ality of mankind, so far from imagining that there could be
any such country as the _new world_ or West Indies, the very notion of any
such thing being supposed to exist was considered as extravagant and
absurd, for every one believed that all to the westwards of the Canary
islands was an immense and unnavigable ocean. Yet some of the ancients
have left hints that such western lands existed. In the close of the
second act of his tragedy of Medea, Seneca says, "The time will come, when
the ocean shall become navigable, and a vast land or New World shall be
discovered." St Gregory, in his exposition of the Epistle of St Clement,
says, "There is a new world, or even worlds, beyond the ocean." We are
informed by other authors, that a Carthaginian merchant ship accidentally
discovered in the ocean, many days sail from our ancient continent, an
incredibly fruitful island, full of navigable rivers, having plenty of
wild beasts, but uninhabited by men, and that the discoverers were
desirous of settling there; but, having given an account of this discovery
to the senate of Carthage, they not only absolutely prohibited any one to
sail thither, but put all who had been there to death, the more
effectually to prevent any others from making the attempt. Yet all this is
nothing to the purpose, as there is no authentic memorial of this supposed
voyage, and those who have spoken of it incidentally have given no
cosmographical indications of its situation, by means of which the admiral
Christopher Columbus, who made the first discovery of the West Indies,
could have acquired any information to guide him in that great discovery.
Besides, that there were no wild beasts, either in the windward or leeward
islands which he discovered, those men who would rob Columbus, in part at
least, of the honour of his great discovery, misapply the following
quotation from the _Timaeus_ of Plato: "There is no sailing upon the ocean,
because its entrance is shut up by the Pillars of Hercules. Yet there had
formerly been an island in that ocean, larger than all Europe, Asia, and
Africa in one; and from thence a passage to other islands, for such as
went in search of them, and from these other inlands people might go to
all the opposite continent, near the true ocean." These detractors from
the honour of Columbus, in explaining the words of Plato after their own
manner, evince more wit than truth, when they insist that the shut up
passage is the strait of Gibr