Meanwhile Spain had entered the field, and was meeting with cruel disappointment. A decade before Vasco da Gama's famous voyage, an Italian navigator, Christopher Columbus, had presented himself at the Spanish court with a scheme for sailing westward to the Indies. The Portuguese king, by whom Columbus formerly had been employed, already had refused to support the project, but after several vexatious rebuffs Columbus finally secured the aid of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Spanish monarchs who were at the time jubilant over their capture of Granada from the Mohammedans (January, 1492). In August, 1492, he sailed from Palos with 100 men in three small ships, the largest of which weighed only a hundred tons. After a tiresome voyage he landed (12 October, 1492) on "San Salvador," one of the Bahama Islands. In that bold voyage across the trackless Atlantic lay the greatness of Columbus. He was not attempting to prove a theory that the earth was spherical--that was accepted generally by the well informed. Nor was he in search of a new continent. The realization that he had discovered not Asia, but a new world, would have been his bitterest disappointment. He was seeking merely another route to the spices and treasures of the East; and he bore with him a royal letter of introduction to the great Khan of Cathay (China). In his quest he failed, even though he returned in 1493, in 1498, and finally in 1502 and explored successively the Caribbean Sea, the coast of Venezuela, and Central America in a vain search for the island "Cipangu" and the realms of the "Great Khan." He found only "lands of vanity and delusion as the miserable graves of Castilian gentlemen," and he died ignorant of the magnitude of his real achievement. [Sidenote: America] Had Columbus perished in mid ocean, it is doubtful whether America would have remained long undiscovered. In 1497 John Cabot, an Italian in the service of Henry VII of England, reached the Canadian coast probably near Cape Breton Island. In 1500 Cabral with a Portuguese expedition bound for India was so far driven out of his course by equatorial currents that he came upon Brazil, which he claimed for the king of Portugal. Yet America was named for neither Columbus, Cabot, nor Cabral, but for another Italian, the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci, who, returning from voyages to Brazil (1499-1500), published a letter concerning what he called "the new world." It was thought that he had discovered this new world, and so it was called after him,--America. [Sidenote: First Circumnavigation of the Earth]