saw the American continent before
Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci.

III.--Of the great navigators of that unexampled age of discovery, as
Spain was honored by Columbus and England by Cabot, so Portugal was
honored by De Gama. Vasco de Gama, the greatest of Portuguese
navigators, left Lisbon in 1497 to explore the unknown world lying east
of the Cape of Good Hope, arriving at Calicut, May, 1498. Before that,
Diaz had actually rounded the cape, but seems to have done so merely
before a high gale. He named it "the stormy Cape." Cabrera, or Cabral,
was another great explorer sent from Portugal to follow in the route of
De Gama; but being forced into a southwesterly route by currents in the
south Atlantic, he landed on the continent of America, and annexed the
new country to Portugal under the name of Brazil. Cabrera afterward drew
up the first commercial treaty between Portugal and India.

IV.--Magellan, scarcely inferior to Columbus, brought honor as a
navigator both to Portugal and Spain. For the latter country, when in
the service of Charles V, he revived the idea of Columbus that we may
sail to Asia or the Spice Islands by sailing _west_. With a squadron of
five ships, 236 men, he sailed, in 1519, to Brazil and convinced
himself that the great estuary was not a strait. Sailing south along the
American coast, he discovered the strait that bears his name, and
through it entered the Pacific, then first sailed upon by Europeans,
though already seen by Balboa and his men "upon a peak in Darien"--as
Keats puts it in his famous sonnet.[7] From the continuous fine weather
enjoyed for some months, Magellan naturally named the new sea "the
Pacific." After touching at the Ladrones and the Philippines, Magellan
was killed in a fight with the inhabitants of Matan, a small island.
Sebastian, his Basque lieutenant (mentioned in Chapter I) then
successfully completed the circumnavigation of the world, sailing first
to the Moluccas and thence to Spain.

[Footnote 7: The poet, however, makes the clerical blunder of writing
Cortez for Balboa.]

V.--Of all the world-famous navigators contemporary with Colon, the
Genoese, there remains only one deserving of our notice, and that
because his name is for all time perpetuated in that of the New World.
Amerigo (Latin _Americus_) Vespucci, born at Florence, 1451, had
commercial occupation in Cadiz, and was employed by the Spanish
Government. He has been charged with a fraudulent attempt to usurp