270 COSMOS. 



east to northwest, in a course of more than ten thousand geo 

 graphical miles, by a singular chance, before he discovered the 

 Marianas (his Mas de los Ladrones, or de las Velas Latinas) 

 and the Philippines, saw no other land but two small unin- 

 habited islands (the Desventuradas, or unfortunate islands), 

 one of which, if we may believe his journal and his ship's reck- 

 oning, lies east of the Low Islands, and the other somewhat 

 to the southwest of the Archipelago of Mendana.* Sebastian 

 de Elcano completed the first circumnavigation of the earth 

 in the Victoria after Magellan's murder on the island of Zebu, 

 and obtained as his armorial bearings a globe, with the glo- 

 rious inscription. Primus drcunidedisti me. He entered the 

 harbor of San Lucar in the month of September, 1522, and 

 scarcely had a year elapsed before the Emperor Charles, stim- 

 ulated by the suggestions of cosmographers, urged, in a letter 

 to Hernan Cortez, the discovery of a passage " by which the 

 distance to the spice lands would be shortened by two thirds." 

 The expedition of Alvaro de Saavedra was dispatched to the 

 Moluccas from a port of the province Zacatula, on the west- 

 ern coast of Mexico. Hernan Cortez writes in 1527 from the 

 recently conquered Mexican capital, Tenochtitlan, " to the 

 Kings of Zebu and Tidor in the Asiatic island world." So 

 rapidly did the sphere of cosmical views enlarge, and with it 

 the animation of general intercourse ! 



Subsequently, the conqueror of New Spain himself entering 

 upon a course of discoveries in the Pacific, proceeded from 

 thence in search of a northeast passage. Men could not ha- 

 bituate themselves to the idea that the continent extended 

 aninterruptedly from such high southern to such high north- 



* On the geographical position of the Desventuradas (San Pablo, S. 

 lat. 16i°, long. 135|o west of Paris; Isla de Tiburones, S. lat. IQ\^ 

 W. long. 145°), see my Examen Crit., t. i., p. 286, and Navarrete, t 

 iv., p. lix., 52, 218, and 267. The great period of geographical discov- 

 eries gave occasion to many illustrious heraldic bearings, similar to the 

 one mentioned in the text as bestowed on Sebastian de Elcano and his 

 descendants (the terrestrial globe, with the inscription " Primus cir 

 cumdedisti me"). The arms which were given to Columbus as early 

 as May, 1493, to honor his person, "para sublimarlo," with posterity, 

 contain the first map of America — a range of islands in front of a gulf 

 (Oviedo, Hist. General de las Indias, ed. de 1547, lib. ii., cap. 7, fol. 

 10 a.; Navairete, t. ii., p. 37 ; Examen Crit., t. iv., p. 236). The Em- 

 peror Charles V. gave to Diego de Ordaz who boasted of having ascend- 

 ed the volcano of Orizaba, the drawing of that conical mountain; and 

 to the historian Oviedo (who lived in tropical America uninteiTuptedly 

 for thirty-four years, from 1513 to 1547), the four beautiful stars of tha 

 Southern Cross, as armorial bearings. (Oviedo, lib. ii., cap. 11, foL 

 16,b.'» 



