Traditional.

CHAPTER I.

DISCOVERY.

THE first man to discover the shores of the United States, according to Icelandic writings, was the Icelander Leif. A countryman of his, sailing from Greenland, had reached Newfoundland or Labrador, and Leif sailed in search of the same land, a few years afterwards. He is described as having found more than he sought, by keeping on to the southward and westward, until he arrived at a point which he called Vinland, from the wild grapes growing there, and which has been supposed to be our own Rhode Island. This was in the year 1000, and from that time, for upwards of three hundred years, voyages to these coasts continued to be made at intervals by Icelanders or Northmen. Other traditions bring over Madoc and his Welshmen in the twelfth century, and the Venetian brothers Zeni at the close of the fourteenth; but when they came, and if they came at all, cannot now be told.

cal,

Histori- Whatever may be thought of these traditional discoveries, this much, at least, is historical about them that they quickened the discoveries of a later period. The idea that land could be gained by sailing westward over the Atlantic was a very old one, but it needed to be revived. At last it triumphed, and Christopher Columbus, a Genoese in the Spanish service, discovered Guanahani, or San Salvador, one of the Bahama Islands, at dawn on

Friday, October 12, 1492. He thought he had succeeded in finding a western route to the Indies, and therefore called his discovery the West Indies. On his third voyage westward, in 1498, he reached the American continent off the Island of Trinidad; but if he knew it to be a continent, he supposed it to be Asiatic, and so he continued to suppose it till his death in 1506. The next year a German geographer, drawing from the descriptions given by Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine who had crossed the ocean under the Spanish and Portuguese flags, coined the name of America. Several years still elapsed before

Fulness

time.

Columbus was known to have discovered a New World. No event in history appears to have been more of the happily timed. The middle ages were closing, the modern were opening; the great nations of Europe were putting forth their energies, material and immaterial, when the discovery of America came just in season to help and be helped by the movements of these stirring years. Had it taken place before, or long before, it would have suffered from the want of those who could turn it to account; had it been delayed, or long delayed, generations would have languished without the golden opportunities which it gave them. The old world needed the new; the new needed the old.

Spanish

CHAPTER II.

SPANISH SETTLEMENTS.

FROM almost every point first gained in America, adven- as well as from the shores of Spain, adventures, tures. some great, some small, some national, some individual, were urged by the Spaniards in all directions. The West Indies, at first the whole, soon became the mere centre of the Spanish possessions.

Ponce de

The first to reach the territory of the present Leon in United States was Ponce de Leon, a companion of Florida. Columbus. Long visited by dreams of riches, and latterly, in his advancing age, excited by rumors of a fountain in which youth might be renewed, Ponce set sail from Porto Rico in search of the treasures in the north. On Easter Sunday,- in the Spanish calendar Pascua Florida,

- he descried a land to which, in his mingled visions of resurrection and of abundance, he gave the name of Florida or Flower-land, (1512.) Nine years later, with a commission from the Spanish crown, as governor of Florida, Ponce returned to conquer and to colonize his discovery. But driven off by the natives of the coast, the old adventurer left Florida to return no more, (1521.)

Various

A series of expeditions had already begun to expedi- scour the Atlantic coast. The Portuguese Cortions. tereal had led the way, twenty years before, in a cruise towards the north, (1501.) A line of Spanish adventurers, intent upon treasure and conquest, succeeded.

Vasquez de Ayllon twice made descents upon Chicora, the later Carolina, (1520–24.) Gomez sailed farther to the north in quest of a western passage to richer lands, (1525.) Pamphilo de Narvaez tried his fortune in Florida, (1528,) whither also De Soto directed his greater expedition, and pursued his wanderings northward and westward (1539-43) with no greater reward than the discovery of the Mississippi, (1541.) At the same time, Vasquez Coronado was penetrating from Mexico high up into the interior, (1540-42,) while De Cabrillo (1542) was coasting the Pacific shore, and, though dying on the voyage, leaving his pilot, Ferrelo, to ascend as far as Oregon, (1543.) Of these western explorations there were few if any results to satisfy the explorers. Nor were the adventurers in the east better contented; the only ones to gain any thing being those who laded their ships with slaves. The natives had been pressed into bondage almost from the moment when they were first seen in the West Indies.

Luis de

A figure of more Christian aspect appears in Cancello. Luis de Cancello, a Dominican friar. Obtaining an order from Spain that all the slaves from the northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico should be returned, he set sail with such as he could collect. Instead of proposing to conquer the natives, he went with the hope of converting them to a religion of peace. But in his first interview with them on the coast, he and two priests accompanying him were slain, (1549.)

Menen

Nearly twenty years elapsed, and our soil was dez. still unoccupied by the Spaniards. At length a veteran commander, Menendez de Aviles, engaged to complete the conquest and to commence the colonization of Florida, with a train of soldiers, priests, and negro slaves. He was of a stern temper, without a vision of romance or a touch of sensibility to turn him from the severe enterprise

which he had assumed. He began with the foundation of St. Augustine, (September 8, 1565,) the oldest town in the United States. Then he routed and slew some French settlers who had lately encamped upon the ground claimed by Spain, and whose destruction had been one of the great incentives to his expedition. Where they fell most thickly, the conqueror marked out the site of a Christian church. The colony thus resolutely founded brought none of the rich returns that had been looked for; but it was not abandoned.

De Espejio and

Fifteen years afterwards, the expeditions from Mexico were renewed by Ruiz (1580) and De Vizcaino. Espejio, (1581,) the latter of whom, followed by soldiers and Indians, marched northward, until he named the country New Mexico, and founded the settlement of Santa Fe, the second town of the United States in point of age. Twenty years later, (1602,) a squadron under Sebastiano Vizcaino explored the Californian shore, bestowing upon its headlands and its bays many of the names which they still bear. It was Vizcaino's hope to colonize the coast, but he died in the midst of his schemes, (1608.)

The motives of the Spanish settler, as we per

Motives. ceive, were partly of a high and partly of a low nature. Devoted to great aims and to generous deeds, he encountered, as Luis de Cancello did in Florida, the perils of an unknown shore, in order to impart to others the faith in which he lived and for which he was willing to die. But in another aspect the Spanish character grows dark and threatening. Men, like the greater part of those who have been mentioned, sought our land for gold or for dominion ; sometimes, indeed, with a national object, but more generally for merely selfish ends. Motives of this sort led to scenes of cruelty and of carnage, on which it is, fortunately, unnecessary to dwell.