Great Epochs in American History, Vol. I | Page 2

known anywhere else in
Europe. Indeed, had the Northmen made it known to other Europeans,
it is quite unlikely that any active interest would have been taken in it.
Europe in the year 1000 was self-centered. She had troubles enough to
absorb all her energies. Ambition for the expansion of her territory, for
trade with peoples beyond the great waters, nowhere existed. Most
European states were engaged in a grim struggle to hold what they
had--to hold it from the aggressions of their neighbors, to hold it
against the rising power of Islam.
Columbus did not know he had discovered the continent we call
America. He died in the belief that he had found unknown parts of Asia;
that he had discovered a shorter and safer route for trade with the East,

and that he had given new proof of the assertions made by astronomers
that the earth is round. The men who immediately followed
him--Vespucius and the Cabots--believed only that they had confirmed
and extended his discovery. Cabot first found the mainland of North
America, Vespucius the mainland of South America, but neither knew
he had found a new continent. Each saw only coast lines; made
landings, it is true; saw and conversed with natives, and Vespucius
fought with natives; but of the existence of a new world, having
continents comparable to Europe, Asia, or Africa, with an ocean on
both sides of them, neither ever so much as dreamed.
Under the splendid inspiration of Prince Henry the Navigator, an
inspiration that remained potent throughout Portugal long after his
death, Bartholomew Dias, five years before Columbus made his voyage
to America, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, actually sailed into the
Indian Ocean, and was pressing on toward India when his crew, from
exhaustion, refused to go farther, and he was forced to return home.
Vasco da Gama, ten years later (1497), following the route of Dias,
actually reached India and thus demonstrated that, instead of going
overland by caravan, India could be reached by sailing around
two-thirds of Africa.
Spanish and Portuguese navigators--Columbus, Da Gama, Dias--alike
sought a new and shorter route for trade with the Far East--one,
moreover, that would not be molested by the advancing and aggressive
Turks. Columbus believed, and so believed Spain and Portugal, that he
had found a shorter route than the one Diaz and Da Gama found.
Disputes arose between the rival powers as to titles and benefits from
the discoveries, and it was because of these that Pope Alexander VI
issued his famous Bull, dividing between the two all lands discovered
by the navigators, an act which, in our time, has become a curious
anomaly, since later proof of the existence of continents between the
Atlantic and Pacific made the Pope's decree virtually a partitioning of
all America between two favored countries as sole beneficiaries.
Da Gama returned from India laden with Eastern treasure. Columbus
returned from America poorer than when he sailed from the port of

Palos. Columbus was believed to have found Asia, but he brought
home, after several voyages, none of the wealth of Asia. Hence those
fierce storms that beat about his head, leading to his imprisonment and
to his death in Valladolid, a broken-hearted man.
The Spanish explorers who in the next century followed Columbus,
came to America in pursuit of silver and gold. Rich stores had already
been found by their countrymen in Mexico and the Peruvian Andes. In
meetings with Indians farther north wearing ornaments of gold, the new
explorers became convinced that mineral wealth also existed in the
lands now called the United States, and especially in the fabled "Seven
Cities of Cibola," in the Southwest. Out of this belief came the bold
enterprises of Ponce de Leon, De Vaca, Coronado and De Soto, while
out of the Spanish successes in finding gold in America came the first
known voyage into New York Harbor, that of Verazzano, the Italian in
French service, who was seeking Spanish vessels returning richly
laden.
Of the French and English explorers of later years--Cartier, Champlain,
Marquette, Hudson, Drake--who came to Cape Breton, the St.
Lawrence, Hudson, and Mississippi valleys, the California coast--the
motives were different. These came to fish for cod, to explore the
country, to plant the banners of the Sun King and Queen Bess over new
territories, to convert the Indians, to find a northwest passage--that
problem of the navigators which baffled them all until 1854--362 years
after the landing of Columbus--when an English ship, under Sir Robert
McClure, sailed from Bering Sea to Davis Strait, and thus proved that
America, North and South, was an island.
Spaniards, however, had dreamed of a northwest passage before any of
these. When Magellan passed through the strait that bears his name,
and his ship completed the first circumnavigation of the