ARRIVAL OF THE ROYAL FAMILY. 



13 



ments upon the subject as the cosmographers of Lusitania, and where, perhaps, 

 he would have been equally unsuccessful had not the spontaneous offers which 

 Luiz de Santangal made to provide all the money requisite for the expedition, 

 and the voluntary proposal of Don Pedro de Mendonca to contribute one- 

 eighth of the expenses, overcome every difficulty. He sailed from Palos, with 

 three caravelleons under his command, on the 3d of August, 1492, and, passing 

 the Canaries, directed his course to the westward, till the llth of October, when 

 he descried an island, which he called St. Salvador, now one of the Bahama 

 Islands. He was much disheartened at having traversed so much of the ocean 

 with so little success ; but he continued, however, the voyage, and discovered 

 the Island of Cuba, of Hispaniola, now St. Domingo, and left 38 men there 

 in a wooden fort. He then retraced his way back, and arrived at Lisbon on the 

 6th of March, 1493. Columbus made three other voyages across the Atlantic, 

 under the protection of Ferdinand V. His second voyage was commenced 

 from Cadiz, on the 25th of September, 1493. He re-visited the Island of His- 

 paniola, discovered Jamaica, and a great many other islands to the southward 

 of Cuba, and which, for its fertility and picturesque beauty, he denominated the 

 garden of the kingdom. Upon his third voyage, in 1498, he saw the island of 

 Trinidad, at the mouth of the Oronocos, on the 1st of August. He afterwards 

 disembarked on various parts of the coast of Paria, returned to Hispaniola, 

 and then to Europe. He sailed again from Cadiz on the 9th of May, 1502, a 

 third time visited Hispaniola, and continued to navigate onward till he dis- 

 covered the Island of Guanaia, near Cape Honduras, and subsequently explored 

 all the coast of the continent, from Cape Gracias to Porto Bello. 



Some persons, however, affirm that it is a great injustice to attribute the honour 

 of discovering this hemisphere to either of those navigators, when it is certain 

 that the oriental Syberios, called Choukes, were in the habit of passing the 

 Straits of Bhering, to the American continent, in the summer season, from time 

 immemorial. The Danes discovered Greenland about the end of the tenth cen- 

 tury, and the Norwegians colonized it in the following one ; and if this land 

 is not a portion of the continent, it is at least an island belonging to it. 



Having briefly described the first discovery of the American continent, it will 

 now be in unison with the object of this work, to invite the attention to an in- 

 vestigation of the circumstances resulting from the discovery of that portion of 

 it more immediately under consideration, and which has excited endeavours 

 on my part, very inadequate to render justice to a subject of such prodigious 

 magnitude. The Portuguese imagine (and the inscriptions met with in the Bra- 



