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 way through the strait which bears his name, and held on westward across the Pacific, making the first circumnavigation of the globe, a feat so startling in audacity that there is none in our day to compare with it, except, perhaps, a journey to another planet. Magellan himself never again saw Europe, meeting his death in a fight with the natives of the Philippines, but one of his ships, with eighteen men, struggled south along the coast of Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and so home.

Half a century was to elapse before the feat was repeated—this time by that slave-trader, pirate, and doughty scourge of the Spaniard, Sir Francis Drake, who, following in Magellan's wake, and pausing only long enough to harry the Spanish settlements in Chili and Peru and capture a Spanish treasureship, held northward along the coast as far as southern Oregon, and then turned westward across the Pacific, around the Cape of Good Hope, and home again, where Elizabeth, in spite of Spanish protests, was waiting to reward him with a touch of sword to shoulder. The Muse of History smiles ironically when she records that Drake's principal discovery in the New World was that of the potato, which he introduced into England.

Not until Drake's voyage was completed was the vast extent of the North American continent even suspected, although its interior had been explored in many directions. Hernando de Soto, with an experience gained with Pizarro in the conquest of Peru, and succeeding Ponce de Leon in the governorship of Florida, marched with a great expedition through what is now South Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia, and came out, at last, upon the Mississippi, only to find burial beneath its waters, while the tattered remnant of his force staggered back to Mexico.

Francisco de Coronado, marching northward from Mexico, in search of the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, found only the squalid villages of the Zuni Indians, after stumbling on the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, and marching as far north as the southern line of Kansas. Jacques Cartier, following another will-o'-the-wisp to the north, and searching for the storied city of Norembega, supposed to exist somewhere in the wilderness south of Cape Breton, found it not, indeed, but laid the foundations for the great empire which France was to establish along the St. Lawrence.

And Henry Hudson, in the little Half-Moon, chartered by a company of thrifty Dutchmen to search for the northwest passage, blundered instead upon the mighty river which bears his name, explored it as far north as the present city of Albany, and paved the way for that picturesque Dutch settlement which grew into the greatest city of the New World. He did more than that, for, persevering in the search and sailing far to the north, he came, at last, into the great bay also named for him, where tragic fate lay waiting. For there, in that icy fastness of the north, his mutinous crew bound him, set him adrift in a small boat, and sailed away and left him.

So, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the New World was fairly well defined upon the maps which the map-makers were always industriously drawing; and so were the spheres of influence where each nation was to be for a time paramount; the Spaniards in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch along the Hudson, the French on the St. Lawrence, and the English on the long coast to the south. But in all the leagues and leagues from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf, nowhere had the white man as yet succeeded in gaining a permanent foothold.

Although the continent of North America had been discovered by John Cabot in 1497, nearly a century elapsed before England made any serious attempt to take possession of it. Cabot's voyages had created little impression, for he had returned from them empty-handed; instead of finding the passage to the Indies which he sought, he had discovered nothing but an inconvenient and apparently worthless barrier stretching across the way, and for many years the great continent was regarded only in that light, and such explorations as were made were with the one object of getting through it or around it. In fact, as late as 1787, opinion in Europe was divided as to whether the discovery of the New World had been a blessing or a curse.

But Spain had been working industriously. The honor of giving America to the world was hers, and she followed that first discovery by centuries of such pioneering as the world had never seen. Her explorers overran Mexico and Peru, discovered the Mississippi, the Pacific, carved their way up into the interior of the continent, looked down upon the wonders of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, founded settlements up and down the land from Kansas to Chili—yes, and did more than that. They opened the first churches, set up the first presses, printed the first books, wrote the first histories, drew the first accurate maps. They established schools among the Indians, sent missionaries to them, translated the Bible into twelve Indian dialects, made thousands of converts, and established an Indian policy as humane and enlightened—once Spanish supremacy was recognized—as any in the world. The savages with whom Spain had to contend were the deadliest, the most cruel, that Europeans ever encountered—no more resembling the warriors of King Philip and the Powhatan than a house-cat resembles a panther. They conquered them without extermination, and converted them to Christianity! An amazing feat, and one which disposes for all time of that old, outworn legend that the Spain of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was a moribund and degenerate nation.

But a change was at hand. The world moved, and Spain, chained to an outworn superstition, did not move with it. The treasure she drew from Mexico and Peru she poured out to prop the tottering pillars of church despotism; and the end came when, in 1588, Elizabeth's doughty captains wiped out the "invincible" armada, and dethroned Spain for all time from her position as mistress of the seas.

It was then that English eyes turned toward the New World and that projects of colonization were set afoot in earnest; and the one great dominant hero of that early movement was Sir Walter Raleigh. He had accompanied his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, on a voyage to the