Third, balsam of liverwort, the extract of buchu, Peruvian hair-dye, or the sozodont, notwithstanding the strenuous assertions to the contrary of the candid proprietors of those invaluable preparations. The only extract he succeeded in making was a promise of honors, never performed, although highly labelled; and it is well known that the only color he succeeded in obtaining in America, for his own hair, was gray. From the ingredients of this blanching powder he ultimately died himself at Valladolid.
Fourth, nor is there any better foundation for the common error, that he was the discoverer of the Tammany Society, and furnished designs and colored drawings for the wigwam, in which the Democratic braves find so many original and aboriginal voters. Indian polls, from which the hair had been carefully removed, he did see, and even took a few back with him to Spain; but it is needless to say that these polling-places were not the exemplars of those which Tammany so often and so lovingly pats on the head.
Fifth, equally erroneous is the general belief that he discovered “Hail Columbia,” although it is true that he got enough of it, in the sense that some illy educated small boys now use that phrase.
Discovery of Newfoundland.
(p. 71)
Ponce de Leon, following up the discoveries of Columbus, landed in Florida, in 1512, and endeavored to find there a fountain possessing the properties of giving to the imbiber perpetual youth. Although he did not succeed in this quest, it seems probable that some one else did, for it is well known that several Americans, such as Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, and others, have lived quite too long, while other distinguished Americans, as Burr and others, have manifested in a very lively way a green old age, cutting up capers which none but very young people would have thought of. He also discovered the Dry Tortugas,—a temperance station of the first water, famous as the habitation of Dr. Mudd.
A few years later, A. D. 1517, Mexico was unfortunately discovered, and from that time to the present has been the scene of constant embroilments, beginning with the broiling of Montezuma, by Cortez, and ending with the unhappy stew made by Maximilian for himself. Mexico is the American abattoir,—the general slaughter-house of our continent. Ice for the preservation of the quarters of her victims, where no quarter was shown, is obtained from the elevated plains into which the country is as yet insufficiently broken up.
We ought to mention the voyage, in 1520, of a Portuguese, Magellan by name, who touched at the Canaries for yellow birds, coasted along the shores of Brazil in search of other golden products, but finally brought up in a very tight place, on the extreme southern tip of our western globe; calling the spot, under great pressure, the Straits of Magellan.
He became so exhilarated, however, at Cape Horn, that he kept on, like the man with the cork leg, and went all around the world, being its first circumventor, and giving the first proof of the gyrating effects of mixing liquors with water.
De Soto first chanced upon the Mississippi River, and, in 1542, was flung upon it with all his heavy armor on,—“a sink-or-swim” experiment, which resulted in his remaining down at the bottom.