CHAPTER XIII
The Conquest of the Sea
1492–1517

I. COLUMBUS

IT was “manifest destiny” that someone in this age would dare the perils of the Atlantic to find India or “Cathay.” For two thousand years legend had told of an Atlantis across the sea; and later myths had placed beyond the Atlantic a fountain whose waters conferred eternal youth. The failure of the Crusades compelled the discovery of America; the domination of the eastern Mediterranean by the Turks, the closing or obstruction of land routes by the Ottomans at Constantinople and by anti-Christian dynasties in Persia and Turkestan, made the old avenues of East-West trade costly and dangerous. Italy and even France might cling to the remnants of that trade over every discouragement of tolls and war, but Portugal and Spain were too far west to make such arrangements profitably; their problem was to find another route. Portugal found one around Africa; nothing was left for Spain but to try a passage west.

The growth of knowledge had long since established the sphericity of the earth. The very errors of science encouraged audacity by underestimating the width of the Atlantic, and picturing Asia as lying ready for conquest and exploitation on the farther side. Scandinavian mariners had reached Labrador in 986 and 1000, and had brought back news of an immense continent. In 1477, if we may believe his own account, Christopher Columbus visited Iceland,¹ and presumably heard proud traditions of Leif Ericsson’s voyage to “Vinland.” All that was needed now, for the great adventure, was money. Bravery abounded.

Columbus himself, in the Mayorazzo or will that he made before setting out on his third voyage across the Atlantic, named Genoa as his birthplace. It is true that in his extant writings he always calls himself by the Spanish name Cristóbal Colón, never by the Italian name Cristoforo Colombo; but this was presumably because he was writing in Spanish, living in Spain, or sailing for a Spanish sovereign, not because he had been born in Spain. Possibly his forebears had been Spanish Christianized Jews who had migrated to Italy; the evidence of Hebraic blood and sentiment in Columbus is almost convincing.² His father was a weaver, and Christoforo appears to have followed that craft for a time in Genoa and Savona. The biography written by his son Ferdinand credits him with studying astronomy, geometry, and cosmography at the University of Pavia, but the university records do not list him, and he himself tells us that he became a sailor at fourteen.³ For in Genoa every road leads down to the sea.

In 1476 a ship on which he was heading for Lisbon was attacked by pirates; the vessel foundered; Columbus relates that with the support of some wreckage he swam six miles to the shore; but the great admiral had high powers of imagination. A few months later (he says) he sailed for England as seaman or captain, thence to Iceland, thence to Lisbon. There he married, and settled down as a maker of maps and charts. His father-in-law was a mariner who had served Prince Henry the Navigator; doubtless Columbus heard from him some glowing tales of the Guinea coast. In 1482, probably as an officer, he joined a Portuguese fleet that sailed that coast to Elmina. He read with interest, and many annotations, Pope Pius II’s Historia rerum gestarum, which suggested the circumnavigability of Africa.⁴

But his studies more and more inclined him to the west. He knew that Strabo, in the first century of our era, had told of an attempt to circle the globe. He was familiar with Seneca’s lines: “An age will come in after years when Ocean will loose the bonds of things, and an immense land will appear, and the prophet Tiphys will reveal new worlds, and Thule [Iceland? ] will no longer be the end of the earth.”⁵ He had read The Book of Ser Marco Polo, which glorified the riches of China and placed Japan 1,500 miles east of the mainland of Asia. He made over a thousand notes in his copy of Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago mundi. He accepted the prevailing estimate of the earth’s circumference as 18,000 to 20,000 miles; and combining this with Polo’s displacement of Japan, he reckoned that the nearest Asiatic islands would be some 5,000 miles west of Lisbon. He had heard of a letter (1474) in which the Florentine physician Paolo Toscanelli had advised King Affonso V of Portugal that a shorter way to India than that around Africa could be found by sailing 5,000 miles west. Columbus wrote to Toscanelli, and received an encouraging reply. His purpose matured, and seethed in his brain.

About 1484 he proposed to John II of Portugal that the King should equip three vessels for a year of exploration across the Atlantic and back; that Columbus should be appointed “Great Admiral of the Ocean” and perpetual governor of whatever lands he might discover; and that he should receive a tenth of all revenues and precious metals thereafter derived from those lands by Portugal.⁶ (Obviously the idea of spreading Christianity was secondary to material considerations.) The King submitted the proposal to a committee of savants; they rejected it on the ground that Columbus’s estimate of the distance across the Atlantic as merely 2,400 miles was far too small. (It was approximately correct from the Canary Islands to the West Indies.) In 1485 two Portuguese navigators proposed a similar project to King John, but agreed to finance it themselves; John gave them at least his blessing; they sailed (1487), followed too northern a route, encountered rough westerly winds, and turned back in despair. Columbus renewed his appeal (1488); the King invited him to an audience; Columbus came just in time to witness the triumphant return of Bartholomeu Dias from a successful rounding of Africa. Absorbed in prospects of an African route to India, the Portuguese government abandoned consideration of a passage across the Atlantic. Columbus turned to Genoa and Venice, but they too gave him no encouragement, for they had a vested interest in the eastward route to the East. He commissioned his brother to sound out Henry VII of England, who invited Columbus to a conference. When the invitation reached him he had already committed himself to Spain.

He was now (1488) some forty-two years old; tall and thin, with long face, ruddy complexion, eagle nose, blue eyes, freckles, bright red hair already turning gray, and soon to be white. His son and his friends described him as modest, grave, affable, discreet, temperate in eating and drinking, fervently pious. Others alleged that he was vain, that he paraded and inflated the titles he received, that he ennobled his ancestry in his imagination and his writings, and that he bargained avidly for his share in the New World’s gold; however, he was worth more than he asked. He deviated occasionally from the Ten Commandments, for at Córdoba, after his wife’s death, Beatriz Enríquez bore him an illegitimate son (1488). Columbus did not marry her, but he provided well for her in his life and his will; and as most dignitaries in those agile times had such by-products, no one seems to have been put out by the accident.

Meanwhile he had laid his petition before Isabella of Castile (May 1, 1486). She referred it to a group of advisers presided over by the saintly Archbishop Talavera. After long delay they reported the plan to be impracticable, arguing that Asia must be much farther west than Columbus supposed. Nevertheless Ferdinand and Isabella gave him an annuity of 12,000 maravedís ($840?), and in 1489 they furnished him with a letter ordering all Spanish municipalities to provide him with food and lodging; perhaps they wished to keep an option on his project lest by some chance it should bestow a continent on a rival king. But when the Talavera committee, after reconsidering the scheme, again rejected it, Columbus resolved to submit it to Charles VIII of France. Fray Juan Pérez, head of the monastery of La Rabida, dissuaded him by arranging another audience with Isabella. She sent him 20,000 maravedis to finance his trip to her headquarters at the siege city of Santa Fé. He went; she heard his plea kindly enough, but her advisers once more discountenanced the idea. He resumed his preparations for going to France (January 1492).

At this critical juncture a baptized Jew prodded the march of history. Luis de Santander, finance minister to Ferdinand, reproached Isabella for lack of imagination and enterprise, tempted her with the prospect of converting Asia to Christianity, and proposed to finance the expedition himself with the aid of his friends. Several other Jews—Don Isaac Abrabanel, Juan Cabrero, Abraham Senior—supported his plea.⁷ Isabella was moved, and offered to pledge her jewels to raise the needed sum. Santander judged this unnecessary; he borrowed 1,400,000 maravedís from the fraternity of which he was treasurer; he added 350,000 out of his own pocket; and Columbus somehow got together 250,000 more.* On April 17, 1492, the King signed the requisite papers. Then or later he gave Columbus a letter to the Khan of Cathay; it was China, not India, that Columbus hoped to reach, and which to the end of his life he thought he had found. On August 3 the Santa Maria (his flagship), the Pinta, and the Niña sailed from Palos with eighty-eight men, and provisions for a year.

II. AMERICA

They headed south to the Canary Islands, seeking winds from the east before they faced into the west. After a long stay at the islands they ventured forth (September 6) along the twenty-eighth parallel of latitude—not quite far enough south to get the full boon of the trade winds; we know now that a still more southerly crossing would have shortened the distance and tribulation to America. The weather was kindly, “like April in Andalusia,” Columbus noted in his log; “the only thing wanting was to hear nightingales.” Thirty-three days passed anxiously. Columbus understated to his men the nautical mileage of each day; but as he overestimated his speed, his statements were unwillingly correct. The calms persisting, he changed his course, whereupon, even more than before, the crew felt lost in the aimless wastes of the sea. On October 9 the captains of the Pinta and the Niña boarded the flagship and pleaded for an immediate turnabout back to Spain. Columbus promised that unless land were sighted in three days he would do as they wished. On October 10 his own crew mutinied, but he appeased them with the same pledge. On October 11 they drew from the ocean a green branch bearing flowers; their trust in the Admiral returned. At two o’clock the next morning, under a nearly full moon, Rodrigo de Triana, the lookout on the Niña, shouted Tierra! tierra! It was land at last.

When dawn came they saw naked natives on the beach, “all of good stature.” The three captains were rowed to the shore by armed men; they knelt, kissed the ground, and thanked God. Columbus christened the island San Salvador—Holy Saviour—and took possession of it in the name of Ferdinand, Isabella, and Christ. The savages received their future enslavers with civilized courtesies. The Admiral wrote:

The report of the “friendly and flowing savage” which was to bewitch Rousseau, Chateaubriand, and Whitman may have begun then and there. But among the first things that Columbus learned on the island was that these natives were subject to slave raids by other native groups, and that they themselves, or their ancestors, had conquered earlier indigenes. Two days after landing, the Admiral struck an ominous note in his journal: “These people are very unskilled in arms.... With fifty men they could all be subjected and made to do all that one wished.”¹⁰

But alas, there was no gold in San Salvador. On October 14 the little fleet sailed again, seeking Cipango—Japan—and gold. On October 28 a landing was made on Cuba. There too the natives were well disposed; they tried to join their visitors in singing the Ave Maria, and did their best to make the sign of the cross. When Columbus showed them gold they seemed to indicate that he would find some at a point in the interior which they called Cubanacam—i.e., mid-Cuba. Mistaking this for El gran can—the Great Khan of China—he sent two Spaniards, with full diplomatic credentials, to find that elusive potentate. They returned without locating the Khan, but with a pleasant account of the courtesies with which they had been everywhere received. They brought also the first report, by Europeans, of American tobacco: they had seen male and female natives smoking tabaco herbs rolled into a cigar, which was inserted into the nose. Disappointed, Columbus left Cuba (December 4), taking with him, by force, five native youths to serve as interpreters, and seven women to comfort them. All died en route to Spain.

Meanwhile Columbus’s senior captain, Martín Alonso Pinzón, had deserted with his ship to hunt gold on his own. On December 5 Columbus reached Haiti. There he remained four weeks, welcomed and feasted by the natives. He found some gold, and felt himself a bit closer to the Khan; but his flagship grounded on a reef, and was smashed to pieces by waves and rocks, on the eve of the Christmas that he had planned to celebrate as the happiest of his life. Luckily the Niña was near by to rescue the crew, and the kindly natives ventured out in their canoes to help salvage most of the cargo before the vessel sank. Their chieftain consoled Columbus with hospitality and gold, and assurances that there was plenty of the murderous metal in Haiti. The Admiral thanked God for the gold, forgave Him for the shipwreck, and wrote in his journal that Ferdinand and Isabella would now have funds sufficient to conquer the Holy Land. He was so impressed with the good manners of the natives that he left part of his crew as a settlement to explore the island while he returned to Spain to report his discoveries. On January 6, 1493, Pinzón rejoined him with the Pinta; his apologies were accepted, for Columbus was loath to sail back with only one ship. On January 16 they began the journey home.

It was a long and miserable voyage. All through January the winds were hostile, and on February 12 a violent storm buffeted the tiny ships, which were not much more than seventy feet long.¹¹ As they approached the Azores, Pinzón deserted again, hoping to be the first to reach Spain with the great news that Asia had been found. The Niña anchored off Santa Maria in the Azores (February 17); half the crew went ashore, partly to make a pilgrimage to a shrine of the Virgin; they were arrested by the Portuguese authorities and were kept in jail for four days while Columbus fretted offshore. They were released, and the Niña sailed again; but another storm drove it from its course, split its sails, and so depressed the sailors that they vowed to spend their first day on land fasting on bread and water and observing the Ten Commandments. On March 3 they sighted Portugal, and though Columbus knew that he was risking a diplomatic mess, he decided to debark at Lisbon rather than attempt the remaining 225 miles to Palos with one sail. John II received him with courtesy; the Niña was repaired; and on March 15 it reached Palos after “infinite toil and terror” (said Columbus), 193 days after leaving that port. Martín Pinzón had landed on northwestern Spain several days before, and had sent a message to Ferdinand and Isabella, but they refused to see him or his messenger. The Pinta sailed into Palos a day after the Niña. Pinzón fled in fear and disgrace to his home, took to his bed, and died.

III. THE WATERS OF BITTERNESS

Columbus was welcomed by King and Queen at Barcelona, lived six months at the court, and received the title Almirante del Mar Oceano—“Admiral of the Ocean Sea”—by which was meant the Atlantic west of the Azores. He was made governor of the New World, or, as he described himself, “Vice-King and General Governor of the Islands and Terra Firma of Asia and India.”¹² As John II was rumored to be fitting out a fleet to cross the Atlantic, Ferdinand appealed to Alexander VI to define the rights of Spain in the “Ocean Sea.” The Spanish Pope, in a series of bulls (1493), allotted to Spain all non-Christian lands west, and to Portugal all those east, of an imaginary line drawn north and south 270 miles west of the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands. The Portuguese refused to accept this line of demarcation, and war was imminent when the rival governments, by the Treaty of Tordesillas (June 7, 1494), agreed that the line should run along a meridian of longitude 250 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands for discoveries before that date, but 370 leagues west for later discoveries. (The eastern corner of Brazil lies east of this second line.) The papal bulls termed the new terrain “Indies”; scholars like Pietro Martire d’ Anghiera accepted Columbus’s notion that he had reached Asia; and this delusion persisted till Magellan circumnavigated the globe.

Hoping for gold, Ferdinand and Isabella provided Columbus with a new fleet of seventeen vessels, equipped with 1,200 seamen, animals to start flocks and herds in the “Indies,” and five ecclesiastics to shrive the Spaniards and convert the “Indians.” The second voyage sailed from Seville on September 25, 1493. Thirty-nine days later (as against seventy days for the first voyage), the watch sighted an island which Columbus, because the day was Sunday, named Dominica. No landing was made there; the Admiral scented bigger prey. He passed through the westernmost group of the Lesser Antilles, and was so impressed by their number that he named them Once Mil Virgenes—“Eleven Thousand Virgins”; they are still the Virgin Islands. Sailing on, he discovered Puerto Rico; he dallied there briefly, then hurried on to see what had happened to the Spanish settlement that he had left in Haiti ten months before. Hardly a man remained of it. The Europeans had roamed the island robbing the natives of gold and women; they had established a tropical paradise with five women to each man; they had quarreled and murdered one another, and nearly all the rest had been killed by the outraged Indians.

The fleet sailed eastward along the Haitian coast. On January 2, 1494, the Admiral landed men and cargo to found a new settlement, which he called Isabella. After supervising the construction of a town and the repair of his ships, he left to explore Cuba. Unable to circumnavigate it, he concluded that it was the mainland of Asia, perhaps the Malay Peninsula. He thought of rounding it and circling the globe, but his ships were not equipped for it. He turned back toward Haiti (October 29, 1494), wondering how his new settlement had fared. He was shocked to find that it had behaved like its predecessor; that the Soaniards had raped native women, stolen native stores of food, and kidnaped native boys to serve as slaves; and that the natives had killed many Spaniards in revenge. The missionaries had made little attempt to Christianize the Indians. One friar had joined a group of malcontents who had sailed back to Spain to give the sovereigns a discouraging report of Haiti’s reputed resources. Columbus himself now became a slave dealer. He sent out expeditions to capture 1,500 natives; 400 of these he gave to the settlers, 500 he dispatched to Spain. Two hundred of these died on the voyage; the survivors were sold at Seville, but died in a few years, unable to adjust themselves to the colder climate, or perhaps to the savagery of civilization.

Leaving orders with his brother Bartolomé to transfer the settlement from Isabella to a better site at Santo Domingo (now Ciudad Trujillo), Columbus sailed for Spain (March 10, 1496), and reached Cádiz after an unhappy voyage of ninety-three days. He presented his sovereigns with Indians and gold nuggets; it was not much, but it modified the doubts that had formed at court about the wisdom of pouring more money into the Atlantic. The Admiral was uncomfortable on land; the salt of the sea was in his blood; he begged for at least eight ships for another trial of fortune. The sovereigns consented; and in May 1498, Columbus sailed again.

This third voyage moved southwest to the tenth meridian of latitude, then followed this due west. On July 31 the crew sighted the great island which the pious commander named Trinidad; and on August 31 he saw the mainland of South America, perhaps a year before, perhaps a year after, Vespucci. After exploring the Gulf of Paria he sailed northwest, and reached Santo Domingo August 31. This third settlement had survived, but one of every four of the five hundred Spaniards that he had left there in 1496 was suffering from syphilis, and the settlers had divided into two hostile groups that were now on the verge of war. To appease the discontent, Columbus allowed each man to appropriate a large tract of land, and to enslave the natives dwelling on it; this became the rule in the Spanish settlements. Worn now with hardships, disappointments, arthritis, and a disease of the eyes, Columbus almost broke down under these problems. His mind clouded occasionally, he became irritable, querulous, dictatorial, avaricious, and ruthless in his punishments; so at least many of the Spaniards claimed, and they fretted under an Italian’s rule. He recognized that the problems of managing the settlement were alien to his training and temperament. In October 1499, he sent two caravels to Spain with a request that Ferdinand and Isabella should appoint a royal commissioner to help him govern the island.

The sovereigns took him at his word, and appointed Francisco de Bobadilla; but, going beyond the Admiral’s request, they gave their commissioner full authority, even over Columbus. Bobadilla reached Santo Domingo while Columbus was away, and heard many complaints of the manner in which Cristoforo and his brothers Bartolomé and Diego had ruled what was now called Hispaniola. When Columbus returned, Bobadilla had him cast into jail, with manacles on his arms and fetters on his feet. After a further inquest the commissioner sent the three brothers, in chains, to Spain (October 1, 1500). Arriving at Cádiz, Columbus wrote a pitiful letter to friends at court:

Ferdinand was busy dividing the Kingdom of Naples with Louis XII; six weeks went by before he ordered Columbus and his brothers released, and summoned them to court. King and Queen received them in the Alhambra, consoled them, and restored them to affluence, but not to their former authority in the New World. By the Capitulations or agreement that they had signed in 1492, the sovereigns were bound to leave Columbus full authority in the lands he had discovered, but they felt that he was no longer fit to exercise it. They named Don Nicolás de Ovando as new governor of the Indies; however, they allowed the Admiral to collect all his property rights at Santo Domingo, and all that was hitherto due him of the gold diggings and trade. Columbus lived the rest of his life a rich man.

But he was not content. He importuned the King and Queen for one more fleet; and though they were not yet clear that the “Enterprise of the Indies” would bring them a net gain, they felt that they owed him another trial. On May 9, 1502, from Cádiz, Columbus began his fourth voyage, with four ships and 140 men, including his brother Bartolomé and his son Fernando. On June 15 he sighted Martinique. On June 29, feeling a storm in the air and in his joints, he anchored off a sheltered spot of the Haitian shore near Santo Domingo. A fleet of thirty ships was in the main harbor, about to sail for Spain. Columbus sent word to the governor that a hurricane was brewing, and advised him to detain the vessels for a while. Ovando rejected the warnings and dispatched the fleet. The hurricane arrived; the Admiral’s ships survived it with minor damage; of the governor’s fleet all vessels but one were wrecked; 500 lives were lost, including Bobadilla’s; and a rich cargo of gold was surrendered to the sea.

Columbus now began, unsuspectingly, the most arduous and tragic months in his troubled career. Continuing westward, he reached Honduras, and explored the coast of Nicaragua and Costa Rica in the hope of finding a strait that would let him circumnavigate the earth. On December 5, 1502, a tempest of wind and rain arose, whose mad force is vividly described in Columbus’s journal:

To add to the terror of wind, water, lightning, and rocky reefs near by, a waterspout—a spray-spreading “twister” in the sea—appeared, perilously close to the ships, and shooting water “up to the clouds.” Columbus took out his Bible, and read from it how Christ had stilled the storm at Capernaum; then he exorcized the waterspout by tracing with his sword a cross in the sky, whereupon, we are told, the tower of water collapsed. After twelve awful days the fury passed, and the fleet rested in a harbor near the present eastern end of the Panama Canal. There Columbus and his men celebrated sadly the Christmas of 1502 and the New Year’s Day of 1503, not knowing that the Pacific was only forty miles away.

Further misfortunes came. Thirteen sailors, rowing the flagship’s boat up a river to find fresh water, were attacked by Indians; all but one of the Spaniards were killed, and the boat was lost. Two vessels had to be abandoned as too worm-eaten to be seaworthy; the other two leaked so badly that the pumps had to be worked night and day. Finally the worms proved stronger than the men, and these surviving ships had to be beached on a shore of Jamaica (June 25, 1503). There the hapless crew remained a year and five days, depending for food on the precarious friendship of the natives, who themselves had little to spare. Diego Mendez, whose calm courage in all this adversity kept Columbus from complete despair, volunteered to lead six Christians and ten Indians in a dugout canoe 455 miles—eighty of them out of sight of land—to Santo Domingo to solicit aid. On that venture their water ran out, and several Indians died. Mendez reached his goal, but Ovando would not or could not spare a vessel till May 1504, to go to the Admiral’s relief. By February the Jamaica Indians had reduced their gifts of food to the stranded crew to the point where the Spaniards began to starve. Columbus had with him Regiomontanus’s Ephemerides, which calculated a lunar eclipse for February 29. He called in the native chiefs, and warned them that God, in His anger at their letting his men starve, was about to blot out the moon. They scoffed, but when the eclipse began they hurriedly brought food to the ships. Columbus reassured them, saying that he had prayed to God to restore the moon, and had promised Him that the Indians would properly feed the Christians thereafter. The moon reappeared.

Four more months passed before help came; even then the ship that Ovando sent leaked so badly that it was barely able to return to Santo Domingo. Columbus, with his brother and son, sailed in a stouter vessel to Spain, arriving November 7 after a long and stormy voyage. The King and Queen were disappointed that he had not found more gold, or a strait to the Indian Ocean; and neither Ferdinand nor Isabella, who was dying, had time to receive the white-haired sailor finally home from the sea. His “tenths” from Haiti were still paid to him; he suffered from arthritis, but not from poverty. When at last Ferdinand consented to see him Columbus, older than his fifty-eight years, could hardly bear the long journey to the court at Segovia. He demanded all the titles, rights, and revenues promised him in 1492. The King demurred, and offered him a rich estate in Castile; Columbus refused. He followed the court to Salamanca and Valladolid; and there, broken in body and heart, he died, May 20, 1506. No man had ever so remade the map of the earth.

IV. THE NEW PERSPECTIVE

Now that he had shown the way, a hundred other mariners rushed to the New World. That name was apparently first used by a Florentine merchant whose own name now describes the Americas. Amerigo Vespucci was sent to Spain by the Medici to straighten out the affairs of a Florentine banker. In 1495 he won a contract to fit out twelve vessels for Ferdinand. He caught the exploration fever, and in letters later (1503–04) written to friends in Florence, he claimed that he had made four voyages to what he termed novo mondo, and that on one of these, on June 16, 1497, he had touched the mainland of South America. As John Cabot reached Cape Breton Island, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, on June 24, 1497, and Columbus sighted Venezuela in 1498, Vespucci’s account would give him the credit of being the first European to reach the mainland of the Western Hemisphere since Leif Ericsson (c. 1000). Confusion and inaccuracies in Vespucci’s reports have cast doubt on his claims; but it is noteworthy that in 1505 Columbus, who by that time should have been able to judge Vespucci’s reliability, entrusted him with a letter to the Admiral’s son Diego.¹⁵ In 1508 Vespucci was made piloto mayor—chief of all the pilots—of Spain, and held that position till his death.

A Latin version of one of his letters was printed at Saint-Dié (Lorraine) in April 1507. Martin Waldseemüller, professor of cosmography in the University of Saint-Dié, quoted the letter in his Cosmographiae introductio, which he published there in that year; he accepted Vespucci’s account as trustworthy, and suggested that the name Amerige or America should be given to what we now term South America. In 1538 Gerhardus Mercator applied America, on one of his famous maps, to all the Western Hemisphere. It is agreed that in 1499, if not in 1497, Vespucci, sailing with Alonso de Ojeda, explored the coast of Venezuela. In 1500, shortly after Cabral’s accidental discovery of Brazil, Vicente Pinzón, who had commanded the Niña on Columbus’s first voyage, explored the Brazilian coast and discovered the Amazon. In 1513 Vasco Núñez de Balboa sighted the Pacific, and Ponce de Leon, dreaming of a fountain of youth, discovered Florida.

The discoveries begun by Henry the Navigator, advanced by Vasco da Gama, culminating in Columbus, and rounded out by Magellan effected the greatest commercial revolution in history before the coming of the airplane. The opening of the western and southern seas to navigation and trade ended the Mediterranean epoch in the history of civilization, and began the Atlantic era. As more and more of America’s gold came to Spain, economic decline progressed in the Mediterranean states, and even in those South German cities which, like Augsburg and Nuremberg, had been commercially tied with Italy. The Atlantic nations found in the New World an outlet for their surplus population, their reserve energy, and their criminals, and developed there avid markets for European goods. Industry was stimulated in Western Europe, and demanded the mechanical inventions, and better forms of power, that made the Industrial Revolution. New plants came from America to enrich European agriculture—the potato, tomato, artichoke, squash, maize. The influx of gold and silver raised prices, encouraged manufacturers, harassed workers, creditors, and feudal lords, and generated and ruined Spain’s dream of dominating the world.

The moral and mental effects of the explorations rivaled the economic and political results. Christianity was spread over a vast hemisphere, so that the Roman Catholic Church gained more adherents in the New World than the Reformation took from her in the Old. The Spanish and Portuguese languages were given to Latin America, and produced there vigorous independent literatures. European morals were not improved by the discoveries; the lawless brutality of the colonists flowed back to Europe with returning seamen and settlers, and brought an intensification of violence and sexual irregularity. The European intellect was powerfully moved by the revelation of so many peoples, customs, and cults; the dogmas of the great religions suffered by mutual attrition; and even while Protestants and Catholics raised their hostile certainties to ruinous wars, those certitudes were melting away into the doubts and consequent tolerance of the Enlightenment.

Above all, a pride of achievement inspired the human mind just when Copernicus was about to reduce the cosmic importance of the earth and its inhabitants. Men felt that the world of matter had been conquered by the courage of the human mind. The medieval motto for Gibraltar—ne plus ultra—was denied by abbreviation; it became now plus ultra—more beyond. All limits were removed; all the world was open; everything seemed possible. Now, with a bold and optimistic surge, modern history began