A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 3 | Page 3

viceroy of all the countries he might discover; that the court of Spain might have a colour for excepting the discoveries made by others from the grant which had been conferred on him, before its prodigious value was at all thought of. Ojeda did little more than revisit some of the previous discoveries of Columbus: Perhaps he extended the knowledge of the coast of Paria. In this expedition, Ojeda was accompanied by an Italian named Amerigo or Almerico Vespucci, whose name was Latinized, according to the custom of that age, into Americus Vespucius. This person was a Florentine, and appears to have been a man of science, well skilled in navigation and geography. On his return to Europe, he published the first description that appeared of the newly discovered continent and islands in the west, which had hitherto been anxiously endeavoured to be concealed by the monopolizing jealousy of the Spanish government. Pretending to have been the first discoverer of the continent of the New World, he presumptuously gave it the appellation of America after his own name; and the inconsiderate applause of the European literati has perpetuated this usurped denomination, instead of the legitimate name which the new quarter of the world ought to have received from that of the real discoverer.
Attempts have been made in latter times, to rob COLUMBUS of the honour of having discovered America, by endeavouring to prove that the West Indies were known in Europe before his first voyage. In some maps in the library of St Mark at Venice, said to have been drawn in 1436, many islands are inserted to the west of Europe and Africa. The most easterly of these are supposed in the first place to be the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries and Cape Verds. Beyond these, but at no great distance towards the west, occurs the _Ysola de Antillia_; which we may conclude, even allowing the date of the map to be genuine, to be a mere gratuitous or theoretic supposition, and to have received that strange name, because the obvious and natural idea of Antipodes had been anathematized by Catholic ignorance. Still farther to the _north-west_, another fabulous island is laid down, under the strange appellation of Delaman Satanaxia, or the land created by the hand of Satan. This latter may possibly have some reference to an ignorant position of Iceland. Both were probably theoretic, for the fancied purpose of preserving a balance on the globe with the continents and islands already known; an idea which was transferred by learned theorists, and even persisted in for a considerable part of the eighteenth century, under the name of the _Terra Australis incognita_; and was only banished by the enlightened voyages of scientific discovery, conducted under the auspices of our present venerable sovereign.
The globe of Martin Behaim, in 1492, repeats the island of Antillia, and inserts beyond it to the west, the isle of St Brandan or Ima, from a fabulous work of the middle ages. Occasion has already occurred to notice two other ancient pretended discoveries of the New World: the fabulous voyages of the Zenos, another Venetian tale; and the equally fabulous Portuguese island of the Seven Churches, abounding in gold, and inhabited by Spanish or Portuguese Christians. Britain even had its Madoc prince of North Wales; and a white nomadic nation in North America, speaking Welsh, is still among the puerile fancies of this nineteenth century.
All these pretended proofs of any previous knowledge of the western world, resolve into complete demonstrations of perfect ignorance, even in the art of deception and forgery. Not only is the world indebted to COLUMBUS for this great and brilliant discovery, but every subsequent improvement in navigation, geography and hydrography, is justly attributable to his illustrious example. Much and deservedly as our COOK and his coadjutors and followers have merited from their country and the world, they are all to be considered as pupils of the truly great archnavigator COLUMBUS; himself a worthy scholar from the nautical academy of the truly illustrious and enlightened father of discoveries, DON HENRY. All other discoveries, whether nautical or by land, dwindle into mere ordinary events, when compared with his absolutely solitary exertion of previous scientific views. The sagacious and almost prophetic induction, persevering ardour, cosmographical, nautical, and astronomical skill, which centered in COLUMBUS, from the first conception to the perfect completion of this great and important enterprize, the discovery of a large portion of the globe which had lain hid for thousands of years from the knowledge of civilization and science, is altogether unexampled. He was incontestibly the first bold and scientific mariner who ever dared to launch out into the trackless ocean, trusting solely to the guidance of the needle and the stars, and to his own transcendent skill and intrepidity.
There can be no