And just as the New World was eventually to be dominated by a nation other than that which first took possession of it, so was it to be named after a man other than its discoverer:  an inconsiderable adventurer named Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine, who accompanied three or four Spanish expeditions as astronomer or pilot, but who had no part in any real discovery in the New World.  He wrote a number of letters describing the voyages which he claimed to have made, and one of these was printed in a pamphlet which had a wide circulation, so that Vespucci’s name came to be connected in the public mind with the new land in the west much more prominently than that of any other man.  In 1502, in a little book dealing with the new discoveries, the suggestion was made that there was nothing “rightly to hinder us from calling it [the New World] Amerige or America, i.e., the land of Americus,” and America it was thenceforward—­one of the great injustices of history.  Since it had to be so, let us be thankful that it was Vespucci’s first name which was selected, and not his last one.

Meanwhile, the Spaniards had pushed their way across the Caribbean and explored the shores of the gulf, finding at last in Mexico a land of gold.  World-worn, disease-racked Ponce de Leon, conqueror and governor of Porto Rico, struggled through the everglades of Florida, seeking the fountain of eternal youth, and getting his death-wound there instead.  Ferdinand Magellan, man of iron if there ever was one, seeking a western passage to the Moluccas, skirted the coast of South America, wintered amid the snows of Patagonia, worked his way through the strait which bears his name, and held on westward across the Pacific, making the first circumnavigation of the globe, a feat so startling in audacity that there is none in our day to compare with it, except, perhaps, a journey to another planet.  Magellan himself never again saw Europe, meeting his death in a fight with the natives of the Philippines, but one of his ships, with eighteen men, struggled south along the coast of Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and so home.

Half a century was to elapse before the feat was repeated—­this time by that slave-trader, pirate, and doughty scourge of the Spaniard, Sir Francis Drake, who, following in Magellan’s wake, and pausing only long enough to harry the Spanish settlements in Chili and Peru and capture a Spanish treasureship, held northward along the coast as far as southern Oregon, and then turned westward across the Pacific, around the Cape of Good Hope, and home again, where Elizabeth, in spite of Spanish protests, was waiting to reward him with a touch of sword to shoulder.  The Muse of History smiles ironically when she records that Drake’s principal discovery in the New World was that of the potato, which he introduced into England.

Not until Drake’s voyage was completed was the vast extent of the North American continent even suspected, although its interior had been explored in many directions.  Hernando de Soto, with an experience gained with Pizarro in the conquest of Peru, and succeeding Ponce de Leon in the governorship of Florida, marched with a great expedition through what is now South Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia, and came out, at last, upon the Mississippi, only to find burial beneath its waters, while the tattered remnant of his force staggered back to Mexico.