E 101 
 
 AN'S 
 
 liisTORicAL Readers 
 
 No. I. 
 
 THE -DISCOVERY -AND 
 EXPLORATION - OF • AMERICA 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 
 0-4,5. Shelf. ...o::r^ 
 
 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
MARTIN FROBTSHER. 
 
OILMAN'S HISTORICAL READERS. — No. I. 
 
 THE 
 
 DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION 
 
 OF 
 
 AMERICA 
 
 A BOOK FOR AMERICAN BOYS AND GIRLS 
 ARTHUR OILMAN, M. A., 
 
 AUTHOR OF A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, FIRST STEPS IN 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE, FIRST STEPS IN GENERAL HISTORY, 
 
 TALES OF THE PATHFINDERS, THE STORY OF 
 
 THE SARACENS, ETC. 
 
 ^ Jul 23 1887 V) 
 
 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 The Interstate Publishing Company 
 Boston : 30 Franklin Street 
 
OTHER WORKS BY ARTHUR OILMAN. 
 
 A History of the American People. One volume. Illustrated, 
 pp. 692. Octavo. Introduction Price, $1.00. 
 
 The critical editor of the New York hidepoidoit says of this book, " We have 
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 we have seen." 
 
 Short Stories from the Dictionary. One volume, pp. 129. Sent 
 by mail for |o. 55. 
 
 The editor of the Sunday School Times pronounces this book " lively, interesting, 
 and attractive," and The Caroliiia Teacher says that "from the first page to the 
 last the keenest interest is felt " in reading it. The Atlantic commends it. 
 
 First Steps in English Literature. One volume. i6mo. pp. 233. 
 Introduction Price, $ 0.60. 
 
 Of this Professor Carpenter says, " It is the best thing out," and Dr. Cogswell, 
 fonnerly of the Astor Library, New York, pronounced it " all that can be desired." 
 
 King's, Queens, and Barbarians, or Talks about Seven Historic 
 Ages. One volume, pp. 190. Introduction Price, $0.60. Illus- 
 trated. 
 
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 leaving an indelible impression of the leading facts of history. " 
 
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 " If there is any book fitted to give people a taste for historical reading," says tlie 
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 Copyright, 1887, by 
 The Interstate Publishing Company 
 
 PRESS OF HENRY H. CLARK & CO. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 [HE history of our country naturally divides itself 
 into three portions. First, there is the period of 
 Discovery and Exploration, when men of different 
 nations were pushing toward the West^ on the track of 
 Columbus, — trying, as he did, to find the coast of Asia, 
 making desperate efforts to sail around the "island," as 
 they thought it, which barred their way, and finally settling 
 down to the conviction that they had come upon a conti- 
 nent ; but never giving up the belief that some stream 
 might be found that would afford them passage through to 
 Cathay. It is with this romantic time that the present 
 volume deals. 
 
 The second period is that of Colojiization. Then the ex- 
 plorers had given place to the pioneers who were cutting 
 down the forests and building homes for themselves. The 
 third period is that of The Making of the American Nation, 
 when the English colonists, having become supreme, were 
 pushed off by an obstinate king, and after a century of 
 experiences, became possessed of the traits of a nation. 
 
 The effort of the author in this volume is to tell the 
 story of the adventurers in a simple style, not always 
 avoiding the use of words that young readers cannot be 
 
iv PREFACE. 
 
 expected to understand, but leading them from point to 
 point, enlarging at once their vocabulary and their acquaint- 
 ance with the subject. 
 
 No branch of the work of education seems to the author 
 of greater importance than this of giving the young their 
 first impressions of the history of their own land. With 
 a deep sense of this truth, the latest authorities have been 
 made tributary to this volume, and the author has spared no 
 pains to have it correct in every statement of facts, and 
 in the difficult matter of dates. 
 
 The work is a study of authorities, under the lead of 
 such writers as those who have contributed to Mr. Winsor's 
 invaluable '' Narrative and Critical History of America," and 
 of those whose works are mentioned in the very extensive 
 notes appended to its different chapters. For other author- 
 ities the Library of Harvard College has furnished ample 
 resources, and they have been extensively used. 
 
 Among the works especially valuable for the period covered 
 by this volume are the narratives of the early navigators, 
 found in the publications of the Hakluyt Society and else- 
 where. The young are not qualified to investigate these 
 books, but they contain much that is of great interest to 
 them. 
 
 The more difficult words are explained at the close of 
 the volume. The author limits the list in the hope that the 
 young reader may not be discouraged by it, and he trusts 
 that teachers will cultivate in them the habit of consulting 
 dictionaries and other works of reference. Such a habit 
 is of great importance, for no book contains all that may 
 be well said on any subject. 
 
 Cambridge, May, 1887. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter Page 
 
 I. A Word about American History . . .7 
 
 II. How THE Round World moves 12 
 
 III. Something like a Wonder-Story . . . . 17 
 
 IV. The Holy Land and Rich Cathay . . . .21 
 
 V. How Sailors searched the Seas .... 25 
 
 VI. Printing Books and Learning from Them . . 28 
 
 VII. A Young Man from Italy 32 
 
 VIII. W^HAT the Young Man thought about the World 36 
 
 IX. Columbus asks Kings to help him . . . .39 
 
 X. Delays and Heartaches . ... . • • 43 
 
 XI. Two Triumphs at once 47 
 
 XII. More Difficulties 5° 
 
 XIII. A New World discovered 53 
 
 XIV. Columbus at Home again 57 
 
 XV. A Royal Welcome 61 
 
 XVI. Columbus makes- more Voyages .... 65 
 
 XVII. Interest in Discovery extends. . . • .72 
 
 XVIII. The Americans the Explorers found ... 76 
 
 XIX. The first Wars with the Savages . . . .80 
 
 V 
 
VI 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 XX. The Spaniards Look for Gold .... S3 
 
 XXI. Grand Times in Europe 87 
 
 XXII. Bad Work in Florida 91 
 
 XXIII. The Days of Queen Elizabeth 94 
 
 XXIV. The Great English Pirate 98 
 
 XXV. Trying to Sail around America . . . .103 
 
 XXVI. Sir Walter Raleigh's Efforts end in Smoke . 107 
 
 XXVII. The English Kings and Queens . . . .110 
 
 XXVIII. Raleigh's last Efforts 
 
 XXIX. English Adventurers more Restless than ever 
 
 XXX. King James's Council for Virginia 
 
 XXXI. Virginia settled 123 
 
 Explanation of the Pronunciation and Meaning 
 of a few Words 127 
 
 113 
 116 
 120 
 
THE 
 
 DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION 
 
 OF AMERICA 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 A WORD ABOUT AMERICAN HISTORY. 
 
 HERE is a great difference between the 
 history of America and that of many other 
 countries. If you try to learn the history 
 of England, for instance, you find that you are car- 
 ried back into ages far gone, when all is dark and 
 blank. No one knows much, if anything, about the 
 first people who lived in that country. Wq can 
 find out about the men who were in England when 
 our fathers lived there ; and we can go back to a 
 time before America was heard of, or even thought 
 of; but at last we come to the names of such 
 
8 BURIED HISTORY. 
 
 persons as king Arthur, and of Pendragon who Is 
 said to have been his father, and we cannot be sure 
 that they ever Hved. 
 
 Back of those days we find stories, however, that 
 we can beHeve. There was a man who came to 
 Britain from Rome, and said that he conquered the 
 land. His name was Juhus Caesar, and w^e have 
 his accounts of w4iat he found and of what he did. 
 We can be very sure of the fact that he went to 
 Britain from GauL Gaul is the name by which 
 France was called ages ago. Farther back than 
 that we cannot go in English history. 
 
 We may, it is true, dig up pieces of stone, and 
 perhaps scraps of copper and iron, which tell us 
 that there w^ere men in Britain before the time of 
 Caesar, and from these articles we can learn some- 
 thing about them and their habits. 
 
 We can see that the pieces of stone were shaped 
 by them in some way to be used as hatchets and 
 arrow-heads, or perhaps as harpoons. We can be 
 sure that these people lived near the seashore. They 
 were afraid of the w^ild beasts of the forests, and 
 could more safely catch fish for their food than hunt 
 animals. We can find great stones made into regu- 
 
STORIKS GO FROM MOUTH TO MOUTH. 9 
 
 lar shapes and piled up in a way that nature never 
 could have put them ; but we cannot even guess how 
 the men of that early time contrived to move such 
 immense weights, or to trim such stones. 
 
 After all, when w^e have dug into the earth as 
 much as w^e can, to find out what the first men of 
 England did and how they lived, it is little we can 
 learn about them. They did not write, and it is 
 not easy to carry stories from one man to another 
 without writing them down, even if the men live at 
 the same time. When they live hundreds of years 
 apart it is only possible for one set to know what 
 the former did if the father tells his son, and sends 
 the story along in that way. It is not a good way 
 to carry a story. Stories are changed by passing 
 from mouth to mouth, and often come to. the last 
 hearer in a very different shape from their original 
 one. 
 
 Suppose, for instance, there had been a great 
 man ages ago, and the men of his time had told 
 about him to their sons, and they again to theirs. 
 I think that his brave acts would have seemed 
 greater to the son than they did to the father, 
 and greater still to the grandson, and so on, until 
 
10 HISTORY WRITTEN IN BOOKS. 
 
 after a while men might think that he could not 
 have been a man at all, but a giant, or a child of 
 the gods. The next step would be to think that 
 he was himself a god ; and thus in time the great 
 man would be worshiped by his own descendants. 
 No doubt such things have happened. 
 
 There is no danger of this sort in the case of 
 the history of America. Not only did men know 
 how to write at the time that our history begins, 
 but they knew how to print, as you shall see. 
 When books are written, they are laid away care- 
 fully on shelves in libraries built for the purpose, 
 and there they remain safe until many sons and 
 grandsons of the writers have read them, and thus 
 the stories in them are surely known many, many 
 years after they were first written. This is true of 
 books that are only written ; but when a book is 
 printed, many copies are saved. As they are in 
 different libraries, it is pretty safe to say that they 
 will not all be destroyed by fire or decay for ages. 
 
 So you see, we may be quite sure of the princi- 
 pal facts in the history of our country, even from the 
 very beginning of it. There are difficulties, how- 
 ever. The men who wrote the first books about 
 
DIFFICULTIES IN STUDYING HISTORY. II 
 
 America did not always know as much as they ought, 
 and thus they may have made errors. If they wrote 
 about what their friends and neighbors did, they may 
 easily have been mistaken ; and if they wrote about 
 what they did themselves, they may have forgotten 
 some things, or they may have omitted acts that they 
 did not want to have remembered. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 HOW THE ROUND WORLD MOVES. 
 
 HERE are many other reasons why it Is 
 not ahvays easy to get at the real truth of 
 history. Men in early times did not know 
 some facts that are very plain and familiar to us now. 
 They thought that they knew, however, and wrote 
 as If they knew. 
 
 It was supposed in the olden time that the world 
 did not move ; but even the youngest child knows 
 now that it is the sun which stands still, while the 
 earth rolls around on its axis from west to east 
 every day. It is for this reason that the sun's light 
 comes to our eyes in the morning over the eastern 
 hills, and fades away In the west at nightfall. 
 
 Not only did our forefathers think that the earth 
 stood still, but they supposed it to be an immovable, 
 
A DARING SHIPiMAX'S SAIL. 1 3 
 
 flat, round Island of great size floating in an immense 
 sea called Ocean. They were acquainted with Greece 
 and Italy, and with portions of Asia and Africa, but 
 they thought that the Mediterranean Sea, which they 
 called the Great Sea, or, affectionately. Our Sea, 
 stretched almost from one end of the world to the 
 other. Around this sea the great nations of the 
 world were settled '' like ants or froes around a 
 marsh," as Socrates said. 
 
 In the course of time astronomers began to 
 understand that the earth could not possibly be flat, 
 for they saw that its shadow was round. Then they 
 thought that it might be shaped like a cylinder or 
 roller. After a while some ventured to suggest that 
 it was a globe, as it is ; but no one was quite 
 certain of this until the year 1520, when a daring 
 shipman had sailed around It, going to the west- 
 ward from Europe and returning by the way of 
 Asia. This man was named Magellan. 
 
 About a hundred years before this, however, a 
 book was written In which It was said that ships 
 might sail completely around the earth, as we know 
 that they can ; but so strange did the notion appear 
 that few believed It. The writer of that book, and 
 
14 NATIONS MOVE AROUND THE GLOBE. 
 
 it was a very strange one, was said to be a certain 
 knio-ht, "Sir John Mandeville," but now-a-days 
 scholars suspect that there never was such a knight, 
 and that some skilful writer concealed himself under 
 that name. There is no doubt that this book was 
 made out of the stories of real travelers. One of 
 them was Marco Polo, who had gone to the East, 
 and had given the people of Venice marvelous ac- 
 counts of what he had seen. He was the most 
 remarkable of all travelers. This shows how diffi- 
 cult it is to find out the truth when much time has 
 passed. 
 
 An old geographer named Ptolemy, who lived 
 in Egypt fifteen hundred years before " Sir John 
 Mandeville," had held the same opinion that is ex- 
 pressed in his book, but he thought that all the 
 other parts of the universe revolved around our little 
 world ! 
 
 Not only does the world itself move, but it is 
 a very interesting fact that the nations on it have 
 steadily moved also. No one knows on what spot the 
 first man lived, but there are good reasons for be- 
 lievine that it was somewhere in the center of the 
 continent of Asia. There, among the highest moun- 
 
EVERYBODY LOOKS WESTWARD. 1 5 
 
 tains of the world, at any rate, lived the men who 
 were forefathers of the Greeks and Romans, of the 
 French and Germans, and of the English and 
 American people. History tells us that the children 
 of those people of Asia have been slowly traveling 
 westward for ages. They first crossed over into the 
 center of Europe in large bodies ; and then they 
 passed to the islands of Britain, where they lived for 
 hundreds of years before they got any farther. 
 
 During all these long periods of time these people 
 seemed to be looking westward, and asking them- 
 selves what miorht be found there. Some of them 
 dreamed of a land of gold, or of a country where the 
 people never grew old, in the direction of sunset. 
 So they went to the edge of the great Atlantic ocean 
 and peered out into the fogs which hid the distance 
 from them. 
 
 They began to talk about wondrous islands in 
 the mysterious sea. Some even ventured to describe 
 them and their inhabitants. In those early days men 
 were very ready to believe wonderful stories. Some 
 of their vessels, puny and small as they were, had 
 been driven by the winds out into the ocean, and 
 thus, much against their will, they had discovered 
 
l6 WONDERS IN THE OCEAN ISLANDS. 
 
 some of the islands that He in that region. In this 
 way they had accidentally found the Canaries, the 
 Madeira Islands, and others, and thus their imagina- 
 tion had been excited. There were giants there, 
 they said ; there were sirens ; there was the bright 
 home of a fair maiden and her lover, who had fled 
 from England in the gay days of romance, when 
 Edward the Third reigned, and there were their 
 graves ! In some regions, they said, ships with iron 
 in them could not sail, because there were load- 
 stones that drew the nails out! 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 SOMETHING LIKE A WONDER-STORY. 
 
 F )'ou look at a map of the world you will 
 see to the north of Eng-land a great many 
 islands that stretch out towards Iceland and 
 Greenland from Norway. These are the Orkney, the 
 Shetland, and the Faroe Islands. They reach almost 
 all the way to Labrador, and it would not have been 
 strange if some seamen should have sailed from one 
 to another, and thus have actually reached America 
 long ago. If we look at the other side of America, 
 we find that it reaches still nearer to Asia, and 
 we can see no reason why men might not have 
 sailed across from that direction too ; perhaps they 
 did both. 
 
 The men of Norway were strong, and loved to 
 battle with the sea and with their neighbors. They 
 
 17 
 
I8 THE VIKINGS SAIL WESTWARD. 
 
 lived in a country where the sah water extends far 
 up into the land in a great many places. High rocks 
 form the steep sides of the inlets. They are called 
 fiords. Though a fiord is simply a bay or inlet, we 
 always think of such a rock-bound bay, when we 
 see the name, because the word is used for that 
 particular kind of a bay in Norway. 
 
 Men who love battle make quarrels for the sake 
 of fighting, and the men of this country who are 
 called vikings, or sea-robbers, found much of their 
 employment in going out from their fiords in strong 
 vessels to fight their neighbors, and to make them- 
 selves rich with what they could take from them. 
 They went to Iceland and far into the Mediterranean 
 Sea and to Russia. When they got home again 
 they boasted of what they had done, and their singers 
 sung songs about their exciting adventures. These 
 singers were the poets of the northland. We know 
 that poets do not always feel bound to make their 
 poems true history. They wish to stir the men who 
 hear or read their words, and thev make the acts 
 they sing of as grand and noble as they can. The 
 skalds of the north-lands, as the poets there were 
 called, wished to make sagas, or sayings, that would 
 
THE SKALDS SING OF WONDROUS DEEDS. I9 
 
 Stir their hearers. Stories of adventure would do 
 this, and of battle with enemies. 
 
 Therefore the skalds made it out that their heroes 
 had done wonderful deeds ; had ventured into dis- 
 tant regions, and had seen things that surprised 
 them. They did not write these songs down ; they 
 sang them, and thus they went from mouth to mouth, 
 from father to son. We cannot tell how much of 
 them to believe. Perhaps it is not important ; be- 
 cause whatever the vikings did, it does not concern 
 Americans much. 
 
 The stories tell us that about eight or nine 
 hundred years ago the vikings, who were, )'ou must 
 know, the best sailors of the time, actually sailed 
 from island to island until they reached our shores. 
 There they visited a pleasant region that they called 
 Vinland, because they found grapes in the woods. 
 They liked the country, and tried to establish a colony. 
 This was at about the year looo. The first Norse- 
 man who got across would not have done it if he 
 had not been lost in a fog. He sailed in an oppo- 
 site direction to that which he intended. The name 
 given to the discoverer of Vinland is Leif. He failed 
 to found a colony, and no other Norseman was more 
 successful. 
 
20 A TOWER AND A SKELETON. 
 
 Where Vinland may have been no one can tell. 
 It has been thought that it was on the coast of New 
 England. There is an old round tower in Newport, 
 Rhode Island, that was once supposed to be a relic 
 of the Norsemen, but hardly anybody thinks so now. 
 There is a stone on the brink of Taunton River, in 
 the town of Berkeley, which bears some marks that 
 were once thought by some to have been cut ages 
 before the English saw it ; but nothing can be made 
 of them, and the best we can do is to suppose that 
 the Indians chiseled the marks. 
 
 About fifty years ago a skeleton in armor was 
 dug up near Fall River, and Mr. Longfellow wrote 
 a poetical story upon it, in which he brings to mind 
 in a lively way the days of the Norsemen, and the 
 tales of their skalds. In it w^e can almost see the 
 bold men launching their graceful barques on the 
 wild Atlantic, and sailing like fierce cormorants 
 through storm and hurricane towards mysterious 
 Vinland ! This is as much poetry as any saga of 
 the ancient skalds. In fact, the whole account of 
 the visits of the vikings to America must be set 
 down as very like a wonder-story. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE HOLY LAND AND RICH CATHAY. 
 
 EOPLE are generally so much interested in 
 what others are about, that when one man 
 begins to do anything new, many others 
 follow his example. A hundred years after the time 
 that the vikings are supposed to have sailed to Vin- 
 land, there was a great stir in sleepy Europe which 
 excited men more than they had. been excited for 
 ages. A good pilgrim who had traveled to Jerusa- 
 lem went about the countries telling the people that 
 the Saracens, who then owned the Holy Land, did 
 not honor the Holy Places connected with the life 
 and death of Jesus. 
 
 He roused the people everywhere so much that 
 they thought that God called them to go to the 
 Holy Land and to take it away from the Saracens. 
 
22 GOING TO FIGHT THE SARACENS. 
 
 The result was that for two hundred years Christians 
 everywhere were filled with enthusiasm on the sub- 
 ject, and thousands and thousands of warriors roamed 
 over Europe, through Asia Minor, and across the 
 Mediterranean, until they came to Palestine, where 
 they fought the Saracens. Sometimes they gained 
 victories, but just as often they were terribly defeated. 
 
 Men had not been accustomed to travel much 
 before these times ; but then they found that there 
 was enjoyment as well as thrilling adventure to be 
 gained by going from land to land. They learned 
 many things, too, for those who stay always at home 
 know but little about the ways of the world. The 
 hosts of crusaders who went to Palestine heard of 
 other wonderful lands, and found that there were 
 things in them that they would like to have. Thus 
 foreign commerce sprung up. Many pilgrims passed 
 through Italy, and the cities there became rich after 
 a while. Then other cities also entertained pilgrims 
 and became rich. When in the process of time men 
 discovered that they could guide their ships by 
 means of the compass, they became bolder and 
 com.merce grew more extensive. 
 
 Throuo-h the stories of Marco Polo, and other 
 
MARCO POLO TELLS OF WONDERS. 23 
 
 travelers, men in Europe heard of a country called 
 India, of an island called Cipango, and of Cathay, the 
 empire of a great ruler called the Grand Cham. 
 Cipango was what we now call Japan, and the em- 
 pire of Cathay was China. In those lands there 
 were gold and diamonds and pearls ; there were great 
 elephants, and lions and leopards and griffins, and 
 beasts of the most marvelous kind. There were ants 
 that collected gold for men, and filled vessels with it. 
 There were trees that bore lambs without wool, bread 
 that did not need to be cooked, and meal and honey. 
 There was such wealth there that the pavements of 
 the palaces were of silver and gold, and above all, — 
 and perhaps this was the chief attraction of the 
 Eastern lands, — there was a fountain of youth of 
 which if a man drank he never would erow old. 
 
 It was not easy to reach Palestine. It was more 
 difficult to get to India; and to reach Cipango and 
 Cathay required long, dreary marches through the 
 wastes of Europe, over the high mountains between 
 the continents, across burninor deserts on the back 
 of a camel, and ever so much sailing on the Mediter- 
 ranean Sea, or on the seas that stretched around the 
 eastern countries. It did not matter to those men 
 
24 EUROPE KEPT WIDE AWAKE. 
 
 that there was more wealth to be made by cultivating 
 the soil at home than there was by going on these 
 toilsome voyages into the midst of unknown perils. 
 They kept on doing the harder thing, only hoping 
 all the time that some easier way might be found to 
 go to . India and Cipango. The hope of gain kept 
 them all wide awake. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 HOW SAILORS SEARCHED THE SEAS. 
 
 E AN WHILE the sailors of the Mediter- 
 ranean were searching every nook of the 
 sea, and even venturing into the Atlantic 
 to see if they could discover what there was of Africa 
 beyond the waters in which the Canary Islands lay. 
 Slowly and surely the mariners of Spain, under direc- 
 tion of Prince Henry of Portugal, — called the Navi- 
 gator, because he thus encouraged discovery, — sailed 
 down towards the equator and beyond it, until, in 
 1487, one Bartholomew Diaz was driven by furious 
 winds quite around the southern end of Africa. On 
 his wa)^ home he discovered the promontory that 
 we call the Cape of Good Hope, though he called 
 it the Cape of Tempests, because he had so much 
 trouble in o^ettinor around it. He did not see it 
 
 25 
 
26 WHAT THE WAVES WASHED UP. 
 
 when he passed it the first tniie. This was a step 
 towards the route for ships to India for which Prince 
 Henry was searching, though it was not understood 
 at the time. 
 
 Sometimes the ocean washed up on the shores 
 of the islands west of Europe bits of wood that 
 showed that they had been carved by men's hands, 
 and with them came cane-stalks, and at last two bodies 
 of drowned men drifted ashore. Once a pilot sail- 
 ing far out into the Atlantic, hundreds of miles west 
 of the coast of Portugal, picked up such a curious 
 piece of carved wood, which seemed to have come 
 from the West. Again, the waves cast up trunks 
 of great trees of a kind not known on the islands. 
 Once a mariner from St. Mary, one of the Azores, 
 said that in sailing northerly he saw land to the west, 
 which his company took to be Tartary. Thus the 
 testimony of years gave one man, at least, reason to 
 think that the coast of India, or Cathay, or Cipango, 
 was not very far distant, and that these articles had 
 drifted from there. 
 
 Though most men still believed that Ocean was 
 the bound of all the earth, and that its terrible winds, 
 huge fishes, frightful tempests, and great depth would 
 
WHAT THE WAVES WASHED UP. 27 
 
 forever keep sailors from visiting the mysterious isl- 
 ands that they were sure lay hidden in its mists, it 
 was not so with all. There were a few who were 
 sure that the earth was a globe, and not a very 
 large one either. They agreed with " Sir John 
 Mandeville," in whom they fully believed, that if the 
 earth were a globe there must be some way around 
 it, and that by going far enough towards the west a 
 sailor would in time reach the Indies. What brilliant 
 visions rose in the mind of the man who thought of 
 a short way of getting to India, to the rich gold-hills 
 of Cathay, and the diamond-fields thereabout! 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 PRINTING BOOKS AND LEARNING FROM THEM. 
 
 HERE was another reason why men at the 
 time of which I am speaking should have 
 been wide awake. They had just begun 
 to print books, and thus knowledge was beginning 
 to become more common. Italy was the foremost 
 country of Europe. To it there had come a great 
 many Christian scholars who had before that tim.e 
 lived at Constantinople. They left their homes be- 
 cause the city fell into the hands of the Saracens, 
 whom they considered their enemies. They wrote 
 books, and studied the old Greek language and the 
 great books that learned Greeks had written ages 
 before. Such men as these naturally helped Italy 
 in its progress, and as learning increased, prosperity 
 followed in other affairs. 
 
 28 
 
1453.] THE BIRTH OF COLUMBUS. 29 
 
 Now It happened that at about the same time 
 that men began to print books, and at the same time 
 that these learned men came to Italy/ there was born 
 In the vicinity of Genoa, on the beautiful blue Medi- 
 terranean, a little boy whose name Is now known 
 everywhere because he grew up to become the most 
 successful of all the navigators of his time, and the 
 most celebrated of all time. In his own language 
 this boy's name was Chrlstofero Columbo, but In 
 our day It Is written Christopher Columbus. 
 
 This boy lived In a place where the sea was always 
 before him, and where he saw little to attract him on 
 land. He became Infatuated with the free life of 
 the sailor, and his father naturally remembered this 
 as he selected the studies for him In his young days. 
 His favorite books were two, — the geography of 
 Ptolemy, written about sixteen hundred years before, 
 and the travels ascribed to Mandevllle, written about 
 a hundred years before. So slowly did men live In 
 the days of Columbus, that neither of these books 
 
 1 This was in the year 1453, but we do not know in what year 
 printing was invented, nor exactly when Cohimbus was born, though 
 the great discoverer probably first saw the light a few years before 
 the fall of Constantinople. 
 
30 
 
 THE STUDIES OF COLUMBUS. 
 
 could be called "behind the times" then. In his 
 first school he was taught something of reading, 
 writing, drawing, and arithmetic, and when he went 
 to the university he learned what he could of geome- 
 try, astronomy, navigation, and geography ; though 
 litde was known on the last-mentioned subject even 
 in enlightened Italy. 
 
 Map-makers drew vague oudines of the countries, 
 putting down islands in the seas where they thought 
 islands might be, and drawing pictures of land and 
 sea monsters in the regions that they confessed they 
 knew little or nothing about. However, in these 
 days people were learning how little they really knew 
 of the earth on which they lived, and w^ere diligently 
 seeking information in every direction. Their im- 
 aginations w^ere on the alert and they were gratified 
 by every nev.^ bit of information that came to them. 
 It was no play-day enterprise to go on a voyage 
 in the Mediterranean in those days. Nations, cities, 
 and private noblemen, all had their vessels on the 
 waters preying on whatever they met, and not hesi- 
 tating to shed blood if they could not obtain the 
 mastery over their opponents without. When vessels 
 came together they grappled and fought until night 
 
THE STORIES OF NAVIGATORS. 3 1 
 
 put an end to the struggle, unless one or the other 
 gave way, or unless the hand-grenades or other fiery 
 missiles set the vessels on fire and sent them to the 
 bottom. 
 
 For a score of years the sturdy young sailor busied 
 himself in voyaging over the Mediterranean ; but 
 then he seems to have heard of the enterprises of 
 Prince Henry of Portugal. Certainly he followed the 
 crowd of strangers who were drawn to Lisbon by 
 the exciting stories of discoveries made by navigators. 
 Portugal, which had before been almost an unknown 
 country, now rose to a position of great importance. 
 Lisbon, its capital, was constantly stirred by the 
 stories of adventurers coming home, or by the ex- 
 pectations roused by others just setting out for 
 unknown reo^ions. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 A YOUNG MAN FROM ITALY. 
 
 ERE the young man from Italy became 
 acquainted with a daughter of an ItaHan 
 navicrator. She attended service with him 
 at the chapel of the convent of All Saints. After a 
 while the two strangers were married. The bride's 
 father was not living, and the young husband was 
 taken to her home, where he found the papers left 
 by the old navigator, and heard tales of his many 
 voyages and adventures. Columbus soon began to 
 make voyages himself. 
 
 He went to the Gold Coast, and made maps of 
 the recrions he visited. Gradually he obtained some 
 reputation for making good maps, and was brought 
 into correspondence with men of science and in- 
 fluence. For a while he lived on Porto Santo, one 
 
 32 
 
1474.] COLUMBUS STUDIES GEOGRAPHY. 33 
 
 of the Madeira Islands, and there his son Diego 
 was born. 
 
 The world of navigators was alive with the longing 
 to discover the passage to India that Prince Henry 
 had thought might be found by sailing down the 
 coast of Africa, as indeed it might. The ships came 
 and w^ent from the harbor of Porto Santo, carrying 
 brave sailors full of stories of all sorts of adventure, 
 and of wild imagination about the mysterious islands 
 that were supposed to lie to the westward. 
 
 Any active )'Oung man w'ould have listened to 
 such stirring accounts as these mariners brought, 
 and Columbus did not neglect them. He talked 
 them over with wiser men, and compared them with 
 each other. He read what had been written in time 
 past about the world, its size and form, and about 
 men and companies of men who had been known to 
 go out into the Atlantic and be lost. 
 
 While Columbus lived at Porto Santo, and, indeed, 
 the very year that Diego was born, which was 1474, 
 he had some important correspondence with a learned 
 Italian about the discovery of w^estern lands. This 
 man, Paolo Toscanelli, believed that India and Cathay 
 might be reached by sailing westward, and in one 
 
34 A REMARKABLE MAP. 
 
 letter he gave an interesting account of the magnifi- 
 cence of Cathay, taken from Marco Polo. Probably 
 this had a great influence upon Columbus ; at any 
 rate, it seems to have caused him to study Marco 
 Polo's work. 
 
 Toscanelli sent Columbus a remarkable map. On 
 it the coast of Asia was drawn in front of the western 
 coasts of Europe and Africa, about where America 
 really lies. There were many islands very conven- 
 iently arranged between the continents. Cipango 
 was the largest. It was some distance east of Cathay, 
 and nearer Europe still were the Island of St. 
 Brandan, and then the Cape Verde, Canary, and 
 Madeira Islands. It seemed as if a man might strike 
 them one after another by sailing westward. 
 
 When we look at the great ships that sail over 
 the ocean to-day, we are in danger of forgetting that 
 in the time of which we are speaking there were none 
 of that size and kind. The ships in which Columbus 
 sailed down the coast of Africa and to the islands, 
 were smaller than most that we see in our rivers and 
 lakes. Many of them were called caravels, which 
 your dictionary tells you means light, round, old- 
 fashioned ships with square poops. They had high 
 
HOW THE CARAVELS LOOKED. 35 
 
 bows and sterns, with castles on the sterns ; their 
 masts were short and their sails were square ; they 
 had no decks, and they were so frail that one would 
 not dare, no\v-a-days, to venture far from land in 
 them. Columbus, however, did not think large 
 vessels were adapted to the purposes of voyages of 
 discovery, as they required too much depth of water, 
 and might not be able to explore bays and rivers. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 WHAT THE YOUNG MAN THOUGHT ABOUT THE 
 WORLD. 
 
 OLUMBUS agreed with Sir John Mandevllle 
 that the earth was round ; but he thought 
 that It was so small that the sea could not 
 be very wide that stretched from Spain to India. 
 He knew nothing of the continent that lay between. 
 He put together all the Information that he was able 
 to gather, and then argued from the nature of things 
 that he was right. He did not see any objection to 
 his theory. Every piece of wood that floated from 
 the w^estward made him more confident. Every reed 
 washed ashore by the west wind was strong enough 
 to strengthen his faith. 
 
 He not only thought the globe smaller than it 
 Is, but he was sure that Asia was much greater than 
 it is, and extended farther around towards the Atlan- 
 36 
 
WISHING TO ATTACK THE SARACENS. 37 
 
 tic. His mistakes are of little consequence now, 
 but if he had known the truth, perhaps even his 
 strong will would have been too weak to lead him to 
 enter upon his perilous voyage. 
 
 The Crusades had failed to drive the Saracens 
 permanendy from the Holy Land, and Columbus 
 thought that perhaps he might accomplish the great 
 work, if only he could attack the Moslems from the 
 other side. One of his chief desires, as he expressed 
 them, was to extend the Christian religion. Every- 
 where he went he made constant inquiries about 
 the land of the Grand Cham, hoping that at some 
 happy time he might actually come upon wealthy 
 Cathay. He was poor, and year after year passed 
 away without bringing to him any definite hope that 
 he should ever be able to set forth on his great 
 voyage. This did not keep him from making short 
 expeditions, and in one of these he is supposed to 
 have visited Iceland. 
 
 There were many reasons why men had not 
 ventured much out of sight of land in their ships 
 in early ages, and in fact at any time before those 
 of which I am now writing. They had no means of 
 telling where they were when they could not see the 
 
38 A NEW NAUTICAL INSTRUMENT. [1484. 
 
 shore. At the beginning of the century in which 
 Columbus Hved the mariner's compass had been 
 brought into more general use, and other helps to 
 the sailor had been invented. 
 
 Just at the time that Columbus needed it, while 
 he was delaying his voyage, indeed, an invention 
 was made that proved of great service to all navi- 
 gators. There was an ancient instrument called the 
 astrolabe, which had been used for ages by astrono- 
 mers and astrologers as a means of finding the 
 position of the stars. It was at this time first applied 
 successfully to the uses of the seaman. By means 
 of this he was able to tell his latitude on a chart, 
 though not very accurately, no matter how far he 
 might be from any shore. This imperfect instrument 
 was in time given up for the quadrant or sextant, 
 which was invented about one hundred and fifty years 
 ago by a friend of Sir Isaac Newton in England, 
 and by Thomas Godfrey in Philadelphia at the same 
 time. 
 
 •^Af^j? 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 COLUMBUS ASKS KINGS TO HELP HIM. 
 
 r was not long after this application of the 
 astrolabe to the uses of the sailor, that 
 Columbus began earnest efforts to obtain 
 help in carrying out his great enterprise. He had 
 argued and studied upon the question long enough ; 
 now he determined to act as soon as possible. No 
 way seemed open to him unless he could influence 
 some sovereign to give him money and ships, and no 
 sovereiorn would do this unless he could be made 
 pretty certain that the enterprise would bring back 
 more money than it cost. Here was a difficult prob- 
 lem for the enterprising Italian to solve. 
 
 Portuofal had been in advance of the world in 
 making voyages of discovery, and therefore it seemed 
 most promising to apply to the king of that country. 
 
 39 
 
40 THE CARDINAL SHAKES HIS HEAD. [1485. 
 
 Columbus made the application, but alas he failed ! 
 He sent his brother to ask king Henry the Seventh 
 of England to take advantage of the opportunity to 
 add glory to his reign ; but he was not successful. 
 
 Columbus then turned to Spain, at that time 
 ruled by Ferdinand and Isabella. They were then 
 engaged in fighting the Saracens, who had been in 
 the land more than seven hundred years. In 1485 
 Columbus obtained an opportunity to present his 
 case to the Grand Cardinal of Spain at Cordova, and 
 we may be sure that he argued it with earnestness. 
 
 At first the great dignitary was inclined to think 
 that the views of the navigator were opposed to the 
 Bible ; but at last he decided that they should not 
 be condemned until they had at least been heard 
 by king Ferdinand. The king was impressed as the 
 Cardinal had been by the earnest eloquence of the 
 petitioner ; but even he was not willing to decide in 
 his favor until he had obtained the opinion of a body 
 of wise churchmen. 
 
 These wise men were not wise enough to see how 
 there could be men on the other side of the globe, 
 standing with their feet toward those on the other 
 side. They asked Columbus what the Bible meant 
 
CAN SNOW FALL UPWARD? 4I 
 
 when it said that the heavens were spread out as a 
 curtain and as a tent. " How," they asked, " can the 
 rain, snow, and hail fall upward, and the trees grow 
 with their branches downward ? " 
 
 These men thought that the globe, if it were a 
 globe, must be so great that it would take two or 
 three years for a ship to sail around it. They were 
 sure that if a vessel were to succeed in getting to 
 the opposite side, it would certainly be unable to sail 
 back again, for it would have to go up-hill ! 
 
 In vain did Columbus try to explain that the Bible 
 was not given to men as a book of science, but that 
 it contained language adapted for the understanding 
 of those for whom it was written ; and that ships 
 had, in fact, gone a part of the way around the globe 
 without having any difficulty in sailing back again. 
 The counselors of king Ferdinand would not be con- 
 vinced, and they sent Columbus away with his petition 
 
 uneranted. 
 
 W'as the poor mariner cast down by all this delay 
 and opposition ? One might expect him to lose every 
 spark of hope; but it was not so. He patiently fol- 
 lowed the king and his court, as they went from camp 
 to camp in the course of the great war against the 
 
42 A CONFERENCE WITH THE KING. 
 
 Saracens. Probably he was much interested in the 
 struggle, for he was as desirous as any one to see 
 the arms of Christian Spain win victory over the 
 enemy. The conference with the churchmen had 
 been held at Salamanca. 
 
 Two years later Columbus was called to confer 
 with the king, w^ho was then pressing the siege of 
 Malaga, but the work of w^ar was so exciting that 
 there was no opportunity for the king to hear the 
 sailor. Then there followed another year of suspense. 
 In the course of it the king of Portugal and the king 
 of England sent Columbus word that they would like 
 to see him, and they gave some encouraging promises. 
 Both of these tempting offers were declined, and it 
 must have been because Columbus felt quite sure 
 that P^erdinand would give the desired help. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 DELAYS AND HEARTACHES. 
 
 N 1489 arrangements were made for another 
 conference between Ferdinand and Colum- 
 bus at Seville. Lodgings were provided for 
 the sailor, and everything else duly arranged ; but, 
 alas! another campaign opened, and no conference 
 could be held. In this campaign, — one of the most 
 glorious of all in the long war, — Columbus is said to 
 have taken active part. Queen Isabella attended with 
 an unusually stately train. Not long afterward one 
 of the rival kings of the Saracens surrendered. 
 
 Then there came news of greater sufferings by 
 Christians in Palestine, and a strong desire to go on 
 a crusade was kindled among the fiery Spaniards. 
 The year 1490 came, and with it the proud entry 
 into Seville by Ferdinand and Isabella, and the fes- 
 
 43 
 
44 COLUMBUS STARTS FOR FRANCE. [1490 
 
 tivities connected with the marriage of their daughtei 
 to the son of the king of Portugal. Winter and 
 spring passed. They were crowded with feasts and 
 tournaments and processions ; and what thought could 
 a king and a queen give then to the petition of a 
 sailor offering to show them a way around the world! 
 
 After these shows had passed another campaign 
 opened, and again Columbus was thrust away. Still, 
 he determined to make one great effort before the 
 army was actually in the field, and to get, if possi- 
 ble, an answer ; for he thought that even a refusal 
 would be better than any longer suspense. 
 
 Some consideration was shown him, but finally a 
 repulse came. The sovereigns said no, but at the 
 same time gave Columbus some hope that, if ever 
 the war should close, the matter would be considered 
 again. It would seem like a forlorn hope. 
 
 Almost heartbroken, Columbus now turned his 
 thoughts toward France, and actually set out to go 
 there. On his way to take ship he stopped 
 with his child at the gate of a convent to ask food, 
 and the prior took interest in him, heard his story, 
 detained him as his guest, and at last sent a mes- 
 senger to the queen with a letter urging her to 
 consider again the cause of poor Columbus. 
 
1492.J THE SURRENDER OF BOABDIL. 45 
 
 Isabella returned a favorable answer, and soon 
 the prior himself went to see her. He made an 
 earnest plea for his guest, showed the queen how 
 honest his offer was, how much to the glory of 
 Spain success would be, if won, and led her to call 
 Columbus to her side again. 
 
 We need no words from history to assure us 
 that Columbus was happy as he received from the 
 prior the money that the queen sent him for expenses 
 of the journey to her court. It was then at a new 
 town called Santa Fe, near Granada. The siege 
 which was destined to close the war w^as in progress. 
 Columbus rode on a mule provided by Isabella, and 
 was clad in new clothes bought with her money. 
 
 When he reached Santa Fe it was just in time to 
 see Boabdil, the last of the Saracenic kings, come 
 out of the palace of the Alhambra to deliver the 
 keys of Granada to the Spanish sovereigns, and to 
 witness a brilliant triumph, after a war of eight years. 
 During the whole of this time Columbus had been 
 looking in vain for the help that his heart now 
 assured him was soon to come. 
 
 It was eighteen years since the design had first 
 been formed. The queen listened with interest ; but 
 
46 HOPE AT LAST! [1492. 
 
 at last, in consequence of the advice of her priests, 
 repHed that the enterprise, magnificent as it was, 
 would be purchased at too great a cost ! Then 
 Columbus mounted his mule firmly determined to 
 turn to France, in accordance with his former in- 
 tention. 
 
 He slowly rode away over the plain that spreads 
 out around Santa Fe and Granada. Just as his mule 
 was about to disappear from sight he was overtaken 
 by a swift messenger, who told him that the queen 
 had offered to pledge her jewels, if necessary, to raise 
 the money needed to fit out the expedition. Gladly 
 he turned the beast toward the rocky heights and 
 soon reached Santa Fe, where he had^ another 
 audience with the queen. 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 TWO TRIUMPHS AT ONCE. 
 
 T was a brilliant scene that Columbus wit- 
 nessed when the last of the Moorish kings 
 gave up the keys of Granada. A great 
 crowd of people gathered to see the ceremonies, 
 which on one side w^ere so joyous and on the other 
 so sad. Every three minutes the dull boom of the 
 euns of the fortress thundered forth, and in the 
 midst of the noise Boabdil came out and handed 
 the keys to Ferdinand in token of defeat and 
 submission. 
 
 He said : '' These keys are the last relics of the 
 government of the Saracens in Spain ! To thee, 
 O king! are our kingdom, our castles, our person. 
 Such is the decree of Allah ! Take them, but treat 
 us with the kindness thou hast promised ! " To 
 
 47 
 
48 THE LAST SIGH OF THE MOOR. [1492. 
 
 the new governor of Granada Boabclil handed his 
 costly ring, saying: ''With this signet have I gov- 
 erned Granada. Take it, and rule with it, and 
 Allah make you more fortunate than I have been ! " 
 
 As Boabdil rode away from the city he too, like 
 Columbus, turned before he got out of sight of its 
 towers and palaces. As he saw for the last time the 
 crucifix sparkling in the sun above the lovely Alham- 
 bra he burst into tears, and cried, "Allah is great!" 
 The spot has been called the " Last sigh of the 
 Moor," and is remembered as carefully as the one 
 on which Columbus stopped his mule, when he looked 
 back and turned again toward the court at the call of 
 the queen. Boabdil went away in despair ; Columbus 
 entered with glorious expectation. 
 
 The hopes of Columbus were well founded. 
 Good queen Isabella saw him immediately, and atoned 
 for all past delays by the honest interest that she 
 took in influencing Ferdinand to enter into the 
 agreement with the mariner. On the seventeenth 
 of April the important paper was duly signed by the 
 sovereigns and the sailor at Santa Fe, which made 
 Columbus and his heirs and successors admirals in 
 all the lands that he might discover in the ocean. 
 
HONORS PROMISED COLUMBUS. 49 
 
 One tenth of all the precious stones, gold, silver, 
 spices, and other merchandise, however obtained in 
 the new lands, were to be the admiral's. He was to 
 be sole judge in all disputes that might arise out of 
 the commerce that was expected to be created. 
 
 Columbus had been very positive that he ought 
 to have all these honors and privileges secured to 
 him before he should start. If he had not been 
 determined about this he might have made an 
 agreement with Ferdinand before he did. The 
 queen sympathized^ with Columbus in desiring to 
 spread the Christian religion, but doubtless the more 
 worldly-wise king was greatly influenced by the vis- 
 ions of gold, silver, and diamonds that he saw before 
 him. The treasurer paid the bills, and Isabella did 
 not have to give up her jewels, as she said she was 
 willing to. 
 
 Columbus expressed the devout wish that the 
 wealth that was to come to Spain should be conse- 
 crated to a Crusade to take the sepulcher of Christ 
 away from the Saracens. He believed that he was 
 to be the agent of God in effecting this great work. 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 MORE DIFFICULTIES. 
 
 HE difficulties of our hero were not over 
 when the aereement was signed. On the 
 third of May, with a joyful heart, Columbus 
 bade the court farewell and started for Palos, where 
 he intended to get his ships ready. There he was 
 met by his faithful friend of the convent, — the same 
 who had before interested Isabella in his behalf. 
 
 On the twenty-third of the month they went to 
 a church where many of the inhabitants and officials 
 had been called to attend. There the orders of the 
 sovereigns were read with much solemn pomp, and 
 the authorities promised obedience ; but when they 
 learned the real nature of the expedition they were 
 filled with dismay. Brave sailors refused to venture 
 on such an enterprise. Every frightful tale of the 
 
 50 
 
1492.] MEN FORCED TO GO. 5 1 
 
 dangers of Ocean that could be remembered was 
 conjured up, and weeks passed before any progress 
 could be made in getting ships and men. 
 
 The king and queen heard that their subjects 
 refused to obey their commands, and sent officers 
 to Palos to force men to supply the ships, and to 
 oblige sailors to go on them. Even then every 
 difficulty was put in the way of Columbus. The men 
 who were to get the ships ready for sea did the work 
 so poorly at first that no one would dare to set out 
 in them. \Mien they were brought back to do it 
 over, they refused, and ran away. In the same spirit 
 the sailors, after being forced to enlist, would desert 
 and hide themselves. 
 
 May passed away ; June came and w-ent ; and yet 
 the little vessels were not fitted out. July passed and 
 August began before the ships were ready; but then 
 every difficulty had been overcome, and as the sun 
 rose on Friday, the third of August, three frail barques 
 slowly steered toward the southwest, bearing ninety 
 sailors, a physician, a surgeon, several priests, some 
 gentlemen and servants, — in all one hundred and 
 twenty persons, with provisions for a year. 
 
 It was not a gay party upon which that morning 
 
52 SOLEMN FAREWELLS. [1492. 
 
 sun looked down. Every man was filled with a sense 
 of die awfulness of the enterprise. Columbus had 
 gone to church, and had taken 'the communion. The • 
 officers and sailors had followed his example. Palos 
 was full of weeping men and w^omen, for there was 
 scarcely a household that did not have some relative 
 on the squadron that sailed out into the unknown 
 sea. At last, committing themselves to the special 
 care of Heaven, with tears and forebodings, in de- 
 pression and sadness, they started out in pursuance 
 of the orders of their sovereigns, and under the stern 
 command of the determined Columbus. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 A NEW WORLD DISCOVERED. 
 
 OOK at the little fleet as it sets out on its 
 momentous voyage. There is the Santa 
 Maria, with the flag of the admiral at its 
 head, a little vessel of but a hundred tons ; and there 
 are the Pinta and the Nina, still smaller. They were 
 to go to the Canary Islands first, and then to steer 
 right westward. They did not know it, but they 
 could hardly have taken a longer course across the 
 ocean. 
 
 Columbus must have felt very solemn for another 
 reason. He knew that his men did not want to go 
 with him, and he could not tell how soon they would 
 refuse to obey his commands. At any moment they 
 might mutiny, and then he would be powerless, if 
 he should not lose his life. There were good reasons 
 
 53 
 
54 ON THE LONG VOYAGE. [1492. 
 
 for such fears as these. One day the Pinta's rudder 
 would not work, and it seemed that some one on 
 board had broken it, hoping thus to compel Columbus 
 to send the vessel back to Europe. It was difficult 
 to repair the break, and a delay at the Canaries of 
 some weeks was made necessary. The volcano of 
 Teneriffe happened to pour forth its smoke at the 
 time, and the sailors took it as an evil omen. As 
 soon as possible, therefore, Columbus left those 
 islands and pressed westward. 
 
 August passed day by day, and the three ships 
 were not beyond the Canaries ; September was gone, 
 and yet there was no hope of soon seeing Cathay. 
 On the twenty-fifth of that month one of the sailors 
 had, indeed, thought he saw land, but he was mis- 
 taken, and the hopes that he had roused were dashed. 
 The men threatened to mutiny. Columbus was afraid 
 to let them know how far they had sailed. He 
 therefore kept two records of the voyage, one of 
 which was true and the other false. On the false 
 record, which was the only one the sailors saw, the 
 distance was set down day by day much less than it 
 really was. I am sorry to have to confess this for 
 the brave admiral. The situation became threaten- 
 
1492.] LAND DISCOVFLRED. 55 
 
 ing as well as hopeless, but still Columbus kept 
 right on ! 
 
 He was not rewarded until Friday morning, 
 October 12, when, as the sun rose from the sea, 
 tokens of land appeared in the distance. Full day- 
 light showed that the ship was off the shore of an 
 island, and that its naked inhabitants were gazing in 
 astonishment at the sight of the approaching vessel. 
 Then the crew thronged around their commander, 
 kissing his hands and begging favors, or asking 
 humble pardon for the misconduct that they had 
 been guilty of on the long voyage. 1 
 
 For seventy days the frail vessels had tossed on 
 the treacherous sea ; but now they lay at peace in 
 transparent waters beneath bright skies, surrounded 
 by all the luxuries of a warm climate. The mari- 
 ners considered themselves the favorites of Heaven, 
 though they had thought themselves its outcasts. 
 
 With evidence of religious gratitude, Columbus 
 landed, and took possession of the country in the 
 names of Ferdinand and Isabella. Throwing himself 
 on the earth he gave thanks to God, with tears of 
 joy, as he kissed the long-looked-for soil of a New 
 World ! 
 
56 LETTERS TO THE GRAND CHAM. 
 
 Columbus did not then know where he was. 
 Neither do we know. There are several islands 
 on which he may have landed. I find among the 
 Bahamas, Cat and Watling's Islands, and from their 
 situation I am inclined to think that Watling's was 
 the one that Columbus landed on. He said it was 
 called Guanahani, but he named it San Salvador, that 
 is, Holy Saviour. He did not doubt but it was one 
 of the many islands near Cipango that he had seen 
 on the map sent to him by Toscanelli. 
 
 It is rather amusing to know that when Columbus 
 landed he was so sure that he had reached Cipango, 
 that he sent by the natives certain letters that Ferdi- 
 nand and Isabella had given him to present to the 
 Grand Cham ! 
 
CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 COLUMBUS AT HOME AGAIN. 
 
 E cannot imagine the joy that Cohimbus felt 
 when he stepped ashore and said to himself, 
 "I was right: the Indies do lie to the 
 westward from Spain ; I can now give to my sov- 
 ereigns the wealth that I promised ! " Though he 
 was doubtless in haste to give the intelligence of his 
 success to those w^ho had sorrowed so much as they 
 saw him sail away with their friends and neighbors, 
 he did not immediately return to Spain. 
 
 He occupied three months in cruising among the 
 Bahama Islands, and the West Indies, as they are 
 still called on account of the mistake that Columbus 
 made in thinking that he had reached the shores of 
 Asia. He sailed thus along the coast of Cuba, 
 which he was sure must be Asia, and then set out 
 
 57 
 
58 THE VOYAGE HOMEWARD. [1493. 
 
 on the return voyage to Palos. He carried with 
 him some of the natives to show to his countrymen. 
 He called them Indians, because he thought he had 
 reached India. He took also specimens of the birds 
 and of the products of the islands. 
 
 It was not until the fourth of January, 1493, that 
 Columbus thought best thus to set sail for Palos 
 again. The winter is said to have been very stormy 
 on the Atlantic, and the little vessels were tossed 
 about in a most frightful manner. At times Colum- 
 bus, brave as he was, feared that he should never 
 see Spain again. He was specially troubled at the 
 thought that the story of his wonderful discovery 
 would never be known. Finally he wrote an ac- 
 count of the vo)-age on parchment, and wrapped it in 
 a waxed cloth. This he enclosed in the middle of a 
 cake of wax, and put the parcel in a barrel, which 
 he cast into the sea. He gave his men to under- 
 stand that he was performing a religious vow. 
 
 His anxiety was so great that this did not satisfy 
 him, and he prepared another account in the same 
 way, and placed it on the high poop of his caravel, 
 so that if he should himself be swallowed up by the 
 angry waves his story might by chance float to shore. 
 
1493.] A VISIT TO A KING. 59 
 
 In spite of all the clangers of this rough voyage, 
 the Pinta at last reached land, but it was off the 
 harbor of Lisbon and not Palos. Nothing but bad 
 weather would have made Columbus stop at Lisbon, 
 for it is in Portugal, and you know that the king 
 of that country had not been willing to help in the 
 beginning of the enterprise. 
 
 However, Columbus was obliged to cast anchor, 
 on account of the storm. He put the best face on 
 the matter, by sending w^ord that he had arrived, and 
 asking permission to go to Palos. The truth is, he 
 was afraid to remain at Lisbon because there was a 
 report that his vessel was loaded with gold that he 
 had found in the rich new world. 
 
 I cannot tell you of all the honors that were now 
 poured on the poor mariner who a few months before 
 had been begging to be listened to. There were 
 acclamations of the people, the sounds of drum and 
 fife, and finally, most remarkable of all, an invitation 
 from the king to visit hirti at Valparaiso. Though it 
 was but thirty miles to this place, it took Columbus 
 two days to get there over the bad roads, and in the 
 rain that poured down on him. 
 
 The king treated the great discoverer with the 
 
6o REJOICINGS IN PALOS. [1493. 
 
 Utmost consideration, and listened to his account of 
 the voyage with deep interest. When the story had 
 been told, Columbus was escorted back to his ship by 
 a long train of cavaliers. 
 
 A few days later, in the middle of March, he found 
 himself the object of still more interest in the harbor 
 of Palos, from which he had so dolefully sailed out 
 seven months before. 
 
 The shops were closed, the bells rang, every one 
 was in a state of excitement, and there was such a 
 tumult as Palos had never known. Everybody seemed 
 to forget the difficulties that they had put in the way 
 of Columbus when he started. With one accord they 
 threw up their hats and shouted their loud accla- 
 mations as they followed his steps through the city. 
 
 There was a man in Palos who did not hear these 
 sounds with joy. It was the commander of one of the 
 ships that had gone out with Columbus. He had 
 deserted his admiral as soon as he was certain that 
 land had been discovered, and had hastened back to 
 Spain to get the honor himself. When he entered the 
 harbor of Palos at last, he found that the place was in 
 an uproar of excitement, and that Columbus, who 
 ought to have received it, was enjoying the honors ! 
 It is said that he died of vexation. 
 
CHAPTER XV. 
 
 A ROYAL WELCOME. 
 
 KRDINAND and Isabella were at Barcelona, 
 a city on the Mediterranean, several hundred 
 miles away. Between the two places there 
 were many mountains and rivers and plains to be 
 crossed, if one were to go thither by land. Columbus 
 had certainly sailed enough for the time. When, 
 therefore, the king and queen invited him to come 
 to them to tell again his wondrous stor)', you may 
 be sure he did not hesitate to take a mule, for though 
 that animal is slow, he Is steadier and surer than the 
 blue waves of the Mediterranean. 
 
 We can hardly Imagine this journey. " Don 
 Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 
 and Governor of the Islands discovered in the Indies," 
 was on his way to court to meet the great rulers of 
 
 6i 
 
62 A WELCOME FROM THE PEOPLE. [1493. 
 
 a rich land. He had with him six Indians, whose 
 swarthy faces and strange garments added to the 
 interest of the people as he passed slowly along. 
 Then there were the curiosities, the birds and fruits, 
 that had come from the New World. 
 
 Women who had never ventured farther from 
 home than the nearest parish church, children to 
 whom the whole world was new, men who had heard 
 that a wild and perhaps crazy sailor had a year before 
 set out to risk his life on the western sea, — all these 
 crowded around the band as it drew its little length 
 over the high mountains, forded the streams, probably 
 flooded by the spring thaws and rains, and traced 
 the dull road from Palos and Seville to distant 
 Barcelona. 
 
 How many times, think you, did Columbus have 
 to stop to tell his tale to the local dignitaries on the 
 route ? How his heart must have swelled with ex- 
 ultant delight as he pressed with difficulty through 
 the excited crowds that thronged the roads ! When 
 at last he entered Barcelona, about the middle of the 
 bright and genial month of April, as the hidalgos and 
 courtiers came out to welcome him, he must have 
 felt much as an ancient Roman general felt at the 
 moment of his triumph ! 
 
THANKSGIVING AT IJARCELONA. 63 
 
 The sovereigns had ordered their throne to be 
 set out before the \vhole people, under a golden 
 canop)'. It was a triumph for them as well as 
 for Columbus. There they waited, as Columbus, 
 mounted on a gayly equipped charger, made his way 
 through the countless multitude in the streets. As 
 he approached the throne, he offered to kiss the 
 royal hands, but Ferdinand and Isabella hesitated to 
 permit such an act from one who seemed so far 
 above ordinary mortals. They raised him from his 
 knees and gave him a seat by them as he told his 
 story. When it was done they sank on the ground, 
 clasped their hands to heaven, and, with joyous 
 tears led the multitude in thanks to God for his 
 wonderful providence. The choir broke forth with 
 the Te Deum, and each Spaniard in the throng felt 
 that he had tasted heavenly delights, so devout did 
 every one feel. 
 
 The triumph of Columbus was long, but it came 
 to an end. Then his active mind was occupied with 
 plans for other voyages. He would go to rescue the 
 holy sepulcher ; he would go again to the new land ; 
 he would gain gold and slaves and honors for himself 
 and for his sovereigns and for the church, \\1iat 
 
64 
 
 GRAND ASPIRATIONS. 
 
 visions did not rise before his eyes as he thought of 
 the deed he had done, and of what might yet be 
 accomphshed ! 
 
 Yet neither Cohimbus nor Ferdinand, nor the 
 Spanish people, nor the Pope, nor any of the poten- 
 tates to whom the news came, knew at all that a New^ 
 World had been found. They thought that Columbus 
 had fallen upon the side of Cipango that had not 
 before been seen. That w^as W'Onderful enough. 
 
CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 COLUMBUS MAKES MORE VOYAGES. 
 
 F course the news that Columbus had crossed 
 Ocean spread quickly over Europe. There 
 were merchants who carried it; there were 
 travelers ever on the lookout for strano-e facts; 
 there were learned men, just as alert then as they 
 are now to ask and tell information; and there were 
 ministers at the different courts whose special busi- 
 ness it was to report to their own sovereigns what 
 they could that might be of interest or advantage. 
 There was at the court in those days a man 
 bearing the rather strange name, Peter Martyr, who 
 had many friends in distant places. They had no 
 newspapers, and could get news from foreign lands 
 only by letters. So Peter Martyr, who loved to write 
 letters, turned reporter, and sent the great news of 
 
 65 
 
66 PETER MARTYR WRITES LETTERS. [1493. 
 
 the day from Barcelona in many directions. He was 
 a man of less than forty years of age, and had a 
 good reputation for learning. He went directly to 
 the great Admiral, and got from his mouth the 
 information that he put in his letters. How inter- 
 esting those letters must have been to Peter Martyr's 
 friends ! 
 
 Genoa heard the great news, — Genoa that, as we 
 have been told, had not listened to her own Colum- 
 bus when he asked for help to make the voyage ! 
 England heard it ; and another Italian, John Cabot, 
 was inspired with a wish to make discoveries in the 
 Ocean Sea himself. King Henry the Seventh said 
 of Columbus, that the discoverer was a thing more 
 divine than human, and regretted that he had not 
 himself been the patron of the successful voyage. 
 
 There was no difficulty now in getting men and 
 ships to go to the Indies. On the 25th of Septem- 
 ber that followed the grand reception at Barcelona, 
 the sun again rose on a fleet that had been fitted 
 out to sail westward ; but it was not three small 
 caravels. There were three great ships of burden, 
 and fourteen caravels, all impatient to be off. What 
 a hurrying there was, as the friends came to bid 
 
1493.] THE SECOND VOYAGE OF COLUMBUS. 67 
 
 farewell to those who were departing ! The sordid 
 speculator and the earnest minister of religion, the 
 mere adventurer and the bronzed navigator, were 
 going, and each was a center of joyous interest ; 
 while the navigator himself was the object of the 
 intensest curiosity. The fleet sailed gayly out of 
 the harbor, followed by the good wishes of hun- 
 dreds, and blessed by the bright smiles of heaven. 
 It was supposed that in a few weeks or months it 
 would return freighted with untold riches. Such 
 was the great contrast that Columbus experienced. 
 On the first departure even his friends shrank from 
 him, and no one wished to give him aid ; now all 
 were proud to help him as much as possible. 
 Twelve hundred men went with him this time. 
 
 It was three years before Columbus saw Spain 
 again. During the time of his absence he explored 
 the islands, founded a town, and, alas ! made the 
 first w^ar with the natives, whom he had come to 
 convert to the true religion. W'hen he returned 
 he carried with him to Spain the first slaves that 
 had been taken from America to Europe. It was 
 not thought at all wrong in those days to catch 
 men and women, and sell them for slaves, and Co- 
 
6S THE THIRD VOYAGE OF COLUMBUS. [1498. 
 
 lumbus was not the only captain who did such 
 things. 
 
 When Columbus w^as at home this time he heard, 
 probably, that the king of Portugal was more desir- 
 ous than ever to discover a way to India around the 
 Cape of Good Hope, and that in the summer of 
 1497 he had sent out one Vasco da Gama on an 
 expedition down the coast of Africa for the purpose. 
 Meantime, at the end of May, in the year 1498, 
 Columbus himself sailed back to America for the 
 third time. When his ships started out of the har- 
 bor of San Lucar, from which they sailed then, Vasco 
 da Gama was safely anchored in the distant port 
 of Calicut, in India. This w^as a town in , Madras. 
 It w^as a place of great importance at the time. It 
 was not Calcutta, the capital of British India, and 
 of Benp-al, which is hundreds of miles farther east. 
 
 The commerce of the world had a new channel. 
 Its course was completely changed. It w^as no longer 
 necessary for men to take the old journey across 
 the continents to India. Da Gama had passed the 
 stormy cape in the November before Columbus 
 started on his third voyage, but of course the great 
 fact was not known in Spain, for the expedition did 
 not reach Europe again until September, 1499. 
 
1498.] COLUMBUS SEES THE MAINLAND. 69 
 
 It was on his third voyage that Columbus first 
 saw the mainland of the Western Continent; but we 
 shall learn that an Englishman had seen it before 
 him. Columbus came upon the coast of South 
 America. He was in the Gulf of Paria, into which 
 the Oronoco River enters by three mouths. 
 
 There he heard the great waves roaring in the 
 night, and thought it was the water of the four 
 rivers of Paradise mentioned in the- Bible as flowino- 
 out to water the earth. He still supposed that he 
 had reached Asia, however; but we know that it 
 was America. His success raised enemies about 
 whom I do not like to read. He was actually sent 
 back to Spain in chains like a wicked murderer or 
 robber. Doubtless Columbus was not a good mana- 
 ger of affairs, and he may have made some mistakes, 
 but this treatment seems quite too severe. Such is 
 the style in which he arrived at the scene of his 
 former triumphs, in 1501. 
 
 The people who had thronged around Columbus 
 on his return from the first voyage proved true to 
 him now. They showed so much resentment at his 
 base treatment that Ferdinand was obliged to take 
 off his chains; but he refused to restore his oflfices 
 
70 VOYAGES TO CALICUT. [1501. 
 
 and honors. All this did not crush the stout-hearted 
 man. He wrote to the Pope that he still held to his 
 determination to extend the Christian religion, and 
 to take the sepulcher of Christ from the Saracens, 
 and he constantly urged his sovereigns to assist him 
 in the pious enterprise. 
 
 There was nothing in such a plan that in those 
 days could be thought silly or visionary. Columbus 
 had seen the Saracens conquered in Granada, and 
 he thought there was no reason why they could not 
 be overcome in Palestine, if only the Christians w^ere 
 determined enough. He had a great deal of faith 
 and pluck, we know. 
 
 I have told you that it was on his return from 
 the third voyage that Columbus heard of the success 
 of Vasco da Gama. He also was told that another 
 bold Portuguese had gone over the same track, and 
 had returned with his ships full of the rich articles 
 for which the Indies were famed. Everybody was 
 talking about Calicut and the Indies, and Columbus 
 was himself excited anew on the subject. You know 
 that they had at first aroused his ambition. The 
 gums and spices, the ivory and silk, the amber and 
 porcelain, that the Portuguese had brought to their 
 
1502.] FOURTH VOYAGE OF^ COLUMBUS. 71 
 
 sovereign might be found, if Columbus could discover 
 a certain strait running through the "island" that 
 stopped the way. He was quite sure that such a pas- 
 sage existed not far from the regions he had visited. 
 
 By one argument and another Columbus man- 
 aged to excite the cupidity of Ferdinand, and on 
 the ninth of May, 1502, he found himself master 
 of a new fleet on his wav over seas aeain. This 
 voyage proved fruitless, and after many sufferings 
 the admiral returned to Spain broken by age and 
 worn out by hardships. He reached San Lucar, not 
 far from Cadiz, in November, 1504. His money af- 
 fairs were in confusion. He was himself heart- 
 broken. After he had added its briorhtest eem to 
 the crown of his sovereigns, he found himself cast 
 off as useless. 
 
 Queen Isabella, his constant friend, died in 1504, 
 and Columbus followed her on the twentieth of 
 May, 1506. Ferdinand seems to have repented of 
 his ill-treatment of his great subject, and erected a 
 monument to his memory at Seville, on which he 
 credited him with having given his country a new 
 world. It would have been better if he had made 
 his life pleasanter. 
 
CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 INTEREST IN DISCOVERY EXTENDS. 
 
 EANTIME the interest In American explo- 
 rations had greatly spread, though the 
 country was not yet called America. In 
 England the Wars of the Roses, as they are called, 
 closed in 1485, and the people began to send out 
 vessels for one purpose or another. They had heard 
 of Brazil, and they sent vessels to find it ; they re- 
 membered old stories about the Island of the Seven 
 Cities, which was said to lie to the westward, and 
 they searched for that. Besides these ventures, there 
 were others carried on by John Cabot and Sebastian, 
 his son, under authority of the king. John Cabot was 
 the first to see the coast of North America. He 
 sailed some seven hundred leagues, and thought he 
 had at last actually reached the country of the Grand 
 72 
 
1497.] CABOT DISCOVERS AMERICA. 
 
 73 
 
 Cham that so many had longed to see. He landed 
 in 1497, but we cannot tell exactly where, — per- 
 haps it was on the dreary shores of Labrador, or 
 on Cape Breton Island, — and took possession of 
 the land in the name of King Henry the Seventh. 
 He coasted along the shores, and then returned 
 to Bristol, where the king gave him much honor; 
 but litde good did his voyage do England, except 
 to make a foundation for a future claim to land 
 on our continent. 
 
 Spain first, and then Portugal, sent out Amerigo 
 Vespucci, an astronomer from Venice, who made 
 several voyages between 1499 and 1505. Finally his 
 name was given to the continent by a geographer 
 who seems not to have reflected that Columbia would 
 have been a more appropriate name for it. Caspar 
 Cortereal was another adventurer sent out by Portu- 
 gal. He went in 1500, and brouorht back a careo 
 of natives that he sold as slaves. He went out the 
 next year on a second voyage, and was not heard 
 of again. 
 
 Ponce de Leon was a Spaniard who was with 
 Columbus on his second voyage. He was especially 
 interested in the Fountain of Youth. Ponce sailed 
 
74 THE PACIFIC OCEAN SEEN. [1513. 
 
 in 15 12. He missed the Fountain, but discovered 
 Florida, which he named because he found it on 
 Palm Sunday, — which in his language is Pasqua 
 Florida, — or because it seemed to him a land 
 of flowers. Another companion of Columbus was 
 Vasco Nuiiez de Balboa, who crossed the Isthmus 
 of Darien. He was the first European to see the 
 great Pacific Ocean. He called it Mcj^ del Sitr, 
 or South Sea, a name that it kept for a long time. 
 This was in 1513. 
 
 These are the only names about which I shall 
 have much to say, for I should tire you if I told you 
 about all the adventurers w^ho sailed for America in 
 the early times. There were Cortes, who cruelly 
 conquered Mexico ; and Magellan, who was helped 
 by Spain to fit out a fleet to seek the passage through 
 our continent to India. Magellan was the first to 
 sail in the Pacific Ocean. 
 
 There were Verrazano, an Italian of doubtful 
 character, who was employed by the French, and 
 probably visited New York bay and other portions 
 of the coast>; Pizarro, who conquered Peru, and 
 robbed the inhabitants of large quantities of their 
 gold ; and Cabeza de Vaca and Francisco Coronado, 
 
THE OTHER EXPEORERS. 
 
 75 
 
 who explored Colorado, Arizona, and the Pacific 
 coast of the present United States. 
 
 There are many stirring tales connected with 
 each of these names ; but we must not stop to 
 tell them. They are found in larger books, which 
 you will have the pleasure of reading one of these 
 days. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 THE AMERICANS THE EXPLORERS FOUND. 
 
 HE English had been the first to see the 
 real continent of America, but they did not 
 know much about it, and they did not hesi- 
 tate to accept the belief of those who had said that 
 India was the country that had been discovered. 
 They therefore also called the men whom they saw 
 Indians. 
 
 This was a mistake ; but the question has not 
 been answered : Who were the men who were found 
 on the continent ? Perhaps they came to America 
 from Asia. There is a point away off to the north- 
 west, as I have told you, at which America and Asia 
 come very close together. It is more important for 
 us to learn what the inhabitants looked like and how 
 they acted, than to know where they came from. 
 76 
 
INDIAN NAMI':S. 77 
 
 They have left their names all over North America. 
 There is Erie, which was the name of one of their 
 tribes ; and there is Huron, which was the name of 
 another. I read of Shawneetown in Illinois, which 
 tells me that the Shawnee tribe once li\^ed in that 
 region ; and there are Pottaw^atomie counties in Iowa 
 and Kansas, w^hich bear the name of another. There 
 are the Miami River in Ohio, the Neenah in Wiscon- 
 sin, Oneida Lake in New York, the city Tuscaloosa 
 in Alabama, of Natchez in Mississippi, the Pasmotank 
 river in North Carolina, the Sac in Missouri, the 
 Housatonic river in Massachusetts, the Tunxis In 
 Connecticut, the Tippencanoe in Indiana, and many 
 other towns, rivers, lakes, and other objects which 
 bear names that remind us of the early inhabitants. 
 Would that there were even more of the musical 
 ones, and fewer Centrevilles and South Solons and 
 Skull Bones and Tombstones ! 
 
 It would take a large history to tell the names 
 of all the Indian tribes, and to describe the places in 
 which they lived. Let us look at a few of them. In 
 the north there were some accustomed to the great 
 cold of such regions as Greenland, and Labrador, 
 who were dull and stupid, living on fish and such 
 
7^ IN THE COLORADO CANONS. 
 
 creatures as they could kill with their spears and 
 arrows. Farther south the people were more intelli- 
 gent. They sometimes built substantial houses of 
 stone and sun-dried bricks, and w^ere able to weave 
 cloth and to make pottery. 
 
 In Colorado, Arizona, and Utah we find now 
 stone houses perched far up on the rocky sides of 
 great canons, — those deep gorges that streams have 
 worn out by long ages of steady flow. In these the 
 inhabitants could easily keep their women and 
 children safe from all danger from enemies. Indians 
 did not usually build stone houses, but made the 
 least protection they could. They put saplings in 
 the ground, and, pulling their tops nearly together, 
 covered them w^ith skins of animals, or with bark, 
 leaving a hole at the top for the smoke of their fires 
 to rise and escape. This was a wigwam. 
 
 They are often called red or copper-colored, be- 
 cause they are accustomed to color their bodies, but 
 they are really brown. If they lived in a warm 
 climate, they liked to be troubled with but little 
 clothing ; but in the north they supplied themselves 
 with enough furs and other coverings to make them- 
 selves warm. Though they were very hardy, they 
 
HOW INDIANS DRESS AND EAT. 79 
 
 wished to be comfortable. Like many other men and 
 women, the Indians Hked gay colors, and ornamented 
 their bodies and clothinof with the brilliant feathers 
 of birds, and with shells and stones of attractive hues. 
 When the men hunted and fished, the women duo- 
 the oTound, so far as they ever did anything of that 
 kind, and planted the seeds and gathered the harvest 
 of nuts or acorns or Indian corn. 
 
 Of course their cooking was very simple. They 
 could roast their venison and quails as well as we can, 
 and probably the)' tasted as good to them as our 
 game tastes to us ; but they did not have stoves and 
 ovens, and pots and pans of metal, and so there were 
 many things they could not do in their kitchens. 
 Indeed, their kitchens were not apartments by them- 
 selves, for all the operations of the household were 
 carried on in the only room the wigwam had. 
 
M^^^^ 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 THE FIRST WARS WITH THE SAVAGES. 
 
 T was not very long after Columbus reached 
 the Bahama Islands that war began be- 
 tween the Ignorant savages of the woods 
 and prairies and the civilized white men who pro- 
 fessed to have sailed westward '' to extend the 
 Christian religion." That was a great mistake. 
 Civilized men in those days thought that when they 
 found any land not owned by a Christian prince 
 they were at liberty to take possession of all it con- 
 tained. They did not seem to reflect that its human 
 inhabitants had any rights at all. This was not 
 very Christian ; but it took men a long, long time 
 to learn what Christian dealing with others meant, — 
 if, indeed, they know it to-day. 
 
 The result of this w^as that the poor, ignorant 
 80 
 
HOW THE INDIAN BECAME SLY. 8l 
 
 Indian thought that all the whites who came to his 
 land were his enemies. He saw plainly that they 
 knew much more than he about many things, and 
 he determined to do his best to protect himself 
 and his squaws and his pappooses, as he called his 
 women and children, from danger! 
 
 He knew that there was litde use in his attempt- 
 ing to fight openly with his bow and arrows against 
 men who could pour forth such terrible blasts of 
 smoke and shot from their wonderful euns, and so 
 he decided to be as sly as he could. He would 
 creep up behind the white man and kill him when 
 he was not looking ! 
 
 He felt sure that the white man was determined 
 to kill all the Indians he could, and therefore he 
 said that he would kill all the white men that 
 he could ; and he would do it in the only way 
 possible or safe for him. This is the reason why 
 the men who came from Europe very soon reported 
 that the Indians were cunning and sly and treach- 
 erous. 
 
 It is sad to think that this was the way in 
 which the Intelliorent white men beean to treat the 
 savage Indian ; but it is true. It is probably true 
 
82 THE MOUND-BUILDERS. 
 
 also that as the Indian found that he could over- 
 come his new enemy only by cunning, he grew 
 more and more sly and treacherous. That is natu- 
 ral. The Indian was brave, and perhaps he was 
 haughty ; certainly he was eloquent and very fiery 
 when he was excited, but usually he did not care 
 to waste his words, and spoke short and briefly. 
 Often he was true to the white man, but he had 
 very little encouragement to treat him well. 
 
 The Indians, — or some still earlier inhabitants of 
 our country, — have left many mounds and earth- 
 works which show by the articles that we can now 
 dig out of them that at some time there were in- 
 habitants here who probably cultivated the earth 
 more than the Indians. They worked in stone and 
 bone, and shell and copper, and could make very good 
 earthen vessels. It is to be hoped that in future 
 years something more definite may be learned from 
 these mounds, many of which have not been ex- 
 plored. Perhaps some boy who reads these words 
 will be the one to make discoveries about the 
 " Mound-Builders," as these people are called. 
 
CHAPTER XX. 
 
 THE SPANIARDS LOOK FOR GOLD. 
 
 T was man)' )'ears after Cabot saw the conti- 
 nent of America before any other Enghsh- 
 men came to explore it farther, and in the 
 mean time the Spanish and French sent out men and 
 vessels to make discoveries. One of these adven- 
 turers, Francisco Orellana, heard that there was on 
 the continent which we call South America a reeion 
 called El Dorado, the Golden Land. 
 
 As he had but little gold, he started bravely out 
 to find it. He entered the mouth of the Amazon 
 river, and sailed some three thousand miles on its 
 waters ; but he had a terrible time. The Indians 
 killed some of his men, and the others could not 
 make their way back again, after they had been far 
 up the river ; and they found so little food that 
 
84 THE AMAZON DISCOVERED. [1541. 
 
 they were forced to eat their saddles and their very 
 shoes. 
 
 However, Orellana reached Spain at last, and told 
 great stories of temples roofed with gold, and of a 
 nation of " Amazons," or women warriors, like those 
 that we read of in Greek mythology. His name was 
 given to the river, though it was also called the 
 Amazon, and he was sent back with much honor and 
 power to explore it. He did not live long after he 
 reached the Amazon the second time. 
 
 Among the followers of the cruel Pizarro there 
 was Fernando de Soto, who tried to make him treat 
 the natives kindly. De Soto received a share of the 
 gold that was won by Pizarro's despotic brutality, 
 however, and went home to Spain very rich. King 
 Charles the Fifth received him much as Ferdinand 
 had welcomed Columbus, and sent him back to con- 
 quer a vast territory reaching from the Atlantic 
 indefinitely westward, — perhaps to the Pacific, which 
 he called Florida. This was the country which De 
 Vaca and Coronado had described, — the great inte- 
 rior land which is in our day rapidly filling up with 
 inhabitants. 
 
 History tells us that Spain was stirred up in a 
 
1538.] DE SOTO IN FLORIDA. 85 
 
 way that had not been known since the second voyage 
 of Columbus, if, indeed, there had been such an 
 excitement since the times of the Crusades. Every- 
 body, rich, poor, high, low, honest, and dishonest, 
 rushed to enlist under the banner of the commander 
 who would certainly, they believed, lead them to the 
 Fountain of Youth and the marvelous Land of 
 Gold. 
 
 Crowds set sail in the spring of 1538, from San 
 Lucar, and after a long voyage landed at Tampa Bay. 
 They wandered about through the uninteresting 
 swamps and sands of western Florida, imtil winter 
 came. Then they wanted to go home, but De Soto 
 said no. The Indians kept pointing to the west, as 
 if the Land of Gold was always before the dispirited 
 explorers ; and at the end of another season they 
 found themselves at some place southwest of the 
 present site of Selma, Alabama, which they called 
 Mauvila. There they had a bloody battle with the 
 natives. 
 
 They wandered about until May, 1542, when De 
 Soto died. They were then on the shores of the 
 Mississippi, and beneath its waves the leader was 
 buried, so that his body might not be found by the 
 
86 THE MISSISSIPPI DISCOVERED. [1541. 
 
 Indians. It was more than a year before the remnant 
 of the company that had so ga)4y set out from San 
 Lucar sadly took shelter in a harbor of Cuba. They 
 had found no gold ; but the great river of North 
 America was discovered, and Spain had established 
 a good claim to the honor and the rights of dis- 
 covery. We cannot be quite sure that no European 
 had seen the Mississippi before ; but it is certain 
 that it was discovered by a Spaniard. 
 

 
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 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 GRAND TIMES IN EUROPE. 
 
 LL this time France had not been idle, but 
 she had been making explorations in a 
 different part of the New World. Verra- 
 zano had been sent out by Francis I., in 1524, and 
 had, as we know, visited northern coasts. He was 
 the first explorer sent out by a French king. 
 
 Jacques Cartier was likewise sent out ten years 
 later with the same number of men that Columbus 
 took on his first voyage, but with only two vessels. 
 He was to explore '' New France," as the country 
 was vaguely called, with no reference to the claims 
 of former explorers. 
 
 Cartier landed on the coast of Labrador, after a 
 short voyage, and solemnly took possession of the 
 country in the name of the king of France, by 
 
 87 
 
S8 CARTIER AT MONTREAL. [1535. 
 
 planting a cross. Probably he cared little whether 
 Cabot had ever seen Labrador or not. He next went 
 into the bay of the St. Lawrence, without knowing 
 that it was the mouth of a river, however, and by 
 September of the same year he was back again in 
 France. 
 
 In 1535 Cartier was in the same region again. 
 This time he sailed up the St. Lawrence, sure that 
 he had found the strait that was to give him a 
 passage through the continent to Cipango. He 
 gave the name "Mount Royal" to the spot on 
 which "Montreal" was afterward built. The two 
 words mean the same thing, as you will see if you 
 think of " regal," and remember that the letter £- 
 was formerly often pronounced like y. 
 
 Cartier went home again in 1536, carrying back 
 ten chiefs whom he had stolen from their native 
 woods. He returned to the New World, however, 
 in 1 54 1, but at last became discouraged and gave 
 up all hope of making any permanent settlement. 
 
 These were grand times in Europe. Men every- 
 where were full of great projects ; there were great 
 kings in the different countries, and they felt the 
 influence of the enterprise that stimulated their sub- 
 
1520.] THE GREAT KINGS MEET. 89 
 
 jects. You may read of a meeting of the kings in 
 France about twenty years after Vasco da Gama 
 had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope. It was 
 held in the flowery month of June, 1520, four years 
 before Verrazano had been sent out by one of the 
 kings who Avas present. 
 
 This was called the Field of the Cloth of Gold, 
 because everything about it w^as so rich and gay. 
 There were present Henry the Eighth of England, 
 Francis the First of France, and Charles the Fifth of 
 Germany. Many of the courtiers spent so much 
 gold coin on their clothes and armor, and on their 
 attendants and equipage, that they were kept in pov- 
 erty all the rest of their lives. It was vain splendor, 
 but it was not unlike much of the grandeur of the 
 times. It was not the only expensive enterprise 
 that came to nothing. 
 
 In Italy there was another great ruler. His 
 name w^as Leo the Tenth, and he did so much for 
 the age in which he lived that it has ever since 
 been called, after him. the "Age of Leo the Tenth," 
 as thouorh nothinof crreater could be said about it. 
 He was the Pope. He was not present at the 
 Field of the Cloth of Gold. He was a patron of 
 
90 WHAT MARTIN LUTHER DID. [1529. 
 
 literature and art, and did not send out explorers 
 as the kings of France, Spain, and England did. 
 He certainly helped to make the age a grand one. 
 
 At about the same time an important event 
 occurred in Germany which was destined to have 
 much influence upon American affairs. The division 
 between Catholics and Protestants was then made by 
 one Martin Luther, a priest, who protested against 
 what he thouo^ht was wrono- in the church of which 
 Leo the Tenth was the head. The name " Prot- 
 estant " was not used until 1529. 
 
 Henry the Eighth and the English became Prot- 
 estants, while France and Spain remained Catholic. 
 The strife between Protestants and Catholics grew 
 very hot, and it was carried everywhere that they 
 went over the earth. Each party thought itself right 
 and the other wrong. 
 
 The first explorers of America had all been 
 Catholics, but now the Protestants began to take 
 part in sending out expeditions. 
 
CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 BAD WORK IN FLORIDA. 
 
 HE first of the Protestants to come to 
 America were French, for there were some 
 Protestants In France. They were called 
 Huguenots. They reached the coast of what is 
 now South Carolina. The region was included in 
 Florida, which, you know, was claimed by Spain. 
 It was in the spring of 1562. The emigrants were 
 charmed by the odors of the flowers, and by the 
 beauties of nature all around. Like Cartier, they 
 took possession of the country in the name of the 
 king of France. They built a fort, but accomplished 
 little more. 
 
 Many returned to France, but some never saw 
 home again. They died after great sufferings. There 
 was a war then between Catholics and Protestants. 
 
 91 
 
92 THE FRENCH IN FLORIDA. [1564. 
 
 It had begun soon after these settlers had left home, 
 and it was that which put an end to their efforts. 
 
 Another party arrived, however, from France, in 
 1564, and landed on the banks of the St. John's River, 
 which we still include in Florida. It had no more 
 success than the one that had come before ; and all 
 were about to return home, when a fleet appeared 
 in the distance bringing more men. This revived 
 their failing courage ; but it was only for a time. 
 The new-comers were followed almost immediately 
 by a number of ships sent out from Spain by Philip 
 the vSecond, son of Charles the Fifth. It had the cruel 
 orders to sweep the Protestant settlement from the 
 face of the earth. The French were considered as 
 pirates by their enemies, the Spaniards ; and pirates 
 did not deserve much mercy then, any more than 
 they now do. Many French sailors had, indeed, pre- 
 tended to be Protestants, and under the mask of 
 religion had captured ships of the Spaniards, treating 
 their owners wdth great cruelty. 
 
 The commander of the Catholic expedition was 
 one Menendez. He had more than twenty-five 
 hundred men with him, and he began a town on 
 September 3, which he named St. Augustine. This 
 
1565.] COLONISTS SLAUGHTERED. 93 
 
 proved the first permanent settlement on land now 
 within the limits of the United States. 
 
 Menendez announced the purpose of his visit, 
 and the commander of the French boldly sailed out 
 to oppose him. The attacking vessels were destroyed 
 by a storm, and IMenendez then broke up the French 
 settlement, leaving an inscription saying that the 
 men had been slaughtered, not as Frenchmen, but as 
 Lutherans. This was in 1565. 
 
 Three years afterward another French fleet arrived, 
 with orders to avenge the slaughter of the Protest- 
 ants. The Spanish fort was attacked, and all Its in- 
 mates put to the sword, except a few who were 
 hanged, with an Inscription over them, burned with 
 a hot Iron into a piece of pine, " Not as Spaniards, 
 but as Traitors, Robbers, and Murderers." This 
 done, the French fleet sailed back again. The land 
 remained In the hands of the few Spaniards who had 
 not been In the fort. 
 
 Now we have the French claiming New France, — 
 stretching from Florida to Newfoundland. The 
 Spanish claimed Florida, which, according to them, 
 comprised the whole of the continent, under a bull 
 of the Pope given to Columbus on his first return 
 from the West Indies. 
 
CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 THE DAYS OF QUEEN ELIZABETH. 
 
 NGLAND had not clone much in the way 
 of looking up new lands In the West since 
 Cabot saw the shores that he called Prinia 
 Vista, which means First View, wherever they were. 
 There were good reasons for this. Henry the Eighth 
 had been fully occupied with affairs in England and 
 on the continent during his relofn, and his struororle 
 with the Pope had called for much attention. His 
 son and daughter, Edward the Sixth, and Mary, 
 likewise had their hands full near at home. Mary, 
 too, had married Philip the Second, king of Spain, 
 and did not care to Interfere with the affairs of his 
 people in the new country. 
 
 We have come to a different period now. Eliza- 
 beth, the strong daughter of Henry the Eighth, stood 
 
 94 
 
ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA. 95 
 
 at the head of the EngHsh nation. The period has 
 been called by her name, so much did she have to 
 do with making it a great one, and so much more 
 brilliant was it than the ages that had gone before. 
 Like her father, Elizabeth was the representative of 
 the cause of the Protestants. She was fortunate in 
 having about her a remarkable group of public men, 
 in all walks of life. 
 
 These men began to think that Spain was gaining 
 too much money and land In America. They saw 
 that it was from those shores that Philip obtained 
 the wealth that enabled him to fight his wars against 
 their country and Holland, and they tried to think 
 of some plan by which they could overthrow his 
 American authority. Everything was in their favor. 
 
 England was not troubled by war, and its thrifty 
 people w^ere making money on their farms, and by 
 their commerce, which was increasing all the time. 
 The land that had formerly been held by the monks 
 and the monasteries was distributed among the 
 people ; and money was no longer sent out of the 
 country to the Pope at Rome. Travelers in England 
 can see now some of the erand and beautiful houses 
 that the wealthy men put up in the time of this great 
 queen. 
 
96 WISE QUEEN ELIZABETH. 
 
 How could harm be done to Spain ? That was 
 the question. Pirates and smugglers might attack 
 their settlements on the Atlantic coast, and they 
 might rob their ships as they sailed from the West ; 
 but that was dangerous, and could effect but little. 
 
 Two daring sailors thought out a new plan. 
 They would go around America. One of them de- 
 termined to attack the Spanish on the Pacific. The 
 vessels there he knew were poorly manned, and the 
 ports were protected but little. One of these adven- 
 turers was named Drake and the other Frobisher. 
 The first was a pirate, the second an explorer, 
 though both wanted to get gold. I shall tell you 
 about them soon. 
 
 Queen Elizabeth was wise and full of tact. She 
 encouraged her subjects to build ships ; she walked 
 about the shipyards ; took the hands of the rough 
 captains in her own ; and drank their healths as she 
 left them. Her cannon thundered farewells as the 
 outgoing vessels sailed past her palace, and her 
 voice welcomed the worn seamen as they returned 
 to tell of the wonders they had seen and the dan- 
 gers they had escaped. She encircled their necks 
 with golden chains, and made them knights after 
 
THE SHEPHERD OF THE OCEAN. 97 
 
 their victories were won. She taught her subjects 
 that she watched their interests and prized their 
 services, and that no good deed done for England 
 was to be unrewarded and forgotten. Thus she 
 gave them an incentive to carry the flag that she had 
 consecrated around the globe, and they carried it. 
 
 Besides all these influences, there was another 
 that was very powerful. Englishmen had become 
 more learned. We cannot stop here to speak of the 
 great wTiters that were printing books in the second 
 half of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Perhaps you 
 have heard of Bacon and Spenser and Hooker and 
 Marlowe and Sidney, and of Shakespeare, the greatest 
 of all of them. In fact Shakespeare was so great 
 that we have never had another equal to him. 
 
 There was only one of the explorers, however, 
 who seems to have been touched by this influence. 
 He was a literary man himself. His name was 
 Raleigh, and he determined to do what he could to 
 make his native country mistress of the seas. He 
 accomplished a great deal, though it seemed at the 
 time that all his ventures had failed. The poet 
 Spenser called him the " Shepherd of the Ocean." 
 
CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 THE GREAT ENGLISH PIRATE. 
 
 NE of the men who had made plans to sail 
 around America was Sir Francis Drake. He 
 thought It was an island, though a very big 
 one. He had been brought up as a boy among sea- 
 men, and thus had become quite familiar with stories 
 of adventure and bravery. His father was poor, and 
 eked out a livelihood by teaching and reading 
 prayers among sailors, under w^arrant of officers of 
 the queen. This poverty led the father to send his 
 son to sea. 
 
 Sir John Hawkins, the pioneer naval hero of the 
 age, the first among the English adventurers, had 
 already made great gain by *' smuggling." That is, 
 he managed to get goods from other lands Into 
 England secretly, without paying the lawful tax to 
 the government. 
 98 
 
1567.] ROBBING SPANISH SHIPS. 99 
 
 When he became a pirate, Drake took a step m 
 advance of Hawkins ; but before long piracy became 
 a popular and lawful business. He sailed out where- 
 ever he thought he could find ships well loaded, and 
 fought them. Many Spanish ships came to Europe 
 with gold. If he could, Drake took all that they 
 had on board that he washed, and sailed away, think- 
 inor that he had done an honorable deed. 
 
 Drake became acquainted with Haw^kins, of whom 
 I just spoke. He had gone to Guinea in 1562 and 
 taken three hundred black people to the West 
 Indies, where he sold them for slaves. Drake went 
 with him on another expedition, and lost everything 
 that he had stolen before. 
 
 Then It was that he began to rob Spanish ships. 
 He W'as told by a careless chaplain that his acts 
 were legal, and that he might well take what he 
 could from them, because he had lost so much by 
 them. This w^as in 1567. 
 
 In 1572 Queen Elizabeth sent him out on an 
 expedition to the West Indies. He went across the 
 Isthmus of Darien, and climbed a giant tree which 
 stood on a hill. From this perch he looked at the 
 Pacific Ocean, and prayed God to permit him some 
 
 I 
 
lOO DRAKP: starts around the world. [1577. 
 
 day to sail an English ship there. Though he was 
 a pirate and a robber, he did not give up praying, 
 for, as I ha\^e said, he was taught that piracy and 
 such robbery as he committed were not wrong. Af- 
 terward he sailed home full of his great project. 
 One August Sunday he arrived at Plymouth, in Eng- 
 land, and almost everybody hurried out of church to 
 see him, — so proud were they of their hero. The 
 minister had but two or three left to hear his 
 sermon ! 
 
 In 1577 Drake was again ready to sail west- 
 ward. This time he went out under the patronage 
 of his queen, and took with him a number of nobles 
 who wished to "learn the art of navigation," as 
 they said ; but who probably thought a good deal 
 more of the gold that they might steal from rich 
 Spanish vessels that they should find. They sailed 
 along the coast of South America until they reached 
 Patagonia. 
 
 Drake passed safely through the Straits of Magel- 
 lan, and then went along the coast, pillaging Spanish 
 towns and vessels, and gaining great sums of 
 treasure. He did not stop until he had reached a 
 point off the coast of our state of Oregon, when his 
 
1578.] DRAKE IN CALIFORNIA. lOI 
 
 men grievously complained of being pinched by the 
 cold, though it was in June. He then turned about, 
 and after sailing some two or three hundred miles 
 entered a "fair and good bay" to rest and make 
 repairs ; probably the one which still bears his name 
 on our maps. It is only a short distance north of 
 San Francisco, and is sometimes called Jack's Bay. 
 
 Because the coast w^as lined w^ith w^hite banks 
 and cliffs toward the sea, reminding him of the 
 *'w^hite cliffs of Albion," Drake called the region 
 New Albion, and took possession of it in the name 
 of his queen. He engraved her majesty's name on 
 a plate, with the date, and fixed it to a fair post. 
 Under the plate he nailed an English sixpence, on 
 which there was a portrait of Elizabeth. He did 
 not fail also to wTite his own name down. 
 
 W'ith so much gold as he had, Drake was afraid 
 to sail over the route by which he had gone out, 
 and therefore he struck directly across the Pacific, 
 and around the Cape of Good Hope. It was on a 
 Sunday in September, 1580, that he reached England. 
 The queen was proud to dine on board the ship that 
 had gone all around the world. She made its com- 
 mander a knight, — "Sir" Francis Drake; and she 
 
I02 DRAKE REACHES ENGLAND. [1580. 
 
 ordered the vessel to be drawn up on land and 
 preserved as a memorial of the event and a monu- 
 ment to the greatest of English pirates ! Sir Francis 
 Drake died on one of his later expeditions, and was 
 buried in the sea. A poet wrote in his praise, — 
 
 '• The waves became his winding-sheet, the waters were his tomb ; 
 But for his fame the Ocean sea was not sufficient room." 
 
 The Spaniards protested against these acts of 
 the great pirate ; but the English laid it down as 
 a law of nations that no government could claim a 
 continent, either because the Pope had given it, or 
 by reason of having built huts here and there on its 
 coasts. Other peoples were at liberty to sail in such 
 seas as the Pacific, and to plant colonies at places 
 that were not inhabited. England was strong enough 
 to enforce this law. 
 
 Now, Elizabeth declared, England had all the 
 rights that there were on the ocean and on the land, 
 in the New World, in spite of any claims that Spain 
 might make. No Englishman had ever before this 
 sailed all around the earth, and you may imagine 
 that it was a great encouragement to all adventurers 
 and traders. 
 

 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 TRYING TO SAIL AROUND AMERICA. 
 
 HREE years before this, in 1576, Queen 
 Elizabeth, who had encouraged her sailors 
 in every way, had waved her royal hand in 
 farewell to the other of the two great navigators of 
 whom I have told you, Sir Martin Frobisher. He 
 went to the northwest under the patronage of the 
 Earl of Warwick, to get gold and find a passage to 
 China around the north of our continent; though, 
 of course, like the others, he thought America was 
 no more than an island, — a large one, perhaps,— 
 that stopped the way. 
 
 Frobisher had been obliged to wait fifteen years 
 before he could find any one willing to help him fit 
 out his fleet. That was much longer than Colum- 
 bus had to wait. When at last he started, he 
 
 103 
 
I04 FINDING FALSE GOLD. [1577. 
 
 sailed bravely across, and left his name on a 
 strait in the frozen land. He took possession of the 
 region for his queen. England owns it still. 
 
 One voyage did not satisfy him, however, and 
 he sailed again, and perhaps a third time. The re- 
 gion that he discovered was called Meta Incogfiita^ 
 which is the Latin for '* Unknown Bourn" or 
 " Limit." He thought it was the coast of Asia. A 
 piece of black stone, like seacoal, which he brought 
 back, was said by a London alchemist or goldfinder 
 to be rich in the precious metal, and when Fro- 
 bisher reached the same region a second time he 
 wasted two months by loading his ship with the 
 black stones. They w^ere found to be almost if not 
 quite worthless when they were again examined. 
 This was a sad disappointment. 
 
 Nothing seemed to discourage brave Englishmen 
 from trying to learn all they could about New- 
 foundland, as the New World was called at this time, 
 and from making efforts to establish colonies of 
 their countrymen there. Two other nobles, courtiers 
 of the great queen, were moved to try their for- 
 tunes in this way. They were Sir Humphrey Gil- 
 bert and Sir Walter Raleigh, who were half-brothers. 
 
1578.] 
 
 SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT. IO5 
 
 Both of these men were learned and of high char- 
 acter. They had fought for Protestantism in France 
 and had served in Parhament at home. 
 
 Gilbert once wrote a "discourse" especially to 
 prove that there must be such a northwest passage 
 to Cathay as Frobisher had sought, and he had 
 indeed been the means of inducing that captain to 
 make his attempt. The queen gave to Gilbert im- 
 portant privileges similar to those that had before 
 been granted to Cabot by King Henry the Seventh, 
 and he prepared an expedition commissioned to 
 establish a colon)'. He saw the great advantages 
 that came to Spain from her Western possessions, 
 and, like a true patriot, he wished to gain for 
 England the same sources of power and wealth. 
 He was to establish his settlers at some point 
 between the French on the north and the Span- 
 iards on the south, and therefore quite distant 
 from the Meta Incognita. 
 
 Gilbert searched for a region known as " Nor- 
 umbega," for which many others had looked and 
 were after^vard to look in vain. He took with him 
 a learned man named Parmenius to sing the praises 
 of the fair land in Latin verse. Verrazano had 
 
I06 LOOKING FOR NORUMBEGA. [1578. 
 
 marked it on his map in 1529. Ten years later 
 it was thought to be a rich territory reaching 
 from New Brunswick to Florida. John Smith con- 
 sidered "New England" to be Norumbega, but he 
 included Virginia in it. Sometimes it was a great 
 town, or an island, on the coast of Maine. Would 
 that we could bring Norumbega out of the region 
 of fable and romance ! Would that Smith had left 
 it, instead of " New England," as the name of that 
 part of our country ! 
 
 The ships of Gilbert went out in 1578, but they 
 missed land, and were forced to return without suc- 
 cess. It was five years before another attempt 
 could be made. Then the island of Newfoundland 
 was reached, and the name which had before been 
 applied to the continent was given to it. It was 
 taken possession of in the name of the queen. On 
 the voyage home Sir Humphrey was lost, and 
 nothing came of his attempt. Mr. Longfellow once 
 wrote a poem on this sad event. It is called ^' Sir 
 Humphrey Gilbert." In it you will see w^hat a good 
 man the poet thought the navigator was. 
 
CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH'S EFFORTS END IN SMOKE. 
 
 N spite of this ill success, Raleigh was none 
 the less determined to "plant" colonies in 
 America, as they said in those days. A 
 "plant" is something that is expected to grow, and 
 this is the reason why a colony was so called. It 
 was intended to grow. Raleigh was disappointed in 
 his noble expectations, however. The year after poor 
 Gilbert w^ent down, Raleigh sent out two ships. 
 
 They reached land off the shores of w^hat is now 
 North Carolina, and called it Virginia, because Eliza- 
 beth was so fond of being spoken of as the ''virgin" 
 queen. The explorers brought back two natives, 
 and reported that the country was the most fertile 
 in the world, that fruits and game abounded, and 
 that the natives w^ere very gentle, loving, and faithful, 
 
 107 
 
I08 THE FIRST AMERICAN CHILD. [1587. 
 
 and lived after the manner described by the poets 
 in speaking of the golden age ! 
 
 Nothing had really been accomplished, but as 
 soon as possible another expedition was made ready, 
 and a body of one hundred and eighty persons was 
 carried over the Atlantic and left on Roanoke Island, 
 in the limits of the present state of North Carolina. 
 The emigrants suffered a great deal, and took the 
 first opportunity to get back to England. Scarcely 
 had they left, however, when another party arrived 
 to give them help. The commander concluded to 
 leave a few sailors behind to keep the place, and 
 then hastened to England himself. All whom he 
 left were soon killed by the natives. 
 
 In 1587 another party still was on the spot. Not 
 long after its arrival the first child of English parents 
 that was ever born in America appeared. She was 
 Virginia Dare. The colony was left without any 
 care until 1590, because in the mean time the atten- 
 tion of all England, and especially of Sir Walter 
 Raleigh, was fixed on a war with Spain in which a 
 tremendous fleet of ships called the " Armada " was 
 sent against England. It was almost miraculously 
 destroyed, and then it was possible to think again 
 of the poor colonists in ''Virginia." 
 
1590.1 TOBACCO AND POTATOES. IO9 
 
 In the spring of 1590 ships were sent to Roa- 
 noke to look after them ; but, alas ! they were not 
 to be found ! Little Virginia Dare was gone ; all 
 were gone ! The colony was lost. Had the people 
 starved slowly to death? Had the Indians killed 
 them ? We can only imagine. 
 
 Thus ended another great enterprise. It is 
 wonderful how bravely men kept trying to get 
 around America, and sail to the Indies, and how 
 nothing was dreadful enough to hinder them from 
 trying to build homes on our coasts. For a time 
 Englishmen were naturally not anxious to try again 
 to establish themselves in America. They had not 
 gained much thus far. It used to be said that Sir 
 Walter Raleigh brought tobacco and potatoes to 
 Europe ; but potatoes had been described by Peter 
 Martyr se\'enty years before, and we are sure that 
 Columbus saw the Indians smoking tobacco when 
 he first landed. It had been used in Southern Eu- 
 rope long before this, but Raleigh may ha\'e shown 
 Englishmen how to smoke it themselves. If so, 
 this was all that came immediately from his noble 
 efforts, though they did not finally end In smoke. 
 
CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 THE ENGLISH KINGS AND QUEENS. 
 
 E have now reached the time when the Eng- 
 Hsh accompHshed somethhig in their efforts 
 to send men and women to the new coun- 
 try, which they had all along claimed was theirs 
 by right of Cabot's discovery. We cannot understand 
 the history of our continent at this period, or at 
 any period, in fact, without knowing much about' 
 the history of England at the same time. Much that 
 was done here was very closely connected, too, as 
 we have already seen, with events in other coun- 
 tries of Europe. 
 
 After Queen Elizabeth died the crown passed to 
 James, son of Mary the unfortunate Queen of Scot- 
 land. Elizabeth had put Mary to death, after keep- 
 ing her in prison for twenty years. Thus the Tudor 
 
THE TUDORS AND STUARTS. Ill 
 
 family of rulers, to which Henry the Eighth and 
 Elizabeth belonged, gave way to the Stuart family, 
 which was a very old one. 
 
 The first Stuart ancestor came to England from 
 France at the time of the conquest by the Normans, 
 five hundred years before the reign of King James. 
 His son became "steward" of Scotland, and, as the 
 office descended to his children, the name was eiven 
 to the whole famil)'. It was afterwards spelled 
 Steuart, and then Stuart. This was a most unfor- 
 tunate family. Its history is very romantic. One 
 member of it was Robert Bruce, an ancient kine of 
 Scotland, who fought bravely against the English, but 
 was terribly defeated at the battle of Bannockburn. 
 
 There were six Stuart sovereigns In England. 
 They ruled from 1603 to 17 14, — one hundred and 
 eleven years. During this time most of the English 
 settlements were made In our country. 
 
 The Stuart family was a good deal older, but 
 not so great and strong as the Tudors had been. 
 The Tudors were cruel and despotic, and oppressed 
 their subjects, and the Stuarts were no better. 
 Finally the people took matters Into their own 
 hands, cut off the head of Charles the First, the 
 
112 THE STUARTS OVERTHROWN. [1688. 
 
 Stuart king who happened to be on the throne at 
 the time, and for a few years governed themselves. 
 
 The first Stuart came from France ; Mary Queen 
 of Scots was a long time in that country (in fact, 
 she was wife of its king, and therefore its queen 
 for a while) ; and we shall find that when the Eng- 
 lish people took the government into their own 
 hands the member of the Stuart family who w^ould 
 otherwise have been king went to France to stay. 
 
 The result of ah this was that the Stuarts re- 
 sembled the French in many ways. They fancied the 
 graceful manners of that people, and they were most 
 of them Catholics, too, or if they were not actually 
 Catholics, they did not like the Protestants. 
 
 As the English became more strongly Protestant, 
 they resolved not to have the Stuarts rule them, and 
 called Mary to the throne, because, though she was 
 daughter of King James the Second, she had married 
 a Protestant. This was a great revolution. The 
 husband and wife were king and queen together. 
 Mary's sister Anne reigned after her. She was also 
 a Protestant. We shall do well not to forget 
 these facts about the kings and queens of England 
 at this time. 
 
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 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH'S LAST EFFORTS. 
 
 IR Weaker RaleleH seems never to have 
 been at all discourao-ed about makino- set- 
 tlements in America. In spite of all his 
 former failures, he determined upon one more ven- 
 ture, and encouraged Bartholomew Gosnold to sail 
 straight across the ocean to " Norumbega." By tak- 
 ing the direct course he saved a thousand miles 
 over former voyages. This was In 1602, just at the 
 end of the rel^n of Oueen Elizabeth. 
 
 Gosnold saw the coast of Elaine, which he sup- 
 posed to be the veritable " Norumbega," and dis- 
 covered Cape Cod, which he gave its present name. 
 As he stepped ashore there, he was the first Eng- 
 lishman who ever trod the soil of New England, as 
 it is now defined. The expedition continued on to 
 
 113 
 
114 GOSNOLD AT CUTTYHUNK. [1602. 
 
 Buzzard's Bay, where a fort was begun by Gosnold 
 on an island that he named EHzabeth, for his queen. 
 It is now called Cuttyhunk. Though this navigator 
 wished to honor his queen instead of himself, he has 
 not been forgotten. There are sixteen little islands 
 called Elizabeth now, and one hundred people live on 
 them. They form together at own called Gosnold. 
 
 This expedition did not accomplish more than 
 the others had. The explorers made excursions 
 upon the mainland, loaded their vessel with sassafras, 
 then much esteemed in Europe as a medicine, and 
 with cedar, and sailed back to England, where they 
 arrived after an absence of four months. They had 
 no bread left, and only a little vinegar to revive 
 their spirits. Raleigh was not cast down, but said 
 that he expected yet to see America an English 
 nation. 
 
 In the spring of 1603 some merchants of Bristol, 
 with authority from Raleigh, planned another effort. 
 This is a new evidence of the perseverance of the 
 English. They sent one expedition after another 
 out, though none seemed to prosper. 
 
 This one sailed under command of Martin Pring, 
 about two weeks after Oueen Elizabeth died, and 
 
1603.] KNICK-KNACKS FOR SASSAFRAS. 1 15 
 
 only three days after the new sovereign, King 
 James, arrived in London. It was well supplied with 
 such knick-knacks as the Indians liked, which it was 
 hoped to exchange for sassafras. Pring sighted the 
 islands of Maine in June, and sailed southward. He 
 crossed Massachusetts Bay and entered Plymouth 
 harbor, where he remained six weeks and obtained 
 sassafras. The expedition was at home in England 
 by August. Sassafras w^as all it carried back. 
 
 This may be called the last effort of Raleigh 
 for America. He was almost immediately cast into 
 prison by King James, and after many years of con- 
 finement was executed. We must remember him 
 for what he persistently tried to do for our country. 
 Indeed, we cannot forget that all the unsuccessful 
 voyages made the way clear for those which followed. 
 
CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 ENGLISH ADVENTURERS MORE RESTLESS THAN 
 
 EVER. 
 
 N spite of all these discouragements won- 
 derful stories got abroad in England of the 
 wealth that was to be had in America for 
 the taking. It was represented in a popular play 
 that gold was as plenty there as copper in the old 
 country ; that prisoners were fettered in chains of 
 that precious metal ; that rubies and diamonds were 
 to be caught up by the handful ; that men of low 
 birth might quickly rise in the social scale ; in fact, 
 that nothing was impossible that the wildest imagina- 
 tion could conceive. 
 
 After the expeditions of Gosnold and Pring had 
 returned, another was sent to see if what they said 
 was true. It went out in 1605, under George Wey- 
 mouth. These expeditions were all commanded by 
 116 
 
1605.] RICHARD HAKLUVT THE SCHOLAR. 117 
 
 able navigators, and were often sent out under the 
 direction of earls and lords. 
 
 Besides the titled patrons, there was the Rev. 
 Richard Hakluyt who was interested in many of the 
 expeditions. He was a scholar, and all the steps 
 that he took were based on the best information 
 that could be obtained. He was connected with the 
 enterprises of Raleigh, and interested in the opera- 
 tions of Drake ; and he collected lone accounts of 
 most of the voyages and discoveries of the Eno-llsh. 
 They would probably have been lost but for his pains. 
 He wrote of more than two hundred expeditions. 
 
 The war wdth Spain was over, and no longer 
 excited adventurers. Thus the incentive that had 
 sent Drake off to the Pacific Ocean did not exist 
 any longer ; but there was now another reason why 
 Englishmen should wish to search the American 
 continent. The war had given the restless opportu- 
 nities for adventure which peace did not offer, at 
 home at least ; but many thought that they could 
 find the excitement they needed in the effort to 
 make settlements in a new land. There were Indians 
 to be fought with, and perhaps there was gold to be 
 got. At any rate, they would see. 
 
Il8 A MAN NAMED JOHN SMITH. [1606. 
 
 A new plan was now begun. In the past every 
 man had undertaken his enterprise alone, or with a 
 few associates. Now it was proposed to form com- 
 panies for the purpose of sending Englishmen to 
 America. Naturally a man who entered into such a 
 company expected to get some gain from it, and 
 probably he thought that his chances would be 
 greater because he had others with him. 
 
 Gosnold was of course among the most inter- 
 ested in the new plan. He seems to have brought 
 in Hakluyt, with his common sense and wisdom. 
 There happened to come home to England, just at 
 that time, a man named John Smith, who told won- 
 derful stories about his adventures. He said that 
 he had fought in battles in Europe, Asia, and Africa ; 
 had been made captive by the terrible Turks, sold 
 as a slave, and sent off to a distant prison ; that he 
 had escaped by wonderful skill and boldness, and at 
 last had found refuge on an English ship which 
 happened to be visiting the country of the Moors, 
 where he was. 
 
 Such a man as that seemed to Gosnold and the 
 others just the kind for an expedition to America. 
 Of course, no one knew exactly how much of his 
 
1606.] FERDIXAXDO GORGP:s. 119 
 
 wonderful story to believe ; but they do not seem 
 to have objected to his company on that account. 
 He was a man of ability ; of that there was no doubt. 
 
 There was also a certain Ferdinando Gorges, who 
 wanted to become owner of some of the lands of 
 America, and as he had a good deal of money and 
 influence, he was considered a favorable person to 
 be interested in the new compan\'. He had a friend. 
 Sir John Popham, who was a chief justice, and he 
 joined the company also. 
 
 Among the others there was a rich merchant of 
 London by the name of Edward Maria Wingfield, 
 whose character was said by Smith to be not of the 
 best. However, he was considered by others to be 
 a gentleman, and was accepted as a partner. When 
 the company asked the king to give them the privi- 
 lege of making "plantations" in America under his 
 authority, he decided to let them try. 
 
 i'^ifiiiAS,^ 
 
CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 KING JAMES'S COUNCIL FOR VIRGINIA. 
 
 ING James selected thirteen men to be a 
 Council in England to look after the 
 enterprise, so that through them he could 
 manage it himself. This was called the Council for 
 Virginia. It was to make the laws for the Colonists. 
 Two companies were formed. The first was called 
 the London Company, because its members belonged 
 to London. The second was called the Plymouth 
 Company, because its members lived in the region 
 of Bristol, Exeter, and Plymouth, England. 
 
 The two companies were to plant their colonies 
 between those parts of America occupied in a loose 
 way by Spain and France, — that is, between South 
 Carolina and New Brunswick, as our maps mark the 
 country now. They were not to put their settle- 
 
1606.] THE LONDON AND PLYMOUTH COMPANIES. 121 
 
 ments so near together as to run any risk of disputes. 
 One hundred miles was to be allowed between a 
 colony of one company and a colony of the other. 
 
 The London Company was to make its setde- 
 ments south of the line of Maryland. The Plymouth 
 Company might not plant a colony farther south 
 than the spot where New Haven now is. They 
 were at liberty at first to occupy only a short dis- 
 tance from the ocean, but afterward they were 
 permitted to go as far west as the Pacific coast, if 
 they pleased. The region between New Haven and 
 Maryland was open to both, only they were not to 
 get nearer together than one hundred miles. One 
 would think this would keep them from quarreling ! 
 
 The companies were formed of men who did not 
 generally intend to leave their comfortable homes ; 
 but they were to have authority over those w^ho 
 should go. All who went were to remain English- 
 men. This was a privilege that they prized very 
 much. Their religion w^as to be that of the country 
 the}' had left. They were to give the king in return 
 for his patent one fifth of the produce of the gold 
 and silver, and one fifteenth of the copper obtained, 
 after paying the expenses of digging it. 
 
CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 VIRGINIA SETTLED. 
 
 T was in 1606 that the king gave the pat- 
 ents to the companies. A "patent" is a 
 document which is open for everybody to 
 read ; and it generally gives a privilege to the owner 
 of which he is glad to have others know. ''Patent" 
 means open. 
 
 Just at. the end of the year, on the nineteenth 
 of December, the London Company was ready to 
 send out a fleet. It consisted of three vessels, with 
 about one hundred men. They did not take their 
 wives and children. They were like the men who 
 went to California forty years ago to dig gold ; 
 they thought that a new country was no place for 
 women and children. Perhaps they remembered 
 the fate of Virginia Dare and her mother, 
 
1607.] COLONISTS REACH VIRGINIA. 123 
 
 It was the middle of May before the fleet 
 reached the end of its journey. They decided to 
 begin their town some fifty miles up the James 
 river. They named the river in honor of their 
 king. The settlement was to be called Jamestown. 
 
 They had named the capes, at the mouth of 
 the Chesapeake Bay, Charles and Henry, after the 
 king's sons; and they fixed " Point Comfort" on the 
 spot where it still remains, because it comforted 
 them to see land after their long voyage. 
 
 They were not the people to build a town ; 
 there were but four carpenters, and the others were 
 not accustomed to labor with their hands. Some 
 did not know how, and others would not. The re- 
 sult was that the colony did not prosper. 
 
 John Smith was of their number, but he was 
 not able to keep them in order. He went up the 
 rivers to see if he could find " Norumbeea," or a 
 passage through to Asia, and when he got safe 
 back he told great stories about his adventures. 
 
 Perhaps some things were true that he told, 
 but we cannot be sure how much was imaginar}^ 
 He made the acquaintance of an Indian chief, Pow- 
 hatan, whom he thought a mighty prince, like 
 
124 COLONISTS REACH MAINE. 1607. 
 
 some that he had heard of in the kingdom of the 
 Grand Cham. He risked his Hfe among the sav- 
 ages, but his tact and strength saved him. When 
 Smith wrote an account of his explorations, he said 
 that Powhatan treated him kindly ; but some years 
 later he added that at one time the old chief was 
 about to dash his brains out with a club, and that 
 his little daughter Pocahontas threw herself upon 
 him and saved his life. This story is doubted now. 
 The colony dragged along in misery and trouble for 
 several years. Its numbers were much reduced by 
 deaths, but new colonists came. New charters were 
 granted, and other changes made ; but still the settle- 
 ment did not thrive. The Company had expected 
 to gain sudden wealth, and had been disappointed. 
 
 Meantime the Plymouth Company sent out a 
 colony under Captain George Popham. It sailed 
 from Plymouth In May, 1607, just after the other 
 colonists had reached Jamestown. There were two 
 ships, and a hundred settlers ; they had ample sup- 
 plies. Their voyage was scarcely one-half as long 
 as that of the London colonists ; but they were not 
 at all pleased with the coast of Maine on which they 
 landed, though It was in August, the month during 
 
THE AGE OF COLONIZATION OPENED. 
 
 125 
 
 which thousands of people now-a-days rush thither 
 for pleasure. More than one-half returned with the 
 ships they had come on, and the others onl)- stayed 
 through the winter. They coined many excuses, and 
 among other reasons said that the country was too 
 cold for Englishmen. 
 
 Thus was the continent of America discovered. 
 Thus did enterprising men of different European 
 nations explore it, and begin to establish themselves 
 upon Its shores. The age of Colonization has been 
 called one of the grandest and most sublime the 
 earth has ever witnessed, and its story the " prose 
 epic of the modern English nation." 
 
 
 2^^ — " '?*'^"' ■- — ■* 
 

 EXPLANATION 
 
 OF THE PRONUNXIATIOX AND MEANING OF A FEW WORDS. 
 
 Alchemist {arkeni-is(\ one \\\\o 
 tries to make gold, 104. 
 
 Alliam^bra, a great palace of the 
 Moors, 43. 
 
 Astrolabe {as' tro-Iabe^ astron, a 
 star), an instrument, 38. 
 
 AstroFog"er, a student of the 
 stars, 33. 
 
 Barque, a small vessel, 51. 
 
 '^^2ih(^\\.{J)o-ab-der\ the last Moor- 
 ish king of Granada, 45. 
 
 Brandan, St., an abbot from 
 Scotland or Ireland who sailed 
 into the ocean, 34. 
 
 Caravels defined, 34. 
 
 Cardinal, a dignitary of the 
 Church, 40. 
 
 Cartier {kar' tee-ya), 33. 
 
 Catliay, an old name for China, 23. 
 
 Chain {kdni)^ the ruler of a region 
 in Asia, 23. 
 
 Charg'er, a war-horse, 63. 
 
 Cipang'O {sipango), Japan, 23. 
 
 Colony, a company of people trans- 
 planted from one country to an- 
 
 other, but still connected with the 
 fatherland, 109. 
 
 Columbus, ideas of, regarding 
 the shape of the earth, 36. 
 
 Compass, an instrument by means 
 of which ships are guided, 22, 38. 
 
 Conference, a meeting for dis- 
 cussion, 42. 
 
 Cortereal {cor-tay-ray-dl), 73. 
 
 Counselors, persons who give 
 advice, 41. 
 
 Crusaders (Latin cj'u.r, a cross), 
 cross-bearers who went to fight 
 the Saracens, 22. 
 
 Cupidity, longing for riches, 71. 
 
 Cylinder, a body of the form of a 
 roller, 13. 
 
 Diaz {liee-az), Bartholomew, dis- 
 covers the Cape of Good Hope, 
 
 -5- 
 Dieg'o {lic-dgo)^ Columbus, 33. 
 Earth, shape of the, 13, 14. 
 England, history of, 7. 
 Fiord, a long narrow bay with 
 
 liigh rocks on its sides, 13. 
 127 
 
28 
 
 EXPLANATION OF WORDS. 
 
 Forlorn hope, a desperate case, 
 41. 
 
 Gold Coast, a region in Western 
 Africa, near the equator, 32. 
 
 Gorges {gor'jez), 119. 
 
 Granada, fall of, 47. 
 
 Hakluyt {Jiak'loot\ 117. 
 
 History, a true story of events, 7. 
 
 Knick-knacks, trifles, toys, 115. 
 
 Labrador, so called because in 
 Portuguese labi'ador means, 
 "which can be cultivated," 17. 
 
 Leif {life), the so-called discoverer 
 of Vinland, 19. 
 
 Tjoadstone (better spelled lode- 
 sfone), the natural magnet, 16. 
 
 Magellan ijjia-jcl' Ian), sails 
 around the globe, 13. 
 
 Mandeville, Sir John, sus- 
 pected to be a myth, 14. 
 
 Maps in the olden time, 30. 
 
 Mediterranean, from two Latin 
 words meaning '-in the midst of 
 land," 13. 
 
 Moslems, Saracens, 37. 
 
 Niiia {iieen'yii), a ship of Colum- 
 bus, 53. 
 
 Parchment, skin prepared for 
 writing on, 58. 
 
 Pasqua Florida {paska), 74. 
 
 Polo, Marco, a great traveler, 23, 
 
 Printing", invention of, 29. 
 
 Ponce de Leon {po?ise de le'oii), 
 
 73- 
 Powhatan {pdiu-hat-tan'\ 124. 
 Quadrant, invention of the, 38. 
 
 Roanoke {j-o' an-oke), 103. 
 Saga {saga), a saying, a heroic tale 
 
 of the Norsemen, 13. 
 Saracens, followers of Moham- 
 med, 21. 
 Salamanca {sdldmdng'ka), a 
 
 strong city of Spain, 42. 
 Santa Fe {sd/ifdfay), 48. 
 Sepulcher, a grave, 49. 
 Seville {sev'il), a city of Spain, 
 
 sixty miles from Cadiz, 43. 
 Sirens, fascinating women of my- 
 thology, 16. 
 Skald (shl/d), an ancient bard af 
 
 the north-lands, 13. 
 Speculator, one who enters oh 
 
 risky business, 67. 
 Squadron, a number of vessels 
 
 under command of one officer, 53. 
 Tartary, the land of the Grand 
 
 Cham, 26. 
 Toscanelli, Paolo {pa-old), 33. 
 Triumph, a pompous ceremony 
 
 in ancient times, 62. 
 Valparaiso {val-pd-)y' zo), 59. 
 Vespvicci, Amerigo {7>es-poot- 
 
 chee, ah-j)iay-ree-gd), 73. 
 Viking {vik'ing), pirates from the 
 
 North. Vick means a bay or 
 
 fiord, 18. 
 Vinland, visit of the Norsemen 
 
 to, 19. 
 Virgin, a maiden, 107. 
 Warwick {ivdrick), 103. 
 West, movement of men to the, 15. 
 Youth, fountain of, 23.