American Men of Action | Page 9

discoveries they made were of no great importance. Not a trace did he find of that golden country, which he sought so eagerly, and at last, broken in health and fortune, in disfavor at court, stripped of the rewards and dignities which had been promised him, he died in a little house at Valladolid on the twentieth of May, 1506. He believed to the last that it was the Indies he had discovered, never dreaming that he had given a new continent to the world.
Yet is his fame secure, for the task which he accomplished was unique, never to be repeated. He had robbed the Sea of Darkness of its terrors, and while those who followed him had need of courage and resolution, it was no longer into the unknown that they sailed forth. They knew that there was no danger of sailing over the edge and dropping off into space; they knew that there were no dragons, nor monsters, nor other blood-curdling terrors to be encountered, but that the other side of the world was much like the side they lived on. That was Columbus's great achievement. To cross the Atlantic, perilous as the voyage was, was after all a little thing; but actually to _start_--to surmount the wall of bigotry and ignorance which, for centuries, had shut the west away from the east, to surmount that wall and throw it down by a faith which rose superior to human belief and incredulity and terror of the unknown--there was the miracle!
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Many there were to follow, each contributing his mite toward the task of defining the new continent. Perhaps you have seen a photographic negative slowly take shape in the acid bath--the sharp out-lines first, then, bit by bit, the detail. Just so did America grow beneath the gaze of Europe, though two centuries and more were to elapse before it stood out upon the map clean-cut and definite from border to border.
First to follow Columbus, and the first white men since the vikings to set foot on the North American continent, which Columbus himself had never seen, were John and Sebastian Cabot, Italians like their predecessor, but in the service of the King of England and with an English ship and an English crew prophetic of the race which was, in time, to wrest the supremacy of the continent from the other nations of Europe. They explored the coast from Newfoundland as far south, perhaps, as Chesapeake Bay, and upon their discoveries rested the English claim to North America, though they themselves are little more than faint and ill-defined shadows upon the page of history, so little do we know of them.
And just as the New World was eventually to be dominated by a nation other than that which first took possession of it, so was it to be named after a man other than its discoverer: an inconsiderable adventurer named Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine, who accompanied three or four Spanish expeditions as astronomer or pilot, but who had no part in any real discovery in the New World. He wrote a number of letters describing the voyages which he claimed to have made, and one of these was printed in a pamphlet which had a wide circulation, so that Vespucci's name came to be connected in the public mind with the new land in the west much more prominently than that of any other man. In 1502, in a little book dealing with the new discoveries, the suggestion was made that there was nothing "rightly to hinder us from calling it [the New World] Amerige or America, i.e., the land of Americus," and America it was thenceforward--one of the great injustices of history. Since it had to be so, let us be thankful that it was Vespucci's first name which was selected, and not his last one.
Meanwhile, the Spaniards had pushed their way across the Caribbean and explored the shores of the gulf, finding at last in Mexico a land of gold. World-worn, disease-racked Ponce de Leon, conqueror and governor of Porto Rico, struggled through the everglades of Florida, seeking the fountain of eternal youth, and getting his death-wound there instead. Ferdinand Magellan, man of iron if there ever was one, seeking a western passage to the Moluccas, skirted the coast of South America, wintered amid the snows of Patagonia, worked his way through the strait which bears his name, and held on westward across the Pacific, making the first circumnavigation of the globe, a feat so startling in audacity that there is none in our day to compare with it, except, perhaps, a journey to another planet. Magellan himself never again saw Europe, meeting his death in a fight with the natives of the Philippines, but one of his ships, with eighteen men,