Page:History of the United States of America, Spencer, v1.djvu/28

 at was now triumphantly established; and Columbus had secured to himself a glory as lasting as the world itself. The land thus reached proved to be the island Guanahani—now called Cat Island, one of the Bahamas —which Columbus named, in token of his devout gratitude to God our Saviour.

Of the further and important voyages and discoveries of Columbus, and to of the varied fortune which it was his lot to meet with, it is not our present purpose to speak. Envy, detraction, injustice and cruelty embittered his latter days. Deprived of the honor, which was only his just due, of giving his name to the newly discovered world, and rendered hopeless of all redress by the death, in 1504, of his patron and fast friend, the good queen Isabella, Columbus died at Valladolid, May 20th, 1506, at peace with the world, and sustained in his last hours by the hopes and consolations of the Christian religion. The selfish Ferdinand did indeed order a monument to his memory, with the motto taken from Columbus's coat of arms —: To Castile and Leon Columbus gave a new world—but it could add nothing to the fame of Columbus; it simply serves to stamp the character and conduct of Ferdinand as one who was an unfeeling, ungenerous, ungrateful king.

The name which was applied to a portion of the Western Continent soon after its discovery, and which has now become its unalterable title, took its rise from a voyage made in 1499 by Amerigo Vespucci, a distinguished Florentine navigator. Vespucci wrote several letters in Latin to Lorenzo de Medici, one of which was printed in 1505, being the first of his narratives that was published. He also wrote a letter, dated Lisbon, September 4th, 1504, addressed to René, duke of Lorraine, in which it is claimed that he discovered the main land in 1497. Now, as he was a man of superior learning and intelligence, and as his name was thus publicly connected with the New World as the Discoverer of the Continent—although he was not the first to reach Terra Firma Columbus, and Cabot, and others having preceded him—it happened that a famous cosmographer, Martin Waldseemüller, of Fribourg, patronized by René, thought good, in 1507, to apply this name to the New World. The geographical works of Waldseemüller, who styled himself by the Grecianized title, Hylacomylas, went through repeated editions, and thus the name America became familiarized to the larger part of the civilized world. And so must it remain, though there can hardly, be any one who can repress a sigh of regret at the injustice which has thus been done to Columbus.