THE UNIVERSE. OCEANIC DISCOVERIES. 67 



had sufficient provisions,, his design would have been to 

 have continued his navigation towards the west, and to have 

 returned to Spain, ( 416 ) either by water, passing by Ceylon 

 (Taprobane) and " rodeando toda la tierra de los Negros," or 

 by land, by Jerusalem and Jaffa. Such were the projects 

 which Columbus cherished in 1494, proposing to himself 

 the circumnavigation of the globe, four years before Yasco 

 de Gama, and twenty-seven years before Magellan and Sebas- 

 tian de Elcano. The preparations for Cabot's second voyage, 

 in which he penetrated among masses of ice as far as 67|- 

 North latitude, seeking a North- West passage to Cathay 

 (China), led him to think of a voyage to the North pole, (a 

 lo del polo arctico), to be made at some future period. ( 417 ) 

 The more it became gradually recognised, that the newly-dis- 

 covered lands formed a connected continent stretching unin- 

 terruptedly from Labrador to the promontory of Paria, and 

 even as the celebrated lately- discovered map of Juan de la Cosa 

 (1500) shewed, far beyond the equator into the Southern 

 hemisphere, the more ardent became the desire to find a 

 passage to the westward, either in the North or in the 

 South. Next to the rediscovery of the American continent, 

 and the conviction of its extension in the direction of the 

 meridian from Hudson's Bay to Cape Horn (discovered by 

 Garcia Jofre de Loaysa,) ( 418 ) the knowledge of the South 

 Sea or the Pacific Ocean, which bathes the Western coasts of 

 America, was the most important cosmical occurrence in the 

 great epoch which we are now describing. 



Ten years before Balboa obtained the first sight of the 

 South Sea, from the summit of the Sierra de Quarequa on 

 the isthmus of Panama, Columbus in sailing along the coast 

 of Veragua, had already received distinct accounts of a sea 



VOL. II. T 



