Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 64

So on the 1st of September, 1513, he set out in the direction which the natives hadindicated, and by the 24th he had reached a mountain from the topof which his guides told him he would behold the sea. On the 25th his party ascended, himself in front, and it was not long before he stood gazing upon the distant ocean, the first of Europeans to discern the long-coveted sea. Down the other slope the Spaniards went. The path was a difficult one, and it was three days before one of his advanced squads reached the beach. Not till the next day, the 29th, did Vasco Nunez himself join those in advance, when, striding into the tide, he took possession of the sea and its bordering lands in the name of his sovereigns. It was on Saint Miguel's Day, and the Bay of Saint Miguel marks the spot to-day. Towards the end of January, 1514, he was again with the colony at Antigua del Darien. Thence, in March, he dispatched a messenger to Spain with news of the great discovery.

[Sidenote: Pedrarias.]

[Sidenote: 1517. Balboa executed.]

This courier did not reach Europe till after a new expedition had been dispatched under Pedrarias, and with him went a number of followers, who did in due time their part in thridding and designating these new paths of exploration. We recognize among them Hernando de Soto, Bernal Diaz, the chronicler of the exploits of Cortes, and Oviedo, the historian. It was from April till June, 1514, that Pedrarias was on his way, and it was not long before the new governor with his imposing array of strength brought the recusant Balboa to trial, out of which he emerged burdened with heavy fines. The new governor planned at once to reap the fruits of Balboa's discovery. An expedition was sent along his track, which embarked on the new sea and gathered spoils where it could. Pedrarias soon grew jealous of Balboa, for it was not without justice that the state of the augmented colony was held to compare unfavorably with the conditions which Balboa had maintained during his rule. But constancy was never of much prevalence in these days, and Balboa's chains, lately imposed, were stricken off to give him charge of an exploration of the sea which he had discovered. Once here, Balboa planned new conquests and a new independency. Pedrarias, hearing of it through a false friend of Balboa, enticed the latter into his neighborhood, and a trial was soon set on foot, which ended in the execution of Balboa and his abettors.

This was in 1517.

It was not long before Pedrarias removed his capital to Panama, and in 1519 and during the few following years his captains pushed their explorations northerly along the sh.o.r.es of the South Sea, as the new ocean had been at once called.

[Sidenote: 1515. Biru.]

[Sidenote: 1519. Panama founded.]

As early as 1515 Pizarro and Morales had wandered down the coast southward to a region called Biru by the natives, and this was as far as adventure had carried any Spaniard, during the ten years since Balboa's discovery. They had learned here of a rich region farther on, and it got to be spoken of by the same name, or by a perversion of it, as Peru. In this interval the town of Panama had been founded (1519), and Pizarro and Almagro, with the priest Luque, were among those to whom allotments were made.

[Sidenote: Peru.]

[Sidenote: Chili.]

[Sidenote: Chiloe.]

It was by these three a.s.sociates, in 1524 and 1526, that the expeditions were organized which led to the exploration of the coasts of Peru and the conquest of the region. The equator was crossed in 1526; in 1527 they reached 9 south. It was not till 1535 that, in the progress of events, a knowledge of the coast was extended south to the neighborhood of Lima, which was founded in that year. In the autumn of 1535, Almagro started south to make conquest of Chili, and the bay of Valparaiso was occupied in September, 1536. Eight years later, in 1544, explorations were pushed south to 41. It was only in 1557 that expeditions reached the archipelago of Chiloe, and the whole coast of South America on the Pacific was made out with some detail down to the region which Magellan had skirted, as will be shortly shown.

[Sidenote: 1508. Ocampo and Cuba.]

It will be remembered that in 1503 Columbus had struck the coast of Honduras west of Cape Gracias a Dios. He learned then of lands to the northwest from some Indians whom he met in a canoe, but his eagerness to find the strait of his dreams led him south. It was fourteen years before the promise of that canoe was revealed. In 1508 Ocampo had found the western extremity of Cuba, and made the oath of Columbus ridiculous.

[Sidenote: 1517. Yucatan.]

In 1517 a slave-hunting expedition, having steered towards the west from Cuba, discovered the sh.o.r.es of Yucatan; and the next year (1518) the real exploration of that region began when Juan de Grijalva, a nephew of the governor of Cuba, led thither an expedition which explored the coast of Yucatan and Mexico.

[Sidenote: 1518. Cortes.]

[Sidenote: 1519.]

When Grijalva returned to Cuba in 1518, it was to find an expedition already planned to follow up his discoveries, and Hernando Cortes, who had been in the New World since 1504, had been chosen to lead it, with instructions to make further explorations of the coast,--a purpose very soon to become obscured in other objects. He sailed on the 17th of November, and stopped along the coast of Cuba for recruits, so it was not till February 18, 1519, that he sunk the sh.o.r.es of Cuba behind him, and in March he was skirting the Yucatan sh.o.r.e and sailed on to San Juan de Uloa. In due time, forgetting his instructions, and caring for other conquests than those of discovery, he began his march inland. The story of the conquest of Mexico does not help us in the aim now in view, and we leave it untold.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GRIJALVA.

[From Barcia's _Herrera_.]]

[Sidenote: Quinsay.]

It was not long after this conquest before belated apostles of the belief of Columbus appeared, urging that the capital of Montezuma was in reality the Quinsay of Marco Polo, with its great commercial interests, as was maintained by Schoner in his _Opusculum Geographic.u.m_ in 1533.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GLOBE GIVEN IN SCHoNER'S _OPUSCULUM GEOGRAPHIc.u.m_, 1533.]

[Sidenote: 1520. Garay.]

[Sidenote: Gulf of Mexico.]

[Sidenote: 1524. Cortes's Gulf of Mexico.]

[Sidenote: Yucatan as an island.]

We have seen how Pineda's expedition to the northern parts of the Gulf of Mexico in 1519 had improved the knowledge of that sh.o.r.e, and we have a map embodying these explorations, which was sent to Spain in 1520 by Garay, then governor of Jamaica. It was now pretty clear that the blank s.p.a.ces of earlier maps, leaving it uncertain if there was a pa.s.sage westerly somewhere in the northwest corner of the gulf, should be filled compactly. Still, a belief that such a pa.s.sage existed somewhere in the western contour of the gulf was not readily abandoned. Cortes, when he sent to Spain his sketch of the gulf, which was published there in 1524, was dwelling on the hope that some such channel existed near Yucatan, and his insular delineation of that peninsula, with a shadowy strait at its base, was eagerly grasped by the cartographers. Such a severance finds a place in the map of Maiollo of 1527, which is preserved in the Ambrosian library at Milan. Grijalva, some years earlier, had been sent, as we have seen, to sail round Yucatan; and though there are various theories about the origin of that name, it seems likely enough that the tendency to give it an insular form arose from a misconception of the Indian appellation. At all events, the island of Yucatan lingered long in the early maps.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GULF OF MEXICO, 1520.]

[Sidenote: 1523. Cortes.]

In 1523 Cortes had sent expeditions up the Pacific, and one up the Atlantic side of North America, to find the wished-for pa.s.sage; but in vain.

[Sidenote: Spanish and Portuguese rivalries.]

Meanwhile, important movements were making by the Portuguese beyond that great sea of the south which Balboa had discovered. These movements were little suspected by the Spaniards till the development of them brought into contact these two great oceanic rivals.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GULF OF MEXICO, BY CORTES.]

[Sidenote: 1511. Moluccas.]

[Sidenote: A western pa.s.sage sought at the south.]

The Portuguese, year after year, had extended farther and farther their conquests by the African route. Arabia, India, Malacca, Sumatra, fell under their sway, and their course was still eastward, until in 1511 the coveted land of spices, the clove and the nutmeg, was reached in the Molucca Islands. This progress of the Portuguese had been watched with a jealous eye by Spain. It was a question if, in pa.s.sing to these islands, the Portuguese had not crossed the line of demarcation as carried to the antipodes. If they had, territory neighboring to the Spanish American discoveries had been appropriated by that rival power wholly unconfronted. This was simply because the Spanish navigators had not as yet succeeded in finding a pa.s.sage through the opposing barrier of what they were beginning to suspect was after all an intervening land.

Meanwhile, Columbus and all since his day having failed to find such a pa.s.sage by way of the Caribbean Sea, and no one yet discovering any at the north, nothing was left but to seek it at the south. This was the only chance of contesting with the Portuguese the rights which occupation was establis.h.i.+ng for them at the Moluccas.

[Sidenote: 1508. Pinzon and Solis.]

On the 29th of June, 1508, a new expedition left San Lucar under Pinzon and Solis. They made their landfall near Cape St. Augustine, and, pa.s.sing south along the coast of what had now come to be commonly called Brazil, they traversed the opening of the broad estuary of the La Plata without knowing it, and went five degrees beyond (40 south lat.i.tude) without finding the sought-for pa.s.sage.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MAIOLLO MAP, 1527.]

[Sidenote: 1511. Portuguese at Rio de Janeiro.]

[Sidenote: Ferdinand Columbus and the western pa.s.sage.]

There is some reason to suppose that as early as 1511 the Portuguese had become in some degree familiar with the coast about Rio de Janeiro, and there is a story of one Juan de Braza settling near this striking bay at this early day. It was during the same year (1511) that Ferdinand Columbus prepared his _Colon de Concordia_, and in this he maintained the theory of a pa.s.sage to be found somewhere beyond the point towards the south which the explorers had thus far reached.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DE COSTA'S DRAWING FROM THE LENOX GLOBE.]

[Sidenote: 1516. Solis.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SCHoNER'S GLOBE, 1520.]