It was but an easy process for a euphonious name, once accepted for a large part of the new discoveries, gradually to be extended until it covered them all. The discovery of the South Sea by Balboa in 1513 rendered it certain that there was a country of unmistakably continental extent lying south of the field of Columbus’ observations, which, though it might prove to be connected with Asia by the Isthmus of Panama, was still worthy of an independent designation.[607] We have seen how the Land of the Holy Cross, Paria, and all other names gave way in recognition of the one man who had best satisfied Europe that this region had a continental extent. If it be admitted even that Vespucius was in any way privy to the bestowal of his name upon it, there was at first no purpose to enlarge the application of such name beyond this well-recognized coast. [Illustration: MERCATOR, 1541. This is the configuration of Mercator’s gores (for a globe) reduced to Mercator’s subsequently-devised projection.] That the name went beyond that coast came of one of those shaping tendencies which are without control. “It was,” as Humboldt says,[608] “accident, and not fraud and dissensions, which deprived the continent of America of the name of Columbus.” It was in 1541, and by Mercator in his printed gores for a globe, that in a cartographical record we first find the name _America_ extended to cover the entire continent; for he places the letters AME at Baccalaos, and completed the name with RICA at the La Plata.[609] Thus the injustice was made perpetual; and there seems no greater instance of the instability of truth in the world’s history. Such monstrous perversion could but incite an indignation which needed a victim,—and it found him in Vespucius. The intimation of Schöner was magnified in time by everybody, and the unfortunate date of 1497, as well as the altogether doubtful aspect of his _Quattuor navigationes_, helped on the accusation. Vespucius stood in every cyclopædia and history as the personification of baseness and arrogance;[610] and his treacherous return for the kindness which Columbus did him in February, 1505, when he gave him a letter of recommendation to his son Diego,[611] at a time when the Florentine stood in need of such assistance, was often made to point a moral. The most emphatic of these accusers, working up his case with every subsidiary help, has been the Viscount Santarem. He will not admit the possibility of Vespucius’ ignorance of the movement at St.-Dié. “We are led to the conclusion,” he says, in summing up, “that the name given to the new continent after the death of Columbus was the result of a preconceived plan against his memory, either designedly and with malice aforethought, or by the secret influence of an extensive patronage of foreign merchants residing at Seville and elsewhere, dependent on Vespucius as naval contractor.”[612]