of Europe, though two centuries and more were to elapse before it stood
out upon the map clean-cut and definite from border to border.

First to follow Columbus, and the first white men since the vikings to
set foot on the North American continent, which Columbus himself had
never seen, were John and Sebastian Cabot, Italians like their
predecessor, but in the service of the King of England and with an
English ship and an English crew prophetic of the race which was, in
time, to wrest the supremacy of the continent from the other nations of
Europe. They explored the coast from Newfoundland as far south, perhaps,
as Chesapeake Bay, and upon their discoveries rested the English claim
to North America, though they themselves are little more than faint and
ill-defined shadows upon the page of history, so little do we know of
them.

And just as the New World was eventually to be dominated by a nation
other than that which first took possession of it, so was it to be named
after a man other than its discoverer: an inconsiderable adventurer
named Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine, who accompanied three or four
Spanish expeditions as astronomer or pilot, but who had no part in any
real discovery in the New World. He wrote a number of letters describing
the voyages which he claimed to have made, and one of these was printed
in a pamphlet which had a wide circulation, so that Vespucci's name came
to be connected in the public mind with the new land in the west much
more prominently than that of any other man. In 1502, in a little book
dealing with the new discoveries, the suggestion was made that there was
nothing "rightly to hinder us from calling it [the New World] Amerige or
America, i.e., the land of Americus," and America it was
thenceforward--one of the great injustices of history. Since it had to
be so, let us be thankful that it was Vespucci's first name which was
selected, and not his last one.

Meanwhile, the Spaniards had pushed their way across the Caribbean and
explored the shores of the gulf, finding at last in Mexico a land of
gold. World-worn, disease-racked Ponce de Leon, conqueror and governor
of Porto Rico, struggled through the everglades of Florida, seeking the
fountain of eternal youth, and getting his death-wound there instead.
Ferdinand Magellan, man of iron if there ever was one, seeking a western
passage to the Moluccas, skirted the coast of South America, wintered
amid the snows of Patagonia, worked his