Page:A general history for colleges and high schools (Myers, 1890).djvu/578

514 met at first with repeated repulse and disappointment. At last, however, he gained the ear of Queen Isabella of Spain; a little fleet was fitted out for the explorer,—and the New World was found.

Columbus never received a fitting reward for the great service he had rendered mankind. Even the continent to which he had shown the way, instead of being called after him as a perpetual memorial, was named from a Florentine navigator, Amerigo Vespucci, whose chief claim to this distinction was his having published the first account of the new lands.

The Voyage of Vasco da Gama (1497–1498).—The favorable position of Portugal upon the Atlantic seaboard naturally led her sovereigns to conceive the idea of competing with the Italian cities for the trade of the East Indies, by opening up an ocean route to those lands. During all the latter part of the fifteenth century Portuguese sailors were year after year penetrating a little farther into the mysterious tropical seas, and exploring new reaches of the western coast of Africa.

In 1487 the most southern point of the continent was reached,