* * * * * CHAPTER II. ACCOUNT OF THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERCIA, BY CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS; FROM THE HISTORY OF THE WEST INDIES, BY ANTONIO BE HERRERA, HISTORIOGRAPHER TO THE KING OF SPAIN[1]. SECTION I. _Of the Knowledge of the Ancients respecting the New World._ With the generality of mankind, so far from imagining that there could be any such country as the _new world_ or West Indies, the very notion of any such thing being supposed to exist was considered as extravagant and absurd, for every one believed that all to the westwards of the Canary islands was an immense and unnavigable ocean. Yet some of the ancients have left hints that such western lands existed. In the close of the second act of his tragedy of Medea, Seneca says, "The time will come, when the ocean shall become navigable, and a vast land or New World shall be discovered." St Gregory, in his exposition of the Epistle of St Clement, says, "There is a new world, or even worlds, beyond the ocean." We are informed by other authors, that a Carthaginian merchant ship accidentally discovered in the ocean, many days sail from our ancient continent, an incredibly fruitful island, full of navigable rivers, having plenty of wild beasts, but uninhabited by men, and that the discoverers were desirous of settling there; but, having given an account of this discovery to the senate of Carthage, they not only absolutely prohibited any one to sail thither, but put all who had been there to death, the more effectually to prevent any others from making the attempt. Yet all this is nothing to the purpose, as there is no authentic memorial of this supposed voyage, and those who have spoken of it incidentally have given no cosmographical indications of its situation, by means of which the admiral Christopher Columbus, who made the first discovery of the West Indies, could have acquired any information to guide him in that great discovery. Besides, that there were no wild beasts, either in the windward or leeward islands which he discovered, those men who would rob Columbus, in part at least, of the honour of his great discovery, misapply the following quotation from the _Timaeus_ of Plato: "There is no sailing upon the ocean, because its entrance is shut up by the Pillars of Hercules. Yet there had formerly been an island in that ocean, larger than all Europe, Asia, and Africa in one; and from thence a passage to other islands, for such as went in search of them, and from these other inlands people might go to all the opposite continent, near the true ocean." These detractors from the honour of Columbus, in explaining the words of Plato after their own manner, evince more wit than truth, when they insist that the shut up passage is the strait of Gibraltar, the gulf the great ocean, the great island _Atlantis_, the other islands beyond that the leeward and windward islands, the continent opposite them the land of Peru, and the true ocean