112 DANIEL WILSON ON 
have to remember that the “Santa Maria,” the only decked vessel of the expedition, was 
stranded ; and the “ Pinta” and “ Nina,” on which Columbus and his party had to depend 
for their homeward voyage, were mere coasting craft, the one with a crew of thirty, and 
the other with twenty-four men, with only latine sails. As to the compass, we perceive 
how little that availed, on recalling the fact that the Portugese admiral, Pedro Alvares de 
Cabral, only eight years later, when following on the route of Vasco de Gama, was carried 
by the equatorial current so far out of his intended course that he found himself in sight 
of a strange land, in 10°S. lat., and so accidentally discovered Brazil. It is thus obvious 
that the discovery of America would have followed as a result of the voyage of Vasco de 
Gama round the Cape, wholly independent of that-of Columbus; but so far from the 
compass furnishing any help, it could only have been influential to prevent it. What 
befell the Portuguese admiral of King Manoel, in A.D. 1500, was an experience that might 
just as readily have fallen to the lot of the Phcenician admiral of Pharaoh Necho in B.C. 
600, to the Punic Hanno, or other early navigators; and may have repeatedly occurred to 
Mediterranean adventurers on the Atlantic in older centuries. On the news of de Cabral’s 
discovery reaching Portugal, the King despatched the Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci, who 
explored the coast of South America, prepared a map of the new-found world, and thereby 
wrested from Columbus the honour of giving his name to the continent which he discovered. 
When we turn from the myths and traditions of the Old World to those of the New, 
we find there traces that seem not unfairly interpretable into the American counterpart of 
the legend of Atlantis. The chief seat of the highest native American civilisation, is 
neither Mexico nor Peru, but Central America. The nations of the Maya stock, who 
inhabit Yucatan, Guatemala, and the neighbouring region, were peculiarly favourably 
situated ; and they appear to have achieved the greatest progress among the communities 
of Central America. They may not unfitly compare with the ancient dwellers in the valley 
of the Euphrates, from the grave mounds of whose buried cities we are now recovering 
the history of ages that had passed into oblivion before the Father of History assumed 
the pen. In actual centuries their monuments are not, indeed, so venerable ; but, for 
America’s chroniclings, they are more prehistoric than the disclosures of Assyrian mounds. 
The cities of Central America were large and populous, and adorned with edifices, even 
now magnificent in their ruins. Still more, the Mayas were a lettered people, who, like 
the Egyptians, recorded in elaborate sculptured hieroglyphics the formule of history and 
creed. Like them, too, they wrote and cyphered ; and appear, indeed, to have employed a 
comprehensive system of computing time and recording dates, which, it cannot be doubted, 
will be sufficiently mastered to admit of the decypherment of their ancient records. The 
Mayas appear, soon after the Spanish Conquest, to have adopted the Roman alphabet, and 
employed it in recording their own historical traditions and religious myths, as well as in 
rendering into such written characters some of the ancient national documents. These 
versions of native myth and history survive, and attention is now being directed to them. 
The most recent contribution from this source is “The Annals of the Cakchiquels,” by 
Dr. D. G. Brinton, a carefully edited and annotated translation of a native legal document 
or titulo, in which, soon after the Conquest, the heir of an ancient Maya family set forth 
the evidence of his claim to the inheritance. Along with this may be noted another 
work of the same class: “Titre Généalogique des Seigneurs de Totonicapan. Traduit de 
l'Espagnol par M. de Charencey.” These two works independently illustrate the same 
