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HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.

CHAPTER I.

VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY. TERRITORIAL CLAIMS.

WE

I.

HEN Columbus undertook his first voyage across CHAPTER the Atlantic, the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope was as yet unknown. The fabulous wealth of the 1492. regions of the East, especially as set forth by the Venetian Marco Polo, fired the bold imagination of that great navigator, sustained his hopes, and prompted his persevering efforts. In the newly-invented astrolabe, the predecessor of the quadrant, he possessed an instrument to ascertain his latitude, and in the compass, a guide across the sea. With scientific heroism, relying on the theory of the earth's rotundity, while the prevailing under-estimate as to its size diminished to his ardent mind the dangers of an untried voyage-first of men, he dared to hope to reach Asia by a western passage. He thought he had done so; the new lands he had found he called the WEST INDIES; and he zealously persisted, and died in the belief, that those new lands were a part of Cathay, or Farther India.

Amerigo Vespucci, following presently in the track of Columbus, seems first to have perceived in those western regions a NEW WORLD. As such he early announced it in his famous letter to Lorenzo de Medici; 1504. and to that remarkable announcement, adding, as it did,

I.

CHAPTER a fourth quarter to the globe, and soon confirmed by subsequent discoveries, ought we not to ascribe the name AMERICA-not, as Spanish historians jealous for the fame of Columbus would have it, to an alleged successful fraud on the part of Vespucci, in passing himself off as having first seen the western continent?

That continent, in fact, was first seen neither by Columbus nor Vespucci. It has even been conjectured, on the strength of an old Icelandic ballad, that, five centuries before the time of those great navigators, the North American coasts were reached by Danish adventurers from Iceland. Greenland they certainly discovered and colonized; but their alleged visit to North America, though not without warm advocates, rests on evidence of too mythic a character to find a place in authentic history. To the Cabots, at the head of an English expedition, the historical honor belongs of having, first of Europeans, seen the main land of the western continent.

England at that period was a feudal monarchy, with a population of hardly three millions, without trade or manufactures, just emerging from the miseries of a disputed succession and a long civil war. Scotland, unquiet and barbarous, constituted a separate and often hostile kingdom. Ireland, equally barbarous and unquiet, was kept, with difficulty, in partial subjection. Henry VII., who united in himself and his queen the rival claims of the two royal houses of York and Lancaster, eager for revenue, and anxious, like all the monarchs of that day, to create a counterbalance to the power of the feudal nobility, was disposed to encourage the long-neglected arts of peace. But that talent for nautical and commercial enterprise for which the English and their descendants. in America have since been so distinguished, as yet lay dormant. The trade and navigation of the British Isles

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