230 COSMOS. 



once awakened, was soon followed by an extension of gerr- 

 graphical knowledge. When Diego Ribero returned, in the 

 year 1525, from the geographical and astronomical congress 

 which had been held at the Puente de Ca.ya, near Yelves, for 

 tlie purpose of settling the contentions that had arisen regard- 

 ing tiie boundaries of the tw^o empires of the Portuguese and 

 the Spaniards, the outlines of the new continent had been 

 already laid down from Terra del Fuego to the coasts of Lab- 

 rador. On the western side of America, opposite to Asia, the 

 advance was, of course, less rapid, although Rodriguez Cabrillo 

 had penetrated further northward than Monterey as early as 

 1543 ; and notwithstanding that this great and daring mar- 

 iner met his death in the Canal of Santa Barbara, in New 

 California, the pilot, Bartholomeus Ferreto, conducted the ex- 

 pedition to the 43d degree of latitude, where Vancouver's 

 Cape Oxford is situated. The emulous enterprise of the 

 Spaniards, English, and Portuguese, directed to one and the 

 same object, was then so great, that fifty years sufficed to de- 

 termine the external configuration or the general direction of 

 the coasts of the countries in the Western hemisphere. 



Although the acquaintance of the nations of Europe with 

 the western part of the earth is the main subject of our con- 

 sideration in this section, and that around which the numer- 

 ous relations of a more correct and a grander view of the 

 universe are grouped, we must yet draw a strong line of sepa- 

 ration between the undoubted first discoverv of America, in 

 \ts northern portions, by the Northmen, and its subsequent 

 rediscovery in its tropical regions. While the Califate still 

 flourished under the Abbassides at Bagdad, and Persia was 

 under the dominion of the Samanides, whose age was so fa- 

 vorable to poetry, America was discovered in the year 1000 

 by Leif, the son of Eric the Red, by the northern route, and 

 as far as 41^ 30' north latitude.^ The first, although acci- 

 dental, incitement toward this event emanated from Norway. 

 Toward the close of the ninth century, Naddod was driven by 



* Parts of America were seen, although no landing was made ou 

 them, fourteen years before Leif Eiicksson, in the voyage which Bjarne 

 Herj«lfsson undertook from Greenland to the southward in 986. Leif 

 first saw the land at the island of Nantucket, l'^ south of Boston ; then 

 in 'Nova Scotia ; and, lastly, in Newfoundland, which was subsequent- 

 ly called " Litla Helluland," but never " Vinland." The gulf, which 

 divides Newfoundland from the month of the great river St. Lawrence, 

 was called by the Northmen, who had settled in Iceland and Green- 

 land, Markland's Gulf. See Caroli Christiani Rafn Antiqnitates Amev' 

 icancc, 1845, p. 4, 421, 423, ami 463. 



