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CHAPTER Own traditions or knowledge, fables suggested by the credulous questions of their conquerors. In course of his romantic search, on Palm Sunday, which the Spaniards 1512. call Pasqua de Flores, Ponce fell in with that peninsula which separates the Gulf of Mexico from the Atlantic Ocean, and which he took for another great island like Haiti or Cuba. He landed at no great distance, probably, from the harbor of St. Augustine; and disregarding alike the rights and the hostility of the natives, with the formalities usual on such occasions, took possession for the King of Spain; and, to commemorate the day of the discovery, gave to this new region the name of FLORIDA.

Adventurers of that period did not conceive themselves authorized to undertake enterprises of conquest, except by some royal commission, and Ponce proceeded to Spain to procure such authority. During his protracted absence, Vasquez de Aillon, another Spanish navigator, visited the coast further north, the region, perhaps, about 1521. St. Helena's Sound, in what is now South Carolina.

1525.

He

also proceeded to Spain, and procured there a grant of this newly-discovered region, by the name of CHICORA.

The discovery and conquest, by Cortez and his followers, of the rich and populous kingdom of Mexico, then just completed, had excited anew the Spanish imagination. Ponce presently returned to Florida with the design of planting a colony, or, more properly, of conquering a province. But hardly had the crews of his two ships landed, when the natives attacked them with poisoned arrows, killed the greater part, and obliged the rest to re-embark. Equally unsuccessful was the attempt of Vasquez to obtain possession of his province of Chicora. The Indians, whose friends he had kidnapped on his former visit, remembered the injury, and repulsed him with loss.

Other Spanish navigators, in the regular intercourse

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now established between the West India Islands and the CHAPTER newly-conquered Mexico, discovered land to the northward, and soon ascertained the general outline of the Mexican Gulf. On the southwestern coast of that gulf some Spanish settlements were already established—the first on the continent-to serve as harbors for the Mexican empire.

The nautical skill of Sebastian Cabot, for which England furnished no occupation, had sought employment in the Spanish service; but, during the period of these recent Spanish discoveries, Cabot appears to have returned to England, and to have undertaken a new enterprise, not without an important influence on the future exploration of North America. The wealth derived by the Portuguese from the trade to India was fast making Lisbon the richest city in Europe. The voyage by the Cape of Good Hope, besides being claimed as a monopoly by the Portuguese, was also very long; and hence the revival of the scheme of Columbus for a western passage to India. The outline of the American coast along the Atlantic was as yet very imperfectly known. The New World was perhaps a series of islands, among which a western passage might be found. The discovery of the 1513. South Sea by Nunez de Balboa, who had penetrated across the Isthmus of Darien, demonstrated the narrowness of the continent in that part, and encouraged these hopes. In pursuit of such a passage, Cabot sailed from England. The date of this voyage is uncertain, and the accounts of it contradictory and obscure; but he seems to have penetrated into that great northern bay, which Hudson re-discovered near a century afterward, where his course was cut short, neither by land nor ice, but by the cowardice and disobedience of one of his subordinate offiThe English were not prepared to follow up this

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CHAPTER enterprise, and Cabot, returning to the service of Spain, found employment in exploring the La Plata, discovered by Juan de Solis the same year in which Ponce had first seen Florida.

A western passage to India was in fact discovered, though not in the direction in which Cabot had sought it. The adventurous Magellan, keeping boldly to the south, entered the straits which bear his name, and by that stormy and dangerous passage penetrated into the 1520. South Pacific, across which he boldly steered for India. He died on the voyage; but his ship, after discovering the Philippine Islands, returned to Spain by the Cape of Good Hope, thus realizing the bold vision of Columbus, and completing the first circumnavigation of the globe. But the southwestern passage to India by the Straits of Magellan, besides being claimed as a Spanish monopoly, was still longer and more dangerous than that by the Cape of Good Hope. A western or northwestern passage still remained, therefore, a problem for navigators, and an object of commercial desire and pursuit.

The great wealth derived by the Spaniards from the conquest of Mexico attracted new attention to America. 1524. Verrazzani, a Florentine, dispatched from France on the first voyage of discovery undertaken from that country at the public expense, after touching at several places further south, discovered and entered the harbors now so familiar as New York and Newport, whence he coasted the then nameless shores of New England and Nova Scotia as far as the 50th degree of north latitude. Verrazzani's letter to Francis I., giving a brief narrative of this voyage, contains the earliest description extant of the coasts and aboriginal people of what are now the United States.

The inhabitants of the north of Italy, especially the

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Genoese, the Venetians, and the Florentines, were at this CHAPTER period the most commercial, industrious, and enlightened people in Europe, and, except perhaps the Portuguese, the best versed in the science and art of navigation. Of the navigators who first explored the shores of the New World, Columbus, the elder Cabot, Amerigo, and Verrazzani were Italians. But Genoa and Florence had lost their liberties, and were sinking in a rapid decline; Venice, become a close aristocracy, was employing all her energies in attempting to shield her commerce with India by the ancient route of Egypt and the Red Sea against the effects of Portuguese competition by the new passage round the Cape of Good Hope. The eminent navigators above named were not employed by their native cities. They sailed in the service of foreign princes. Spain, Portugal, England, and France profited by the science of Italy, and acquired vast possessions in America, where no Italian state ever possessed a foot of territory. Whether Verrazzani undertook a second voyage is uncertain; but his track was immediately followed by Gomez, dispatched by the Spanish council of the Indies, it would seem, as a sort of rival to Cabot, in search of a western or northwestern passage into the Pacific, which Gomez had already traversed, as the companion of Magellan, in the first circumnavigation of the globe. present voyage degenerated, like that of Cortereal a quarter of a century before, into a mere kidnapping expedition, a practice already familiar to the Spaniards of the West Indies, who sought by this means to fill up the gap which their inexorable avarice occasioned in the once numerous population of Haiti and the adjacent islands. This resource, however, was found quite insufficient, and slaves from Africa, more capable of endurance, already began to be imported into the West Indies.

His 1525.

Las Casas,

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CHAPTER the friend and protector of the Indians, had suggested and favored this substitute a suggestion which the colonists were prompt to seize, and which the benevolent bishop lived to condemn and lament. The system of personal servitude was fast disappearing from Western Europe, where the idea had obtained that it was inconsistent with Christian duty for Christians to hold Christians as slaves. But this charity did not extend to heathen and infidels. The same system of morality which held the possessions of unbelievers as lawful spoils of war, delivered over their persons also to the condition of servitude. Hence, in America, the slavery of the Indians, and presently of negroes, whom experience proved to be much more capable of enduring the hardships of that condition.

The exploration of Florida hitherto had been limited to the coast; Pamphilo de Narvaez was first to penetrate inland. Narvaez had taken an active part in the conquest of Cuba, and subsequently had been dispatched by the governor of that island to dispute with Cortez the conquest of Mexico, but on that occasion had fallen a prisoner into the hands of his abler rival. Setting sail 1528. from Cuba in search of a new Mexico, he landed with three hundred men on the northern shore of the gulf, near the Bay of Appalache. After wandering inland for some distance, and finding nothing satisfactory, he turned westward, and struggled on through pine forests and morasses, and across rivers, as far, perhaps, as the Bay of Pensacola. Discouraged and greatly reduced in numbers, his company built small boats, in which they hoped to reach some Spanish settlement; but the boats were driven on shore in a storm, and four men only of the whole company succeeded at last, after long wanderings, in reaching Mexico by land.

While the Spaniards were engrossed with the conquest