THE TREASURE REVEALED 215 



ocean that laved their western shores had not yet yielded 

 her secret." 



It is common to attribute the naming of the two western 

 continents, the Americas, to an accident of fortune. When we 

 study the history of events this does not seem to be so acci- 

 dental after all. In the first place we must always remember 

 that Columbus did not intend or desire to find a new world; 

 he was obsessed with the dream of opening a quick western 

 route to the wealth of Cathay, the land of Marco Polo. Like 

 so many Europeans of his day, he wanted to avoid or at least 

 get around the Moslem Curtain across the East which shut 

 off the land trade routes to the Orient — routes which were 

 far too long, even when open. This drove the Portuguese 

 around the Cape of Good Hope and the Spaniards to send 

 Magellan around the southern tip of South America. Colum- 

 bus and others refused to accept a blockade of new lands. 

 They were determined to follow the slow beginnings of the 

 Ocean Stream through the Caribbean and then keep on west 

 through some unknown strait. At different times the Missis- 

 sippi, the Chesapeake, and the Hudson were thought to be 

 this strait, as were the Orinoco, Amazon, and La Plata in 

 the southern continent. Amerigo Vespucius did a lot of look- 

 ing for these straits. 



A famous pilot named La Cosa was with Columbus on his 

 second voyage. As Columbus returned a broken man to Spain 

 in 1505, this La Cosa teamed up with Vespucius, who had 

 now shifted his allegiance from Portugal to Spain, and they 

 searched the Gulf of Darien looking for a passage to Cathay. 

 They were not obsessed with any conviction that the West 

 Indies were part of the Orient — Vespucius had already named 

 the Novus Mundus. Again in 1507 Vespucius and La Cosa 

 were back off the Darien coasts, but unlike Balboa they met 

 no Indian chief to tell them of the Pacific just beyond the 

 narrow Cordillera; they were six years too early. For many years 



