h expedition), and reached
the mainland eighteen days before Cabot saw it. The statement of
encyclopaedias that Vespucci "probably got as far north as Cape Hatteras"
is ridiculous. The proof is absolute that he never saw an inch of the
New World north of the equator. Returning to Spain in the latter part of
1498, he sailed again, May 16, 1499, with Ojeda, to San Domingo, a
voyage on which he was absent about eighteen months. He left Lisbon on
his third voyage, May 10, 1501, going to Brazil. It is not true, despite
the encyclopaedias, that he discovered and named the Bay of Rio Janeiro;
both those honors belong to Cabral, the real discoverer and pioneer of
Brazil, and a man of vastly greater historical importance than Vespucci.
Vespucci's fourth voyage took him from Lisbon (June 10, 1503) to Bahia,
and thence to Cape Frio, where he built a little fort. In 1504 he
returned to Portugal, and in the following year to Spain, where he died
in 1512.

These voyages rest only on Vespucci's own statements, which are not to
be implicitly believed. It is probable that he did not sail at all in
1497, and quite certain that he had no share whatever in the real
discoveries in the New World.

The name "America" was first invented and applied in 1507 by an
ill-informed German printer, named Waldzeemueller, who had got hold of
Amerigo Vespucci's documents. History is full of injustices, but never
a greater among them all than the christening of America. It would have
been as appropriate to call it Walzeemuellera. The first map of America
was made in 1500 by Juan de la Cosa, a Spaniard,--and a very funny map
it would seem to the schoolboy of to-day. The first geography of America
was by Enciso, a Spaniard, in 1517.

It is pleasant to turn from an overrated and very dubious man to those
genuine but almost unheard-of Portuguese heroes, the brothers Gaspard
and Miguel Corte-Real. Gaspard sailed from Lisbon in the year 1500, and
discovered and named Labrador,--"the laborer." In 1501 he sailed again
from Portugal to the Arctic, and never returned. After waiting a year,
his brother Miguel led an expedition to find and rescue him; but he too
perished, with all his men, among the ice-floes of the Arctic. A third
brother wished to go in quest of the lost explorers, but was forbidden
by the king, who himself sent out a relief expedition of two ships; but
no trace of the gallant Corte-Reals, nor of any of their men, was ever
found.

Such was the