OCEANIC DISCOVERIES. 269 



Six years after Balboa, sword in hand, and wading to his 

 knees through the waves, claimed the possession of the Pacific 

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

 hand of the executioner in the revolt against th« tyrannical 

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

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

 bus naturally preferred this result to that of Ptolemy, according to which 

 Quinsay should have been found in the naeridian of the eastern part of 

 the archipelago of the Carolinas. Ptolemy, in the Almagest (II., 1), 

 places the coast of Sinse at 180^^, and in his Geop-aphy (lib. i., cap. 12) 

 at 177^"^. As Columbus estimated the navigation from Iberia to Sinae 

 at 120^^, and Toscauelli at only 52°, they might certainly, estimating 

 the length of the Mediterranean at about A<P, have called this appar 

 ently hazardous enterprise a " brevissimo camino." Martin Behaim, 

 also, on his " World Apple,'' the celebiated globe virhich he completed 

 in 1492, and which is still preserved in the Behaim house at Nurem- 

 berg, places the coast of China (or the throne of the King of Mango, 

 Cambalu, and Cathai) at only 100° west of the Azores — i. e., as Behaim 

 lived four years at Fayal, and probably calculated the distance from 

 that point — 119° 40' west of Cape St. Vincent. Columbus was prob- 

 ably acquainted with Behaim at Lisbon, where both lived from 1480 

 to 1484. (See my Examen Crit. de CHist. d,e la Geographic, t. ii., p. 

 357-369.) The many wholly erroneous 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 opin- 

 ions of the Middle Ages with those of classical antiquity. 



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

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

 with Vasco Nunez de Balboa on the 25th of September, 1513, from the 

 little Sierra de Quarequa) descended a few days afterward to the Gulf 

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

 possession of the ocean. Seven months befora, 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 Ma- 

 gellan's expedition (in August, 1519), the Spanish government, which 

 was not wanting in watchful activity, had given secret orders, in Novem- 

 ber, 1514, to Pedrarias Davila, governor of the province of Castilla del 

 Oro (the most northwestern 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 discovei'ies in the newly-discov- 

 ered South Sea:" and to the latter, to seek for an opening ("abertura 

 de la tierra") from the eastern coast of America, with the view of ar- 

 riving at the back (" d 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 (October, 1515, to August, 1516) led him far to 

 the south, and to the discoveiy of the Rio de la Plata, long called the 

 Rio 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., p. 134 and 357; also my Examen Crit^ 

 t i., p. 320 and 350.) 



