t of seven vessels, which
started from Cadiz, 25th September 1493. He took a more southerly
course, but again reached the islands now known as the West Indies.
On visiting Hayti he found the fort destroyed, and no traces of
the men he had left there. It is needless for our purposes to go
through the miserable squabbles which occurred on this and his
subsequent voyages, which resulted in Columbus's return to Spain
in chains and disgrace. It is only necessary for us to say that
in his third voyage, in 1498, he touched on Trinidad, and saw the
coast of South America, which he supposed to be the region of the
Terrestrial Paradise. This was placed by the mediaeval maps at the
extreme east of the Old World. Only on his fourth voyage, in 1502,
did he actually touch the mainland, coasting along the shores of
Central America in the neighbourhood of Panama. After many
disappointments, he died, 20th May 1506, at Valladolid, believing,
as far as we can judge, to the day of his death, that what he had
discovered was what he set out to seek--a westward route to the
Indies, though his proud epitaph indicates the contrary:--

A Castilla y a Leon | To Castille and to Leon
Nuevo mondo dio Colon. | A NEW WORLD gave Colon.[1]

[Footnote 1: Columbus's Spanish name was Cristoval Colon.]

To this day his error is enshrined in the name we give to the Windward
and Antilles Islands--West Indies: in other words, the Indies reached
by the westward route. If they had been the Indies at all, they
would have been the most easterly of them.

Even if Columbus had discovered a new route to Farther India, he
could not, as we have seen, claim the merit of having originated
the idea, which, even in detail, he had taken from Toscanelli.
But his claim is even a greater one. He it was who first dared
to traverse unknown seas without coasting along the land, and his
example was the immediate cause of all the remarkable discoveries
that followed his earlier voyages. As we have seen, both Vasco da
Gama and Cabral immediately after departed from the slow coasting
route, and were by that means enabled to carry out to the full
the ideas of Prince Henry; but whereas, by the Portuguese method
of coasting, it had taken nearly a century to reach the Cape of
Good Hope, within thirty years of Columbus's first venture the
whole globe had been circumnavigated.

The first aim of his successors was to ascertain more clearly what it
was that Columbus had discove