Rodrigo de Triana, who, poor fellow, never got the promised reward, and, as tradition says, went to Africa and became a Mohammedan in despair.

The landing of Columbus has been commemorated by the fine design of Turner, engraved in Rogers's poems. Columbus wore complete armor, with crimson over it, and carried in his hand the Spanish flag, with its ominous hues of gold and blood; his captains bore each a banner with a green cross, and the initials F. and Y. for "Ferdinand" and "Ysabel," surmounted by their respective crowns. They fell upon their knees; they chanted the "Te Deum," and then with due legal formalities took possession of the island in behalf of the Spanish sovereigns. It was the island Guanahani, which Columbus rechristened San Salvador, but whose precise identity has always been a little doubtful. Navarrete identified it with Turk's Island; Humboldt and Irving with Cat Island; Captain Becher, of the English Hydrographic Office, wrote a book to prove that it was Gatling Island; while Captain Fox and Harrisse the latest authority-believe it to have been Acklin's Key. It is a curious fact that the island which made the New World a certainty should itself remain uncertain of identification for four hundred years.

With the glory and beauty of that entrance of European civilization on the American continent there came also the shame. Columbus saw and described the innocent happiness of the natives. They were no wild savages, no cruel barbarians. They had good faces, he says; they neither carried nor understood weapons, not even swords; they were generous and courteous; "very gentle, without knowing what evil is, without killing, without stealing" (muy mansos, y sin saber que sea mal, ni matar á otros, ni prender). They were poor, but their houses were clean; and they had in them certain statues in female form, and certain heads in the shape of masks well executed. "I do not know," he says, in Navarrete's account,

"whether these are employed for adornment or worship" (per hermosura ó adoran). The remains of Aztec and Maya civilization seem less exceptional, when we find among these firstseen aborigines the traces of a feeling for art.

Columbus seems to have begun with that peculiar mixture of kindness and contempt which the best among civilized men are apt to show towards savages. "Because," he said, “they showed much kindliness for us, and because I knew that they would be more easily made Christians through love than fear, I gave to some of them some colored caps, and some strings of glass beads for their necks, and many other trifles, with which they were delighted, and were so entirely ours that it was a marvel to see." There is a certain disproportion here between the motive and the action. These innocent savages gave him a new world for Castile and Leon, and he gave them some glass beads and little red caps. If this had been the worst of the bargain it would have been no great matter. The tragedy begins when we find this same high-minded admiral writing home to their Spanish Majesties in his very first letter that he shall be able to supply them with all the gold they need, with spices, cotton, mastic, aloes, rhubarb, cinnamon, and slaves; "slaves, as many of these idolators as their Highnesses shall command to be shipped" (esclavos quanto mandaran cargar y seran de los ydolatres). Thus ended the visions of those simple natives who, when the Europeans first arrived, had run from house to house, crying aloud, "Come, come and see the people from heaven" (la gente del cielo). Some of them lived to suspect that the bearded visitors had quite a different origin.

But Columbus shared the cruel prejudices of his age; he only rose above its scientific ignorance. That was a fine answer made by him when asked, in the council called by King Ferdinand, how he knew that the western limit of the Atlantic was formed by the coasts of Asia. "If indeed," said he,

"the Atlantic has other limits in that direction than the lands of Asia, it is no less necessary that they should be discovered, and I will discover them." He probably died without the knowledge that he had found a new continent, but this answer shows the true spirit of the great captain. Columbus has been the subject of much discussion. He has been glorified into something like sainthood by such Roman Catholic eulogists as Roselly de Lorges, and has been attacked with merciless vituperation by such writers as Goodrich; but time does not easily dim the essential greatness of the man. Through him the Old and New worlds were linked together for good or for evil, and once united, they never could be separated.

There was another Spanish voyager whose name will always be closely joined with that of Columbus, and who is still regarded by many persons as having unjustly defrauded his greater predecessor, inasmuch as it was he, not Columbus, who gave his name to the New World. Unlike Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci was never imprisoned, enchained, or impoverished, and was thus perhaps the happier of the two during his life, though Columbus himself wrote of him: "Fortune has been adverse to him as she has to many others." Since his death his fate has been reversed, and he has suffered far more than Columbus at the hands of posterity. The very fact that his name was applied to the American continent caused many to regard him as but a base and malignant man. It was believed, moreover, down to the time when Irving wrote, that Vespucci's alleged voyage of 1497 was a fabrication, and that he did not really reach the mainland of South America until 1499, whereas Columbus reached it the year before. But the elaborate works of Varnhagen have changed the opinion of scholars on this point, and it is now believed that Vespucci reached the southern half of the continent in the same year when Cabot first reached the northern. If this be so, it turns out not to be quite so unjust, after all, that his name should have been

given to the continent, for he really was the first to attain and describe it definitely, although it may justly be said that after Columbus had reached the outlying islands all else was but a question of time.

The works of Varnhagen, published partly at Lima and partly at Vienna and Paris, are costly and elaborate; they include the minutest investigations as to the text of all the letters, proved or reported, of Vespucci, and the most careful investigation of all internal evidence bearing on the authenticity of those documents. His conclusion is that Vespucci's first voyage was made in 1497-8, as he claimed; that he reached Honduras, and coasted all along the shores of Yucatan, of the Gulf of Mexico, and of Florida, thus proving Cuba to be an island, when Columbus still held it to be part of the mainland; and that he had reached Cape Canaveral before he quitted the shores and set sail for Portugal. The land which he discovered he called "The Land of the Holy Cross," and he believed it to be a promontory of Asia.

His discoveries attracted much attention in Germany, and it was a geographer named Waldsee-Müller who first printed, in 1507, one of his letters at the little town of St. Dié, in Lorraine. This same author, believing the "Land of the Holy Cross" to be a new quarter of the globe discovered by Vespucci (alia quarta pars per Americanum Vespucium . . . inventa), suggested, in a book called "Cosmographiæ Introductio,” and published in 1507, the year after the death of Columbus, that this new land should be named for Americus, since Europe and Asia had women's names (Amerigen quasi Americi terram sive Americam dicendam cum et Europa et Asia a mulieribus sua sortita sint nomina). It is curious to read this sentence in the quaint clear type of that little book, copies of which may be found in the Harvard College library, and in other American collections, and to think that every corner of this vast double continent now owes its name to what was perhaps a

random suggestion of one obscure German. The use of the title gradually spread, after this suggestion, and apparently because it pleased the public ear; but no two geographers agreed

as to the shape of the land it represented. Indeed, WaldseeMüller, a man who was not content with one hard name for himself, but must needs have two-being called in Latin Hy. lacomylus-seems not to have been quite sure what name the newly discovered lands should have, after all. Six years after he had suggested the name America, he printed (in 1513) for an edition of Ptolemy a chart called "Tabula Terre Nove," on which the name of America does not appear, but there is represented a southern continent called "Terra Incognita," with an express inscription saying that it was discovered by Columbus. This shows in what an uncertain way the bap