[3] Antilles, an early name of the West Indies.
[4] Terra Firma, literally meaning firm land; a name first used by the Spaniards to distinguish the American continent, or that part first discovered, from the West India Islands.
[5] Christian Name, from its discovery on Easter Sunday, Pascha Floridum—Flowery Easter.
[6] Burning One's Ships has passed into a proverb often used to illustrate some act of extraordinary hardihood, by which one puts it out of his power to draw back from an undertaking. Cortez only followed the example of the Emperor Julian in ancient Rome, and of William the Conqueror in England.
[7] South Sea. The Pacific Ocean was so first called.
[8] Disaster befell the attempt of Narvaez upon Florida in 1528. Look it up.
DE SOTO'S DISCOVERY OF THE MISSISSIPPI.[1]
"One may buy gold at too dear a price."—Spanish.
If we look at the earliest Spanish maps on which the Gulf of Mexico is laid down, not only do we find the delta of a great river put in the place where we would expect to see, on our maps of to-day, the Mississippi making its triumphal entry into the sea, but the map-makers have even given it a name—Rio del Espiritu Santo—meaning, in their language, the River of the Holy Ghost.