He was naturally received with great enthusiasm by the Spaniards, and after a solemn entry at Barcelona he presented to Ferdinand and Isabella the store of gold and curiosities carried by some of the natives of the islands he had visited.  They immediately set about fitting out a much larger fleet of seven vessels, which started from Cadiz, 25th September 1493.  He took a more southerly course, but again reached the islands now known as the West Indies.  On visiting Hayti he found the fort destroyed, and no traces of the men he had left there.  It is needless for our purposes to go through the miserable squabbles which occurred on this and his subsequent voyages, which resulted in Columbus’s return to Spain in chains and disgrace.  It is only necessary for us to say that in his third voyage, in 1498, he touched on Trinidad, and saw the coast of South America, which he supposed to be the region of the Terrestrial Paradise.  This was placed by the mediaeval maps at the extreme east of the Old World.  Only on his fourth voyage, in 1502, did he actually touch the mainland, coasting along the shores of Central America in the neighbourhood of Panama.  After many disappointments, he died, 20th May 1506, at Valladolid, believing, as far as we can judge, to the day of his death, that what he had discovered was what he set out to seek—­a westward route to the Indies, though his proud epitaph indicates the contrary:—­

  A Castilla y a Leon | To Castille and to Leon
  Nuevo mondo dio Colon. | A NEW WORLD gave Colon.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Columbus’s Spanish name was Cristoval Colon.]

To this day his error is enshrined in the name we give to the Windward and Antilles Islands—­West Indies:  in other words, the Indies reached by the westward route.  If they had been the Indies at all, they would have been the most easterly of them.

Even if Columbus had discovered a new route to Farther India, he could not, as we have seen, claim the merit of having originated the idea, which, even in detail, he had taken from Toscanelli.  But his claim is even a greater one.  He it was who first dared to traverse unknown seas without coasting along the land, and his example was the immediate cause of all the remarkable discoveries that followed his earlier voyages.  As we have seen, both Vasco da Gama and Cabral immediately after departed from the slow coasting route, and were by that means enabled to carry out to the full the ideas of Prince Henry; but whereas, by the Portuguese method of coasting, it had taken nearly a century to reach the Cape of Good Hope, within thirty years of Columbus’s first venture the whole globe had been circumnavigated.