, in 1505, some Portuguese appear to have been on the Newfoundland coast under the royal patronage of Henry VII. of England, and by 1506 the Portuguese fishermen were regular frequenters of the Newfoundland banks. We find in the old maps Portuguese names somewhat widely scattered on the neighboring coast lines, for the frequenting of the region by the fishermen of that nation continued well towards the close of the century.

[Sidenote: 1506. Spaniards.]

There are also stories of one Velasco, a Spaniard, visiting the St. Lawrence in 1506, and Juan de Agramonte in 1511 entered into an agreement with the Spanish King to pursue discovery in these parts more actively, but we have no definite knowledge of results.

[Sidenote: 1517. Sebastian Cabot.]

[Sidenote: 1521. Portuguese.]

The death of Ferdinand, January 23, 1516, would seem to have put a stop to a voyage which had already been planned for Spain by Sebastian Cabot, to find a northwest passage; but the next year (1517) Cabot, in behalf of England, had sailed to Hudson's Strait, and thence north to 67° 30', finding "no night there," and observing extraordinary variations of the compass. Somewhat later there are the very doubtful claims of the Portuguese to explorations under Fagundes about the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1521.

[Sidenote: 1506. Ango's captains.]

[Sidenote: Denys's map.]

[Sidenote: 1518. Léry.]

By 1506 also there is something like certainty respecting the Normans, and under the influence of a notable Dieppese, Jean Ango, we soon meet a class of adventurous mariners tempting distant and marvelous seas. We read of Pierre Crignon, and Thomas Aubert, both of Dieppe, Jean Denys of Honfleur, and Jean Parmentier, all of whom have come down to us through the pages of Ramusio. It is of Jean Denys in 1506, and of Thomas Aubert a little later, that we find the fullest recitals. To Denys there has been ascribed a mysterious chart of the Gulf of St. Lawrence; but if the copy which is preserved represents it, there can be no hesitation in discarding it as a much later cartographical record. The original is said to have been found in the archives of the ministry of war in Paris so late as 1854, but no such map is found there now. The copy which was made for the Canadian archives is at Ottawa, and I have been favored by the authorities there with a tracing of it. No one of authority will be inclined to dispute the judgment of Harrisse that it is apocryphal. We are accordingly left in uncertainty just how far at this time the contour of the Golfo Quadrago, as the Gulf of St. Lawrence was called, was made out. Aubert is said to have brought to France seven of the natives of the region in 1509. Ten years or more later (1519, etc.), the Baron de Léry is thought to have attempted a French settlement thereabouts, of which perhaps the only traces were some European cattle, the descendants of his small herd landed there in 1528, which were found on Sable Island many years later.

[Sidenote: 1526. Nicholas Don.]

We know from Herrera that in 1526 Nicholas Don, a Breton, was fishing off Baccalaos, and Rut tells us that in 1527 Norman and Breton vessels were pulling fish on the shores of Newfoundland. Such mentions mark the early French knowledge of these northern coasts, but there is little in it all to show any contribution to geographical developments.

[From Barcia's _Herrera_.]]

[Sidenote: Attempts to connect the northern discoveries with those of the Spanish.]

[Sidenote: 1511. Peter Martyr's map.]

[Sidenote: 1512. Ponce de Leon.]

[Sidenote: 1513. March.]

[Sidenote: Florida.]

Before this, however, the first serious attempt of which we have incontrovertible evidence was made to connect these discoveries in the north with those of the Spanish in the Antilles. As early as 1511 the map given by Peter Martyr had shown that, from the native reports or otherwise, a notion had arisen of lands lying north of Cuba. In 1512 Ponce de Leon was seeking a commission to authorize him to go and see what this reported land was like, with its fountain of youth. He got it February 23, 1512, when Ferdinand commissioned him "to find and settle the island of Bimini," if none had already been there, or if Portugal had not already acquired possession in any part that he sought. Delays in preparation postponed the actual departure of his expedition from Porto Rico till March, 1513. On the 23d of that month, Easter Sunday, he struck the mainland somewhere opposite the Bahamas, and named the country Florida, from the day of the calendar. He tracked the coast northward to a little above 30° north latitude. Then he retraced his way, and rounding the southern cape, went well up the western side of the peninsula. Whether any stray explorers had been before along this shore may be a question. Private Spanish or Portuguese adventurers, or even Englishmen, had not been unknown in neighboring waters some years earlier, as we have evidence. We find certainly in this voyage of Ponce de Leon for the first time an unmistakable official undertaking, which we might expect would soon have produced its cartographical record. The interdicts of the Council of the Indies were, however, too powerful, and the old lines of the Cantino map still lingered in the maps for some years, though by 1520 the Floridian peninsula began to take recognizable shape in certain Spanish maps.

[Sidenote: Bimini.]

Just what stood for Bimini in the reports of this expedition is not clear; but there seems to have been a vague notion of its not being the same as Florida, for when Ponce de Leon got a new patent in September, 1514, he was authorized to settle both "islands," Bimini and Florida, and Diego Colon as viceroy was directed to help on the expedition. Seven years, however, passed in delays, so that it was not till 1521 that he attempted to make a settlement, but just at what point is not known. Sickness and loss in encounters with the Indians soon discouraged him, and he returned to Cuba to die of an arrow wound received in one of the forays of the natives.

[Sidenote: 1519. Pineda.]

It was still a question if Florida connected with any adjacent lands. Several minor expeditions had added something to the stretch of coast, but the main problem still stood unsolved. In 1519 Pineda had made the circuit of the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and at the river Panuco he had been challenged by Cortes as trenching on his government. Turning again eastward, Pineda found the mouth of the river named by him Del Espiritu Santo, which passes with many modern students as the first indication in history of the great Mississippi, while others trace the first signs of that river to Cabeça de Vaca in 1528, or to the passage higher up its current by De Soto in 1541. Believing it at first the long-looked-for strait to pass to the Indies, Pineda entered it, only to be satisfied that it must gather the watershed of a continent, which in this part was now named Amichel. It seemed accordingly certain that no passage to the west was to be found in this part of the gulf, and that Florida must be more than an island.

[Sidenote: 1520. Ayllon.]

[Sidenote: Spaniards in Virginia.]

While these explorations were going on in the gulf, others were conducted on the Atlantic side of Florida. If the Pompey Stone which has been found in New York State, to the confusion of historical students, be accepted as genuine, it is evidence that the Spaniard had in 1520 penetrated from some point on the coast to that region. In 1520 we get demonstrable proof, when Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon sent a caravel under Gordillo, which joined company on the way with another vessel bound on a slave-hunting expedition, and the two, proceeding northward, sighted the main coast at a river which they found to be in thirty-three and a half degrees of north latitude, on the South Carolina coast. They returned without further exploration. Ayllon, without great success, attempted further explorations in 1525; but in 1526 he went again with greater preparations, and made his landfall a little farther north, near the mouth of the Wateree River, which he called the Jordan, and sailed on to the Chesapeake, where, with the help of negro slaves, then first introduced into this region, he began the building of a town at or near the spot where the English in the next century founded Jamestown; or at least this is the conjecture of Dr. Shea. Here Ayllon died of a pestilential fever October 18, 1526, when the disheartened colonists, one hundred and fifty out of the original five hundred, returned to Santo Domingo.

[Sidenote: 1524. Gomez.]

[Sidenote: Chaves's map.]

[Sidenote: 1529. Ribero's map.]

While these unfortunate experiences were in progress, Estevan Gomez, sent by the Spanish government, after the close of the conference at Badajos, to make sure that there was no passage to the Moluccas anywhere along this Atlantic coast, started in the autumn of 1524, if the data we have admit of that conclusion as to the time, from Corunna, in the north of Spain. He proceeded at once, as Charles V. had directed him, to the Baccalaos region, striking the mainland possibly at Labrador, and then turned south, carefully examining all inlets. We have no authoritative narrative sanctioned by his name, or by that of any one accompanying the expedition; nor has the map which Alonso Chaves made to conform to what was reported by Gomez been preserved, but the essential features of the exploration are apparently embodied in the great map of Ribero (1529), and we have sundry stray references in the later chroniclers. From all this it would seem that Gomez followed the coast southward to the point of Florida, and made it certain to most minds that no such passage to India existed, though there was a lingering suspicion that the Gulf of St. Lawrence had not been sufficiently explored.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Shores of the Caribbean Sea.]

[Sidenote: Ojeda and Nicuessa.]

Let us turn now to the southern shores of the Caribbean Sea. New efforts at colonizing here were undertaken in 1508-9. By this time the coast had been pretty carefully made out as far as Honduras, largely through the explorations of Ojeda and Juan de la Cosa. The scheme was a dual one, and introduces us to two new designations of the regions separated by that indentation of the coast known as the Gulf of Uraba. Here Ojeda and Nicuessa were sent to organize governments, and rule their respective provinces of Nueva Andalusia and Castilla del Oro for the period of four years. Mention has already been made of this in the preceding chapter. They delayed getting to their governments, quarreled for a while about their bounds on each other, fought the natives with desperation but not with much profit, lost La Cosa in one of the encounters, and were thwarted in their purpose of holding Jamaica as a granary and in getting settlers from Española by the alertness of Diego Colon, who preferred to be tributary to no one.

All this had driven Ojeda to great stress in the little colony of San Sebastian which he had founded. He attempted to return for aid to Española, and was wrecked on the voyage. This caused him to miss his lieutenant Enciso, who was on his way to him with recruits. So Ojeda passes out of history, except so far as he tells his story in the testimony he gave in the suit of the heirs of Columbus in 1513-15.

[Sidenote: Pizarro.]

[From Barcia's _Herrera_.]]

New heroes were coming on. A certain Pizarro had been left in command by Ojeda,--not many years afterwards to be heard of. One Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, a poor and debt-burdened fugitive, was on board of Enciso's ship, and had wit enough to suggest that a region like San Sebastian, inhabited by tribes which used poisoned arrows, was not the place for a colony struggling for existence and dependent on foraging. So they removed the remnants of the colony, which Enciso had turned back as they were escaping, to the other side of the bay, and in this way the new settlement came within the jurisdiction of Nicuessa, whom a combination soon deposed and shipped to sea, never to be heard of. It was in these commotions that Vasco Nuñez de Balboa brought himself into a prominence that ended in his being commissioned by Diego Colon as governor of the new colony. He had, meanwhile, got more knowledge of a great sea at the westward than Columbus had acquired on the coast of Veragua in 1503. Balboa rightly divined that its discovery, if he could effect it, would serve him a good purpose in quieting any jealousies of his rule, of which he was beginning to observe symptoms.

[Sidenote: 1513. Balboa and the South Sea.]

So on the 1st of September, 1513, he set out in the direction which the natives hadindicated, and by the 24th he had reached a mountain from the topof which his guides told him he would behold the sea. On the 25th his party ascended, himself in front, and it was not long before he stood gazing upon the distant ocean, the first of Europeans to discern the long-coveted sea. Down the other slope the Spaniards went. The path was a difficult one, and it was three days before one of his advanced squads reached the beach. Not till the next day, the 29th, did Vasco Nuñez himself join those in advance, when, striding into the tide, he took possession of the sea and its bordering lands in the name of his sovereigns. It was on Saint Miguel's Day, and the Bay of Saint Miguel marks the spot to-day. Towards the end of January, 1514, he was again with the colony at Antigua del Darien. Thence, in March, he dispatched a messenger to Spain with news of the great discovery.

[Sidenote: Pedrarias.]

[Sidenote: 1517. Balboa executed.]

This courier did not reach Europe till after a new expedition had been dispatched under Pedrarias, and with him went a number of followers, who did in due time their part in thridding and designating these new paths of exploration. We recognize among them Hernando de Soto, Bernal Diaz, the chronicler of the exploits of Cortes, and Oviedo, the historian. It was from April till June, 1514, that Pedrarias was on his way, and it was not long before the new governor with his imposing array of strength brought the recusant Balboa to trial, out of which he emerged burdened with heavy fines. The new governor planned at once to reap the fruits of Balboa's discovery. An expedition was sent along his track, which embarked on the new sea and gathered spoils where it could. Pedrarias soon grew jealous of Balboa, for it was not without justice that the state of the augmented colony was held to compare unfavorably with the conditions which Balboa had maintained during his rule. But constancy was never of much prevalence in these days, and Balboa's chains, lately imposed, were stricken off to give him charge of an exploration of the sea which he had discovered. Once here, Balboa planned new conquests and a new independency. Pedrarias, hearing of it through a false friend of Balboa, enticed the latter into his neighborhood, and a trial was soon set on foot, which ended in the execution of Balboa and his abettors. This was in 1517.