Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 63

[Sidenote: 1504. Normans and Bretons.]

In the north, the discoveries of the English under Cabot, and of the Portuguese under the Cortereals, soon led the Normans and Bretons from Dieppe and Saint Malo to follow in the wake of such predecessors. As early as 1504 the fishermen of these latter peoples seem to have been on the northern coasts, and we owe to them the name of Cape Breton, which is thought to be the oldest French name in our American geography. It is the "Gran Capitano" of Ramusio who credits the Bretons with these early visits at the north, though we get no positive cartographical record of such visits till 1520, in a map which is given by Kunstmann in his _Atlas_.

[Sidenote: 1505. Portuguese.]

Again, in 1505, some Portuguese appear to have been on the Newfoundland coast under the royal patronage of Henry VII. of England, and by 1506 the Portuguese fishermen were regular frequenters of the Newfoundland banks. We find in the old maps Portuguese names somewhat widely scattered on the neighboring coast lines, for the frequenting of the region by the fishermen of that nation continued well towards the close of the century.

[Sidenote: 1506. Spaniards.]

There are also stories of one Velasco, a Spaniard, visiting the St.

Lawrence in 1506, and Juan de Agramonte in 1511 entered into an agreement with the Spanish King to pursue discovery in these parts more actively, but we have no definite knowledge of results.

[Sidenote: 1517. Sebastian Cabot.]

[Sidenote: 1521. Portuguese.]

The death of Ferdinand, January 23, 1516, would seem to have put a stop to a voyage which had already been planned for Spain by Sebastian Cabot, to find a northwest pa.s.sage; but the next year (1517) Cabot, in behalf of England, had sailed to Hudson's Strait, and thence north to 67 30', finding "no night there," and observing extraordinary variations of the compa.s.s. Somewhat later there are the very doubtful claims of the Portuguese to explorations under f.a.gundes about the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1521.

[Sidenote: 1506. Ango's captains.]

[Sidenote: Denys's map.]

[Sidenote: 1518. Lery.]

By 1506 also there is something like certainty respecting the Normans, and under the influence of a notable Dieppese, Jean Ango, we soon meet a cla.s.s of adventurous mariners tempting distant and marvelous seas. We read of Pierre Crignon, and Thomas Aubert, both of Dieppe, Jean Denys of Honfleur, and Jean Parmentier, all of whom have come down to us through the pages of Ramusio. It is of Jean Denys in 1506, and of Thomas Aubert a little later, that we find the fullest recitals. To Denys there has been ascribed a mysterious chart of the Gulf of St. Lawrence; but if the copy which is preserved represents it, there can be no hesitation in discarding it as a much later cartographical record. The original is said to have been found in the archives of the ministry of war in Paris so late as 1854, but no such map is found there now. The copy which was made for the Canadian archives is at Ottawa, and I have been favored by the authorities there with a tracing of it. No one of authority will be inclined to dispute the judgment of Harrisse that it is apocryphal. We are accordingly left in uncertainty just how far at this time the contour of the Golfo Quadrago, as the Gulf of St. Lawrence was called, was made out. Aubert is said to have brought to France seven of the natives of the region in 1509. Ten years or more later (1519, etc.), the Baron de Lery is thought to have attempted a French settlement thereabouts, of which perhaps the only traces were some European cattle, the descendants of his small herd landed there in 1528, which were found on Sable Island many years later.

[Sidenote: 1526. Nicholas Don.]

We know from Herrera that in 1526 Nicholas Don, a Breton, was fis.h.i.+ng off Baccalaos, and Rut tells us that in 1527 Norman and Breton vessels were pulling fish on the sh.o.r.es of Newfoundland. Such mentions mark the early French knowledge of these northern coasts, but there is little in it all to show any contribution to geographical developments.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PETER MARTYR, 1511.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: PONCE DE LEON.

[From Barcia's _Herrera_.]]

[Sidenote: Attempts to connect the northern discoveries with those of the Spanish.]

[Sidenote: 1511. Peter Martyr's map.]

[Sidenote: 1512. Ponce de Leon.]

[Sidenote: 1513. March.]

[Sidenote: Florida.]

Before this, however, the first serious attempt of which we have incontrovertible evidence was made to connect these discoveries in the north with those of the Spanish in the Antilles. As early as 1511 the map given by Peter Martyr had shown that, from the native reports or otherwise, a notion had arisen of lands lying north of Cuba. In 1512 Ponce de Leon was seeking a commission to authorize him to go and see what this reported land was like, with its fountain of youth. He got it February 23, 1512, when Ferdinand commissioned him "to find and settle the island of Bimini," if none had already been there, or if Portugal had not already acquired possession in any part that he sought. Delays in preparation postponed the actual departure of his expedition from Porto Rico till March, 1513. On the 23d of that month, Easter Sunday, he struck the mainland somewhere opposite the Bahamas, and named the country Florida, from the day of the calendar. He tracked the coast northward to a little above 30 north lat.i.tude. Then he retraced his way, and rounding the southern cape, went well up the western side of the peninsula. Whether any stray explorers had been before along this sh.o.r.e may be a question. Private Spanish or Portuguese adventurers, or even Englishmen, had not been unknown in neighboring waters some years earlier, as we have evidence. We find certainly in this voyage of Ponce de Leon for the first time an unmistakable official undertaking, which we might expect would soon have produced its cartographical record. The interdicts of the Council of the Indies were, however, too powerful, and the old lines of the Cantino map still lingered in the maps for some years, though by 1520 the Floridian peninsula began to take recognizable shape in certain Spanish maps.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PONCE DE LEON'S TRACK.]

[Sidenote: Bimini.]

Just what stood for Bimini in the reports of this expedition is not clear; but there seems to have been a vague notion of its not being the same as Florida, for when Ponce de Leon got a new patent in September, 1514, he was authorized to settle both "islands," Bimini and Florida, and Diego Colon as viceroy was directed to help on the expedition. Seven years, however, pa.s.sed in delays, so that it was not till 1521 that he attempted to make a settlement, but just at what point is not known.

Sickness and loss in encounters with the Indians soon discouraged him, and he returned to Cuba to die of an arrow wound received in one of the forays of the natives.

[Sidenote: 1519. Pineda.]

It was still a question if Florida connected with any adjacent lands.

Several minor expeditions had added something to the stretch of coast, but the main problem still stood unsolved. In 1519 Pineda had made the circuit of the northern sh.o.r.es of the Gulf of Mexico, and at the river Panuco he had been challenged by Cortes as trenching on his government.

Turning again eastward, Pineda found the mouth of the river named by him Del Espiritu Santo, which pa.s.ses with many modern students as the first indication in history of the great Mississippi, while others trace the first signs of that river to Cabeca de Vaca in 1528, or to the pa.s.sage higher up its current by De Soto in 1541. Believing it at first the long-looked-for strait to pa.s.s to the Indies, Pineda entered it, only to be satisfied that it must gather the watershed of a continent, which in this part was now named Amichel. It seemed accordingly certain that no pa.s.sage to the west was to be found in this part of the gulf, and that Florida must be more than an island.

[Sidenote: 1520. Ayllon.]

[Sidenote: Spaniards in Virginia.]

While these explorations were going on in the gulf, others were conducted on the Atlantic side of Florida. If the Pompey Stone which has been found in New York State, to the confusion of historical students, be accepted as genuine, it is evidence that the Spaniard had in 1520 penetrated from some point on the coast to that region. In 1520 we get demonstrable proof, when Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon sent a caravel under Gordillo, which joined company on the way with another vessel bound on a slave-hunting expedition, and the two, proceeding northward, sighted the main coast at a river which they found to be in thirty-three and a half degrees of north lat.i.tude, on the South Carolina coast. They returned without further exploration. Ayllon, without great success, attempted further explorations in 1525; but in 1526 he went again with greater preparations, and made his landfall a little farther north, near the mouth of the Wateree River, which he called the Jordan, and sailed on to the Chesapeake, where, with the help of negro slaves, then first introduced into this region, he began the building of a town at or near the spot where the English in the next century founded Jamestown; or at least this is the conjecture of Dr. Shea. Here Ayllon died of a pestilential fever October 18, 1526, when the disheartened colonists, one hundred and fifty out of the original five hundred, returned to Santo Domingo.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE AYLLON MAP.]

[Sidenote: 1524. Gomez.]

[Sidenote: Chaves's map.]

[Sidenote: 1529. Ribero's map.]

While these unfortunate experiences were in progress, Estevan Gomez, sent by the Spanish government, after the close of the conference at Badajos, to make sure that there was no pa.s.sage to the Moluccas anywhere along this Atlantic coast, started in the autumn of 1524, if the data we have admit of that conclusion as to the time, from Corunna, in the north of Spain. He proceeded at once, as Charles V. had directed him, to the Baccalaos region, striking the mainland possibly at Labrador, and then turned south, carefully examining all inlets. We have no authoritative narrative sanctioned by his name, or by that of any one accompanying the expedition; nor has the map which Alonso Chaves made to conform to what was reported by Gomez been preserved, but the essential features of the exploration are apparently embodied in the great map of Ribero (1529), and we have sundry stray references in the later chroniclers. From all this it would seem that Gomez followed the coast southward to the point of Florida, and made it certain to most minds that no such pa.s.sage to India existed, though there was a lingering suspicion that the Gulf of St. Lawrence had not been sufficiently explored.

[Sidenote: Sh.o.r.es of the Caribbean Sea.]

[Sidenote: Ojeda and Nicuessa.]

Let us turn now to the southern sh.o.r.es of the Caribbean Sea. New efforts at colonizing here were undertaken in 1508-9. By this time the coast had been pretty carefully made out as far as Honduras, largely through the explorations of Ojeda and Juan de la Cosa. The scheme was a dual one, and introduces us to two new designations of the regions separated by that indentation of the coast known as the Gulf of Uraba. Here Ojeda and Nicuessa were sent to organize governments, and rule their respective provinces of Nueva Andalusia and Castilla del Oro for the period of four years. Mention has already been made of this in the preceding chapter.

They delayed getting to their governments, quarreled for a while about their bounds on each other, fought the natives with desperation but not with much profit, lost La Cosa in one of the encounters, and were thwarted in their purpose of holding Jamaica as a granary and in getting settlers from Espanola by the alertness of Diego Colon, who preferred to be tributary to no one.

All this had driven Ojeda to great stress in the little colony of San Sebastian which he had founded. He attempted to return for aid to Espanola, and was wrecked on the voyage. This caused him to miss his lieutenant Enciso, who was on his way to him with recruits. So Ojeda pa.s.ses out of history, except so far as he tells his story in the testimony he gave in the suit of the heirs of Columbus in 1513-15.

[Sidenote: Pizarro.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: BALBOA.

[From Barcia's _Herrera_.]]

New heroes were coming on. A certain Pizarro had been left in command by Ojeda,--not many years afterwards to be heard of. One Vasco Nunez de Balboa, a poor and debt-burdened fugitive, was on board of Enciso's s.h.i.+p, and had wit enough to suggest that a region like San Sebastian, inhabited by tribes which used poisoned arrows, was not the place for a colony struggling for existence and dependent on foraging. So they removed the remnants of the colony, which Enciso had turned back as they were escaping, to the other side of the bay, and in this way the new settlement came within the jurisdiction of Nicuessa, whom a combination soon deposed and s.h.i.+pped to sea, never to be heard of. It was in these commotions that Vasco Nunez de Balboa brought himself into a prominence that ended in his being commissioned by Diego Colon as governor of the new colony. He had, meanwhile, got more knowledge of a great sea at the westward than Columbus had acquired on the coast of Veragua in 1503.

Balboa rightly divined that its discovery, if he could effect it, would serve him a good purpose in quieting any jealousies of his rule, of which he was beginning to observe symptoms.

[Sidenote: 1513. Balboa and the South Sea.]