years of anxiety and labour. The little colony was in a turmoil of dissension, and a feeling of petty jealousy, arising from the fact that Columbus was a foreigner, induced many of the Spanish settlers to compass his overthrow. Various calumnies

The

were carried back to the old country by colonists who were disappointed with their adventure, and would rather blame any one but themselves. In July, 1500, Ferdinand despatched Francisco Bobadilla, to supersede the noble Genoese in his position as High Admiral and Governor-General. discoverer of America was actually put in chains; and when Vallejo, the officer who had him in charge, offered to strike off his fetters, Columbus proudly refused, saying that he would wear them until the King ordered otherwise, and preserve them as memorials of his gratitude.

Ferdinand disavowed all knowledge of the transaction, but allowed some time to elapse before he restored the great navigator to favour, or provided him with means for a fourth expedition. On the 9th of May, 1502, Columbus again sailed from Cadiz. His object now was to discover a passage to the East Indies, which he thought he should find near the Isthmus of Darien. No such passage was revealed, but the explorer saw a good deal of the American coast, and enlarged his conception of the splendid territory which Providence had made him the instrument of disclosing. To allay the dissatisfaction of his crews, he went in search of precious metals to Veragua, a country which he mistook for the Golden Chersonesus of the Greeks and Romans. A series of misfortunes and mutinies ultimately drove him to seek shelter at Hispaniola, whence, on the 12th of September, 1504, he sailed once more for Europe. Spain was reached on the 7th of November, and, at Seville, Columbus received news of the recent death of Isabella, who had always been his friend, and had done far more for the promotion of his enterprises than her niggardly and suspicious husband. Ferdinand now turned coldly from the genius who had given him an Empire beyond the dreams of conquerors; and, after some months of sickness, poverty, and disappointment, the discoverer of the New World died at Valladolid on the 20th of May, 1506. A pompous funeral and a stately monument made poor amends for the long neglect of a noble and generous-hearted man.

It was the hard fate of Columbus, not merely to reap no advantage from the greatest achievement of the modern world, but even to be deprived of that titular honour to which he was entitled. The whole of the New World ought by right to have been called Columbia; as a matter of fact, it

received its name from Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine who accompanied Alonso de Ojeda in a voyage across the Atlantic, performed in the year 1499. A large portion of the eastern coast of America was discovered on this occasion, and, as Amerigo had a principal share in the direction of the enterprise, and published an account of it, the whole continent came in time to be called after him. Columbus, however, had been before them. even in this respect, for in 1498 he had sighted that part of Venezuela, which was then called Paria, and which lay opposite to the island of Trinidad. But in truth the continent of America, as distinguished from the adjacent islands, was first discovered neither by Columbus nor Vespucci, but by a third Italian, named Giovanni Gaboto, more generally known as John Cabot, who in 1496 obtained from Henry VII. of England a patent empowering him and his three sons to sail into the eastern, western, or northern sea, with a fleet of five ships, at their own expense, to search for islands, countries, provinces, or regions, not before seen by Christian people; to plant the English flag on any city, island, or continent, that they might find, and, as vassals of the English crown, to possess and occupy the territories thus discovered. In return

for these anticipated services, the patent conferred on the family of the Cabots and their assigns the exclusive and permanent right of frequenting all the countries thus revealed. The expedition set sail from Bristol in May, 1497, and on the 24th of June beheld the coast of North America in that portion which is now called Labrador. This was nearly a year before the discovery of the South American continent by Columbus on his third voyage, and less than five years after the first glimpse of the New World had been obtained at the island of San Salvador. The enterprise of Cabot was doubtless suggested by the great success of Columbus; but it is a fact of which Englishmen are not sufficiently proud, that the American continent was first disclosed to an English expedition, commanded, indeed, by a foreigner, but fitted. out in a mercantile city of their own land.

The Cabots made a second voyage to America in 1498; and the King himself was a partner in this new adventure, which it was hoped would turn to the advantage of commerce, and open possibilities

*It is possible that the original intention was to give the name of America only to that part of the western continent which Amerigo was concerned in exploring, as another part was, and still is, called Colombia. The first to apply the name of America to the whole continent was Martin Waldseemüller, a cosmographer of Fribourg, contemporary with Vespucci and Columbus.

A.D. 1499.)

of colonisation. The coast of Labrador was again visited, but, discouraged by the extreme cold, the explorers turned southward, and reached the farthest extremity of what is now Maryland, if they did not touch Virginia. A third voyage, extending to the Gulf of Mexico, probably followed in 1499; and in all these expeditions the chief lieutenant of John Cabot (who died shortly afterwards) was his son Sebastian, who, having been born at Bristol, must be considered as to some extent an Englishman. Sebastian was the most scientific navigator of the family, and seems to have been a man of noble life and attractive disposition. Nevertheless, he was ill-treated by the English Government, and, taking service under Ferdinand of Spain after the death of our Henry VII., received from that monarch, in 1512, the title of Captain, with a liberal salary. The death of Ferdinand early in 1516, put a stop to a new expedition which Sebastian Cabot was to have commanded. Returning to England shortly afterwards, he was commissioned to go in search of the north-west passage into the Pacific Ocean—a favourite project with all the great explorers of that age. He sailed from England about 1517, passed through the straits that were afterwards named after Hudson, and reached the bay beyond; but it would seem that the straits had already been entered, about sixteen years before, by Gaspar de Cortereal, a Portuguese. Cabot, however, penetrated farther than his predecessor, and would have continued his voyage, as the sea was quite open, had not his fellow-commander, Sir Thomas Perte, lost courage, and the crew proved mutinous. This brave explorer, of Venetian blood and English birth— certainly one of the greatest navigators of that epoch, after Columbus himself-died at an advanced age in a year not exactly known, but probably in the reign of Queen Mary. As he lay on his death-bed, his mind wandered over the broad ocean, and he talked to his friend Richard Eden of a peculiar mode of finding the longitude which had been communicated to him by divine revelation, but which he was not permitted to repeat. Eden (who afterwards compiled a history of maritime expeditions) thought that, in the extremity of his age, the old voyager somewhat doted; but at least his thoughts were characteristic of the whole tenor of a life which sought the unknown shores of distant oceans, as if nothing less could satisfy the ardour of his soul.

For many years, the spirit of enterprise continued to impel all the nations of Western Europe to maritime expeditions, which frequently led to important results. Brazil was accidentally

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| discovered, in 1501, by a Portuguese fleet under Cabral, whose real object was to effect conquests in the East, to which the attention of adventurers had been specially directed by the success of Vasco de Gama in accomplishing the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope. Cabral was carried westward by the equatorial currents, and, reaching the coast of Brazil, sailed along it as far as Porto Seguro, where he landed, and took possession of the country in the name of his Government. The northern coast of New Granada was first visited by a Spaniard, named Bastidas, in 1501. Yucatan was discovered by Diaz de Solis and Pinzon in 1508, and Florida by Juan Ponce de Leon in 1512. In 1515, de Solis and several of his crew were killed and eaten by the natives of the country near the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, where they had landed in pursuit of their explorations; and two years earlier (1513) the Pacific or Southern Ocean had been descried from the mountain-tops near Panama by Vasco Nunez de Balboa-a man of heroic spirit, who was set aside in the governorship of the territories thus acquired in favour of one Pedrarias Davila, who in 1517 caused him to be beheaded on a false accusation of rebellious designs.

The enterprise of Portugal was equal to that of Spain, though the country was so much smaller; but the attention of the Portuguese was directed more to Africa, and to the East, than to the new territories of America. To them, the great object was to reach India by sailing round the African continent; and in July, 1497, King Manuel despatched Vasco de Gama, with three ships, to double the Cape of Good Hope, and endeavour in that way to attain the golden lands of Asia. For a portion of the way he was accompanied by Bartholomew Diaz, who had discovered the Cape ten or eleven years before; and in the following November Gama rounded the stormy promontory, and sailed up the eastern coast of Africa as far as Mozambique. With the king of that territory he concluded a treaty, by which the barbarian monarch agreed to furnish the Portuguese navigator with pilots experienced in the course to India. A quarrel afterwards ensued, and the Africans, dismayed by the Portuguese firearms, submitted to the demands of the strangers. On the 1st of April, 1498, Vasco de Gama sailed from Mozambique for India, and, after much trouble, succeeded in crossing to the coast of Malabar. Landing at Calicut, he announced himself as an ambassador from the King of Portugal, charged to negotiate a treaty of alliance with the Indian sovereign, to establish commercial relations, and to convert the natives to Christianity.

lished relations with the Shah of Persia, and opened a flourishing trade with the Moluccas. He died about the close of 1515, after securing to his country some of the finest colonial dependencies ever possessed by any State.

The value of Malacca to the Portuguese can hardly be exaggerated. The chief trade of Farther Asia was there pursued with every advantage which could be derived from locality and from natural resources. Robertson has well remarked that "to this port, situated nearly at an equal

resorted from the east; and those of Malabar, of Ceylon, of Coromandel, and of Bengal from the west." Thus favourably circumstanced, the subjects of King Manuel frequented every port from the Cape of Good Hope to the river of Canton; and their enterprise established a chain of forts or factories along an immense stretch of coast. Commerce could boast of no such achievements since the days of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians; and the trade of Venice soon felt the superior energy, or happier fortune, of the Portuguese.

AFTER the Albizzi had succeeded in obtaining possession of power in the Republic of Florence, about the year 1382, the conduct of affairs continued a long while in the hands of what may be called the new aristocracy--the privileged class of the wealthy, the intellectual, and the cultured. For the first eighteen years, the rule of that class was occasionally disturbed by conspiracies and insurrections; but, from 1400 to 1433, the city, according to Macchiavelli, remained singularly tranquil. This was a longer period of repose than the excitable and turbulent commonwealth had ever known before; and while the citizens were at peace with themselves, they acquired possession, either by force or purchase, of Pisa, Cortona, Livorno (known to English people as Leghorn), and other portions of Northern Italy. The fate of Pisa was particularly sad. The city had for a long time been distracted by the feuds of the aristocratic and democratic parties, and in 1399 it was sold by its then ruler to Gian Galeazzo Visconti, of Milan, at whose death, in 1403, it passed to his natural son, Gabriello Maria. This person, doubting his ability to hold the place without assistance, placed himself under the protection of Charles VI. of France, whose representative, Marshal Boucicault, sold the citadel and other strongholds to the Florentines for 206,000 florins. The transaction was an infamous one, and it was rendered still worse by the conduct of Boucicault to Gabriello Maria, whom, on his demanding a share in the purchase-money, he beheaded as a traitor to the King of France. The citizens of Pisa soon afterwards retook the citadel, and offered to repay the Florentines the money they had disbursed to the French Marshal,

The Government of the sister Republic, however, refused these terms, and demanded the surrender of Pisa. The city was blockaded for nearly a year, and, when reduced to extremities by famine, was treacherously given up to the enemy for a money payment, on the night of the 8th of November, 1406. One Giovanni Gambacorta, who had formerly been an exile, but whom the Pisans had recalled that he might conduct negotiations with the besiegers, was the traitor who thus effected the ruin of this once illustrious State. All the greatest families of Pisa emigrated to Sardinia and Sicily, and the city underwent a servitude of eighty-eight years. Expelling the Florentines in 1494, the citizens placed themselves under the protection of France, but, after two heroic struggles, again submitted to the Republic of the Arno in 1509. From that time until the unification of Italy, Pisa remained subject to Florence.

Before the middle of the fifteenth century, Florence had passed under the rule of a very illus trious family, the leading members of which are indissolubly associated with her annals. The Medici were merchant-princes who had distinguished themselves in the conduct of affairs as early as the thirteenth, and again in the fourteenth, century. They were wealthy, and employed their wealth with a liberal regard to the public interests. Salvestro de' Medici attained the rank of Gonfaloniere in 1378, and from that time the family rose in general estimation and in power, until it acquired an almost regal dignity in the person of Giovanni de' Medici, who successively filled all the great offices of the Republic, and, in a.singularly jealous and turbulent community, retained the respect of