A few lines more as to the Spanish and Portuguese navigators in these waters, and then we shall have done with them for the present. In 1499 one of the Pinçons sailed from Spain straight to the Amazon, as has been mentioned, avoiding the West Indies, as if he knew precisely whither he was bound, and reached there in January of 1500. A few months later a large Portuguese expedition under Pedro Cabral, starting for India around the cape, was blown so far to the west that it ran against Brazil. Everybody was hitting upon untrodden shores in those inspiring days, and Cabral promptly took possession for his king. As this shore was outside (east of) the hemisphere assigned by the Pope to the Spanish, the Portuguese kept it for 389 years, in spite of Pinçon’s priority. In 1508 Ojeda obtained the government of the northern coast of South America, and Nicuesa of the region north of the Gulf of Darien; and with the arrival of these adventurers in New Spain began that era of rapine and horror which will forever disgrace the Spanish name. The rapacious governors and their wild crews quarreled and fought with each other as well as with the downtrodden natives, and exploration was carried on by piracy. A learned man, Martin Enciso, went out to take command in 1510, but he was deposed by his soldiers the next year and sent back to Europe, where he made the first book printed in Spanish (1519) describing America. His place was taken by Vasco Nuñez Balboa, who entered upon a career of exploration and peaceful conquest, generally conciliating the Indians, who told him of another sea not far to the west, and on September 25, 1513, guided him to the summit of a hill near Panama, whence he, first of Europeans, gazed upon the Pacific. Who can imagine the emotions of such a sight!—for it told the Spaniards that this land was not the eastern margin of Asia, but a new continent. Balboa made his way through the forests as rapidly as he could, and on the 29th, wading into the surf, banner in hand, took possession of the waters in the name of the King of Castile.
Balboa at once began preparations to utilize his discovery, for the Indians had also excited him and his men by tales of a country to the south abounding in gold. He cut and shaped timbers for small ships, and had with enormous trouble and labor transported these across the isthmus, intending there to build a fleet and sail southward, when he was superseded in command by a new governor, Pedrarias. This man, a jealous and brutal adventurer, on a false pretext of disloyalty arrested and beheaded Balboa before he could get away—an act that “was one of the greatest calamities that could have happened to South America at that time; for ... a humane and judicious man would have been the conqueror of Peru, instead of the cruel and ignorant Pizarro.” The frightful destruction of the country of the Incas soon followed, while Cortés overran Mexico and De Soto invaded Florida.
It has doubtless by this time been in the mind of more than one reader to ask whether, while the men of the Mediterranean region were making these notable searchings for new shores, the men of northern Europe were standing idle. What were the mariners of France and the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Great Britain, doing? Well, all were doing something, and some of them produced results of novel seafaring that were well worth the getting, but these were principally in far northern waters, as we shall read in the next chapter. It was not until the opening of the sixteenth century that in England, at least, that era of far voyaging began which signalized the Elizabethan age on the sea as much as the poets and dramatists and statesmen-writers of her court distinguished it on land.
A PEACEFUL DAY ON THE SPANISH MAIN.
It was, however, earlier than that—in the reign of Henry VII—that England’s story of discovery begins, and the first names are those of two Italians known in English as John and Sebastian Cabot, father and son, who were then residents of Bristol. The Bristol folk were at that time the foremost mariners of England, who often went to Iceland and all the nearer isles; and they firmly believed in certain traditional islands and coasts far away to the west, which seem to have been composed of no better material than the airy structures of the sunset clouds and the romantic tales of Phenician sailors and other travelers in the dawn of history. As long ago as when Strabo wrote, a century before the birth of Christ, these things were of old belief, and he recounts the delights then told of the “Isles of the Blest,” west of the farthest verge of Africa. When the Canary Islands became known as facts, the myth moved farther west; and when acquaintance with the Azores proved them to be only natural earth with a fair share of its ills, as well as of its good, people insisted that still other islands must lie farther away, where the Elysian Fields basked in perpetual summer and men were eternally happy. The old idea charms us even yet when we sing “Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood stand dressed in living green.”
VOYAGING TO THE ISLES OF THE BLEST.
But no such higher rendering occurred to the men of the earlier time. They believed firmly in the actual existence of these ever-fortunate islands under the sunset horizon of the Atlantic, and (in the north) called them the Isles of St. Brandon, the “green isle of Brazil” (the root of which word seems to express the idea of redness, such as appears in low sunset clouds), the Isle of the Seven Cities or Antillia, and by other names. Ferdinand Columbus, a son of Christopher, says in his “History” that his father fully expected to meet, “before he came to India, a very convenient island or continent from which he might pursue with more advantage his main design.” This does not prove that Columbus put any faith in the reality of these old notions, nor does he seem to be responsible for the fact that the name Antilles was immediately attached to the archipelago he actually did meet with, and The Brazils to a part of the mainland next found. These names had been appearing on conjectural maps of the Atlantic side of the earth for many years before his time; and that they represented realities to many hard-headed merchants and sailors of his time is shown conclusively by the fact that between 1480 and 1487 at least two carefully planned naval expeditions had gone from Bristol, England, in search of them. How much vague memories of early Norse and Irish findings in the west may have given weight in Bristol to these old myths is hard to say; but at any rate it was there the search for this pot of gold at the end of the rainbow bore unexpected and momentous results, but all were surprised at the distance involved.
About 1496 John Cabot, then a resident of Bristol, proposed to the king an expedition in search of a new route to the Indies by sailing due west from Ireland. Henry VII was excited by the news of Columbus’ southerly findings, and was eager to secure something of the kind for England. Nevertheless, although the king granted privileges that might prove profitable in case of success, he seems to have furnished no money. Cabot, therefore, sailed away, privately equipped, in a small caravel named Matthew, carrying only eighteen persons.