ossession of it, so was it to be named
after a man other than its discoverer: an inconsiderable adventurer
named Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine, who accompanied three or four
Spanish expeditions as astronomer or pilot, but who had no part in any
real discovery in the New World. He wrote a number of letters describing
the voyages which he claimed to have made, and one of these was printed
in a pamphlet which had a wide circulation, so that Vespucci's name came
to be connected in the public mind with the new land in the west much
more prominently than that of any other man. In 1502, in a little book
dealing with the new discoveries, the suggestion was made that there was
nothing "rightly to hinder us from calling it [the New World] Amerige or
America, i.e., the land of Americus," and America it was
thenceforward--one of the great injustices of history. Since it had to
be so, let us be thankful that it was Vespucci's first name which was
selected, and not his last one.
Meanwhile, the Spaniards had pushed their way across the Caribbean and
explored the shores of the gulf, finding at last in Mexico a land of
gold. World-worn, disease-racked Ponce de Leon, conqueror and governor
of Porto Rico, struggled through the everglades of Florida, seeking the
fountain of eternal youth, and getting his death-wound there instead.
Ferdinand Magellan, man of iron if there ever was one, seeking a western
passage to the Moluccas, skirted the coast of South America, wintered
amid the snows of Patagonia, worked his way through the strait which
bears his name, and held on westward across the Pacific, making the
first circumnavigation of the globe, a feat so startling in audacity
that there is none in our day to compare with it, except, perhaps, a
journey to another planet. Magellan himself never again saw Europe,
meeting his death in a fight with the natives of the Philippines, but
one of his ships, with eighteen men, struggled south along the coast of
Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and so home.
H
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John Addington Symonds (October 5, 1840 - April 19, 1893) was an English poet and literary critic. He was an early advocate of the validity of male love which included for him pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships, and which he would refer to as lamour de limpossible.