ns as to who was the discoverer of Brazil. There is, moreover,
Amerigo Vespucci. Amerigo Vespucci may be said to have been more
successful in his accounts of his voyages than in the feats which he
actually accomplished. To have succeeded on such slender foundation in
causing an entire Continent to be christened by his name was in itself
no mean performance, and this was probably his greatest claim to
distinction.

Some historians take him more seriously than this. Southey, for one,
appears to accept Vespucci very much at his own valuation, and states
that the honour of having formed the first settlement in Brazil is due
to Amerigo Vespucci.

The Spaniards claim this distinction for their famous seaman, Vicente
Pinzon. Pinzon sailed from Spain in December, 1499. He shaped a more
southerly course than any previous navigator in the Spanish service, and
he appears to have made his landfall in the neighbourhood of Pernambuco.
He went ashore, it would seem, at a spot he named Cape Consolation, and
of this he took possession in the name of the Spanish Crown. His voyage,
however, appears to have had very little practical result, for almost
immediately afterwards he returned to Europe, and no steps seem to have
been taken by the Spanish Court for the colonization of the land which
he had discovered.

[Illustration: COLUMBUS LANDING IN AMERICA.

_From a seventeenth-century engraving._]

The Portuguese, for their part, assert that the territories of Brazil
were first sighted by their great navigator, Pedro Alvarez Cabral. The
discovery was in one sense something of an accident. It was necessary
for the seamen who were setting their course for the East Indies to
steer well to the west, in order to avoid the zones of calms which
prevail in the neighbourhood of the African coast. Cabral appears to
have steered so boldly into the west that he fell in with the coast of
Brazil. This was in 1500. Word of this event was sent to Portugal, and
the enterprising little kingdom, at that time at the height of her
maritime power, made preparations to colonize the country.

The auspices under which the Spaniards and the Portuguese arrived in the
New World were curiously different. The Spaniards were frankly in quest
of gold, and in many cases ransacked the fertile agricultural lands in
search of minerals which were non-existent. The Portuguese, on the other
hand, had no reason to suspect the presence of precious metals in their
new colony,