266 COSMOS. 



which ba\'hes the western shores of America, was the most 

 important cosmical event of the g^reat epoch which we are 

 here describing. 



Ten years before Balboa, on the 25th of September, 1513, 

 first caught sight of the Pacific from the heights of the Sierra 

 de Quarequa at the Isthmus of Panama, Columbus distinctly 

 learned, when he was coasting along the eastern shores of Ve- 

 ragua, that to the west of this land there was a sea " which 

 in less than nine days' sail would bear ships to the Chersone- 

 sus aurea of Ptolemy and to the mouth of the Ganges." In 

 the same Ca7'ta rarissi77ia, which contains the beautiful and 

 poetic narration of a dream, the admiral says, that " the op- 

 posite coasts of Veragua, near the Rio de Belen, are situater^ 

 relatively to one another as Tortosa on the Mediterranean, 

 and Fuenterrabia in Biscay, or as Venice and Pisa." The 

 great ocean, the South Pacific, was even at that time regard- 

 ed as merely a continuation of the Sinus magnus (fisyag 

 KoXnog) of Ptolemy, situated before the golden Chersonesus, 

 while Cattigara and the land of the Sines (Thinse) were sup- 

 posed to constitute its eastern boundary. The fanciful hypoth- 

 esis of Hipparchus, according to which this eastern shore of 

 the great gulf was connected with the portion of the African 

 continent which extended far toward the east,* and thus sup- 

 posed to make a closed inland sea of the Indian Ocean, was 

 but little regarded in the Middle Ages, notwithstanding the 

 partiality to the views of Ptolemy — a fortunate circumstance. 



in the expedition of the Comraendador Garcia de Loaysa, which, follow 

 ing tliatof Magellan, was destined to proceed to the Molnccas. While 

 Loaysa was passing through the Straits of Magellan, Hoces, with his 

 caravel, the San Lesmes, was separated from the flotilla, and driven as 

 far as 55^ south latitude. " Dijeron los del buque, que les parecia que 

 era alii acabamiento de tierra." (Navarrete, Viages de los Espanoles, 

 t. v., p. 28 and 404-488.) Fleurieu maintains that Hoces only saw the 

 Oabo del Buen Succeso, west of Staten Island. Toward the end of the 

 sixteenth century, such a strange uncertainly again prevailed respect- 

 ing the form of the land, that the author of the Araucana (canto i., oct. 

 9) believed that the Magellanic Straits had closed by an earthquake, 

 and by the upheaval of the bottom of the sea, while, on the other han^ 

 Acosta (Hisioria Natural y Moral delas India8,\ih. iii.,cap. 10) regard- 

 ed the Terra del Fuego as the beginning of a great south polar land. 

 (Compare, also, ante, p. 72.) 



* Whether the isthmus hypothesis, according to which Cape Prasum, 

 on the eastern shore of Africa, was connected with the eastern Asiatic 

 isthmus of Thinae, is to be traced to Marinusof Tyre, or to Hipparchua, 

 or to the Babylonian Seleucus, or rather to Aristotle, De Ccelo (ii., 14), 

 18 a question treated in detail in another work, Examen Cril.* t i., p 

 144, leiiand 329} t. ii., p. 37b-3r2. 



