Wonderful indeed!  Yet what a dizziness would have seized that audience could they have guessed the truth!  Could they have guessed that the proud kingdom of Spain was but an insignificant patch compared with the vast continent Columbus had discovered and upon which a score of nations were to dwell.

The life-work of the great navigator practically ended on the day he told his story to the court of Spain, for, though he led three other expeditions across the ocean, the discoveries they made were of no great importance.  Not a trace did he find of that golden country, which he sought so eagerly, and at last, broken in health and fortune, in disfavor at court, stripped of the rewards and dignities which had been promised him, he died in a little house at Valladolid on the twentieth of May, 1506.  He believed to the last that it was the Indies he had discovered, never dreaming that he had given a new continent to the world.

Yet is his fame secure, for the task which he accomplished was unique, never to be repeated.  He had robbed the Sea of Darkness of its terrors, and while those who followed him had need of courage and resolution, it was no longer into the unknown that they sailed forth.  They knew that there was no danger of sailing over the edge and dropping off into space; they knew that there were no dragons, nor monsters, nor other blood-curdling terrors to be encountered, but that the other side of the world was much like the side they lived on.  That was Columbus’s great achievement.  To cross the Atlantic, perilous as the voyage was, was after all a little thing; but actually to start—­to surmount the wall of bigotry and ignorance which, for centuries, had shut the west away from the east, to surmount that wall and throw it down by a faith which rose superior to human belief and incredulity and terror of the unknown—­there was the miracle!

* * * * *

Many there were to follow, each contributing his mite toward the task of defining the new continent.  Perhaps you have seen a photographic negative slowly take shape in the acid bath—­the sharp out-lines first, then, bit by bit, the detail.  Just so did America grow beneath the gaze of Europe, though two centuries and more were to elapse before it stood out upon the map clean-cut and definite from border to border.

First to follow Columbus, and the first white men since the vikings to set foot on the North American continent, which Columbus himself had never seen, were John and Sebastian Cabot, Italians like their predecessor, but in the service of the King of England and with an English ship and an English crew prophetic of the race which was, in time, to wrest the supremacy of the continent from the other nations of Europe.  They explored the coast from Newfoundland as far south, perhaps, as Chesapeake Bay, and upon their discoveries rested the English claim to North America, though they themselves are little more than faint and ill-defined shadows upon the page of history, so little do we know of them.