[CHAPTER II]
A HISTORICAL OUTLINE
It would be manifestly impossible, in the present work, to enter in detail upon the wide field of the history of the Spanish American States. Yet, just as in order to gain an intelligent idea topographically of the region we must refer to its main geographical features and disposition, so must we cast a glance at its historical outlines. Those readers who are drawn on to fill in the detail have ample material at hand in the books recently published on the Latin American States.[4]
The beginnings of history and of geography are, of course, inextricably interwoven, and in the case of America this is markedly so. America, in a sense, was discovered by accident, and its first discoverers did not know they had brought to being a new continent. Columbus, to his dying day, believed it was India he had reached, which he had set out to reach, and would not be persuaded to the contrary.
On the maps of the earlier geographers there was, in fact, no room for America. From the shores of Europe and Africa to those of Cathay—the old, mediaeval, and still the poetical name for China, the great Asiatic coast—stretched one sea, the Western Ocean, broken by some small islands and Cipango, or Japan. Scholars and dreamers, studying isolated passages in cryptic and classic writings, or arguing from general principles, in which the wish was at times father to the thought, believed that by sailing west India could be reached.
These dreams of poets and the beliefs of scholars crystallized in the mind of the Genoese sailor, Columbus, a man of humble origin, and after many disappointments and disillusions, in the interviewing of kings and high personages for aid and patronage (among them the King of England, but England with characteristic lack of imagination would have none of it, and the King of Portugal, who tried to cheat him), was enabled to set sail by aid of the Queen of Spain—women having more imagination than men—in three small vessels, and made his great and memorable landfall in the New World on October 12, 1492, in the Bahamas.
These islands Columbus and his officers believed to be those described by Marco Polo, as forming the eastern end of Asia; and thus arose the name of "Las Indias," the Indies, which America long retained.
As a result of this discovery, a controversy arose between Spain and Portugal, for, in 1454, the Pope had given the Portuguese—by what right he himself doubtless best knew—exclusive control of exploration and conquest on the road to the Indies, although his Bull had in view only the eastern route. Now, however, "spheres of influence" might easily clash. The two Powers repaired again to the Pope, successor of the former, and he, drawing a line across the map of the world from north to south, in a position west of the Azores a hundred leagues, awarded Spain everything that might lie beyond it. The Pope was a Spaniard. The Portuguese did not think the award fair. (It might have been mentioned that the Portuguese King, his "especial friend," had treacherously endeavoured to forestall Columbus by dispatching a caravel on his proposed route secretly, instead of helping him, a futile errand, however.) They protested, and by common consent the line was shifted to 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, corresponding to-day to the 50th degree of longitude.
Such a line cuts South America across the mouth of the Amazon, and the Spaniards claimed the right to exclude all other people and all trade but their own from beyond this line.
The subsequent conquest and discovery of America embodies some of the most romantic and stirring episodes in history. In his last voyage Columbus explored the West Indies and reached South America, landing at the mouth of the Orinoco, and he sailed along the coast of the Caribbean and Central America to Nombre de Dios—"Name of God"—near Colon. Henry VII of England—who had declined to help Columbus—now kindly permitted John Cabot to sail, in 1499, who discovered Newfoundland and did other valuable exploits. Hispaniola was the first Spanish Settlement, on the Island of Hayti, and this spread to the mainland. In 1513 Vasco Nuñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Darien and Panama and beheld the "South Sea," as described in our chapter upon Central America. The insistent hope of a "strait" or passage through these lands, giving a way to the Spice Islands of the Indies, was now given up, and when Magellan, in 1520, passed through the strait which bears his name, and sailed across the Pacific, it was understood that a vast continent and a vast ocean divided the world from Asia here, a new world, and that lying mainly within the sphere of influence which the Pope had so generously assigned to Spain.