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 io INTRODUCTION Portuguese name in the first half of the fifteenth century, and several other islands accompanied it. They all certainly seem to be American and West Indian. COLUMBUS, VESPUCIUS, AND CABOT Incidentally the Portuguese activity stimulated the enthu- siasm of Columbus, guided his plans, and contributed to the em- inent success of his great undertaking. In Antillia it provided a first goal, which he believed to be nearer than it really was. He fully meant to attain it and probably really did so, but without recognizing Antillia in Cuba or Hispaniola, for he thought he had missed it on the way and left it far behind. Vignaud insists that Columbus did not aim at Asia until after he actually reached the West Indies but sought to attain Antillia only. 11 However this may be, there is no doubt that he found in the island a notable prompting to his supreme adventure. The discoveries of Columbus, Vespucius, and Cabot, with their immediate followers, heralded the opening of an effective knowledge of the western world and the ocean world to the centers of civilization. Thereafter the delineation of new islands did not cease but for a long time rather multiplied; yet they had little significance or importance, being chiefly the products of fancy, optical illusion, or error in reckoning. One of the latest worth considering is the island of Buss (Ch. XII), reported where there is no land by a separated vessel of Frobisher's expedition near the end of the sixteenth century. Afterward it was known as the Sunken Land of Bus, or Buss, to the grave concern of mariners. We are reasonably secure against such imposition now, though perhaps it is not yet impossible. The old mythical or apocryphal islands, too, are gone from standard maps and most others, though you may yet find in cartographic work of little authority one or two of the more tenacious specimens making a final stand. Henry Vignaud: The Columbian Tradition on the Discovery of America and of the Part Played Therein by the Astronomer Toscanelli, Oxford, 1920.