646 COSMOS. 



for Castille, and two years after his head had fallen by the 

 hand of the executioner in the revolt against the tyrannical 

 Pedrarias Davila,* Magellan appeared in the Pacific (27th 

 of November, 1520), and traversing the vast ocean from 

 south-east to north-west, in a course of more than ten thousand 

 geographical miles, by a singular chance, before he dis- 

 covered the Marianas (his Islas de los Ladrones, or de las 

 Velas Latinas) and the Philippines, saw no other land but two 

 small uninhabited islands (the Desventuradas, or unfortunate 

 islands), one of which, if we may believe his journal and his 

 ship's reckoning, lies east of the Low Islands, and the other 



St. Yincent. Columbus was probably acquainted with Behaim at 

 Lisbon, where both lived from 14SO to 1484 (see my Examen crit. de 

 I' Hist, de la Geographic, t. ii. pp. 357-369). The many wholly erro- 

 neous numbers which we find in all the writings on the discovery of 

 America, and the then supposed extent of Eastern Asia, have induced 

 me more carefully to compare the opinions of the middle ages with those 

 of classical antiquity. 



* The eastern portion of the Pacific was first navigated by white men 

 in a boat, when Alonso Martin de Don Benito (who had seen the sea* 

 horizon with Yasco Nunez de Balboa on the 2 5th September, 1513, from 

 the little Sierra de Quarequa) descended a few days afterwards to the 

 Golfo de San Miguel, before Balboa enacted the strange ceremony of 

 taking possession of the ocean. Seven months before, in the month of 

 January, 1513, Balboa had announced to his court, that the South Sea, 

 of which he had heard from the natives, was very easy to navigate : 

 "mar muy mansa y que nunca anda brava como la mar de nuestra 

 banda" (de las Antillas). The name Oceano Pacifico was, however, as 

 Pigafetta tells us, first given by Magellan to the Mar del Sur (Balboa). 

 Before Magellan's expedition (in August, 1519), the Spanish Go- 

 vernment, which was not wanting in watchful activity, had given 

 secret orders, in November, 1514, to Pedrarias Davila, Governor of 

 the province of Castilla del Oro (the most north-western part of South 

 America), and to the great navigator Juan Diaz de Solis : for the 

 former to have four caravels built in the Golfo de San Miguel, " to 

 make discoveries in the newly-discovered South Sea ;" and to the lat- 

 ter, to seek for an opening (" abertura de la tierra,") from the eastern 

 coast of America, with the view of arriving at the back ("a. espel 

 das") of the new country, i. e., of the western portion of Castilla del 

 Oro, which was surrounded by the sea. The expedition of Solis (Octo- 

 ber, 1515, to August, 1516) led him far to the south, and to the dis- 

 covery of the Eio de la Plata, long called the Eio de Solis. (Compare, .on 

 the little known first discovery of the Pacific, Petrus Martyr, Epist* 

 dxl. p. 296, with the documents of 1513--1515, in Navarrete, t. iii 

 pp. 134 and 357 ; also my Examen crit., t. i. pp. 320 and 350). 



