During the first quarter of a century after the landing of Columbus on San Salvador, three thousand leagues of mainland coast were examined, chiefly in the hope of finding a passage through to the India of Marco Polo. The Cabots from England and the Cortereals from Portugal made voyages to Newfoundland and down the east coast of North America; Amerigo Vespucci sailed hither and thither in the service of Spain, and wrote letters confounding knowledge; Vasco da Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope; Columbus, Ojeda, Niño, Guerra, Bastidas, and Pinzon and Solis coasted the Tierra Firme of Central and South America; Ocampo skirted Cuba and found it an island; Cabral accidentally discovered Brazil; Juan Ponce de Leon hunted for the Fountain of Youth in Florida; Vasco Nuñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus and floated his ships on the South Sea. Prior to 1517 almost every province of the eastern continental seaboard, from Labrador to Patagonia, had been uncovered, save those of the Mexican Gulf, which casketed wonders greater than them all. This little niche alone remained wrapped in aboriginal obscurity, although less than forty leagues of strait separated the proximate points of Cuba and Yucatan. Meanwhile, in the government of these Western Indies, Columbus, first admiral of the Ocean Sea, had been succeeded by Bobadilla, Ovando, and the son and heir of the discoverer, Diego Colon, each managing, wherein it was possible, worse than his predecessor; so that it was found necessary to establish at Santo Domingo, the capital city of the Indies, a sovereign tribunal, to which appeals might be made from any viceroy, governor, or other representative of royalty, and which should eventually, as a royal audiencia, exercise for a time executive as well as judicial supremacy. But before clothing this tribunal with full administrative powers, Cardinal Jimenez, then dominant in New World affairs, had determined to try upon the turbulent colonists the effect of ecclesiastical influence in secular matters, and had sent over three friars of the order of St Jerome, Luis de Figueroa, Alonso de Santo Domingo, and Bernardo de Manzanedo, to whose direction governors and all others were made subject. Just before the period in our history at which this volume opens, the Jeronimite Fathers, as the three friars were called, had practically superseded Diego Colon at Española, and were supervising Pedrarias Dávila of Castilla del Oro, Francisco de Garay governor of Jamaica, and Diego Velazquez governor of Cuba. It will be remembered that Diego Colon had sent Juan de Esquivel in 1509 to Jamaica, where he was succeeded by Francisco de Garay; and Diego Velazquez had been sent in 1511 to Cuba to subdue and govern that isle, subject to the young admiral’s dictation; and beside these, a small establishment at Puerto Rico, and Pedrarias on the Isthmus, there was no European ruler in the regions, islands or firm land, between the two main continents of America.