It would be manifestly impossible, in the present work, to enter in detail upon the wide field of the history of the Spanish American States. Yet, just as in order to gain an intelligent idea topographically of the region we must refer to its main geographical features and disposition, so must we cast a glance at its historical outlines. Those readers who are drawn on to fill in the detail have ample material at hand in the books recently published on the Latin American States.[4] [4] Each volume of the South American Series contains such. The beginnings of history and of geography are, of course, inextricably interwoven, and in the case of America this is markedly so. America, in a sense, was discovered by accident, and its first discoverers did not know they had brought to being a new continent. Columbus, to his dying day, believed it was India he had reached, which he had set out to reach, and would not be persuaded to the contrary. On the maps of the earlier geographers there was, in fact, no room for America. From the shores of Europe and Africa to those of Cathay--the old, mediaeval, and still the poetical name for China, the great Asiatic coast--stretched one sea, the Western Ocean, broken by some small islands and Cipango, or Japan. Scholars and dreamers, studying isolated passages in cryptic and classic writings, or arguing from general principles, in which the wish was at times father to the thought, believed that by sailing west India could be reached. These dreams of poets and the beliefs of scholars crystallized in the mind of the Genoese sailor, Columbus, a man of humble origin, and after many disappointments and disillusions, in the interviewing of kings and high personages for aid and patronage (among them the King of England, but England with characteristic lack of imagination would have none of it, and the King of Portugal, who tried to cheat him), was enabled to set sail by aid of the Queen of Spain--women having more imagination than men--in three small vessels, and made his great and memorable landfall in the New World on October 12, 1492, in the Bahamas. These islands Columbus and his officers believed to be those described by Marco Polo, as forming the eastern end of Asia; and thus arose the name of "Las Indias," the Indies, which America long retained.