THE DISCOVERIES OF AMERICA TO THE YEAR 1525 BY ARTHUR JAMES WEISE, M.A. G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS NEW YORK: 27 & 29 WEST 23D STREET LONDON: 25 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN 1884 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1883, by ARTHUR JAMES WEISE in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington ALL RIGHTS RESERVED _Press of G. P. Putnam’s Sons New York_ THIS WORK IS DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR TO THE MEMORY OF HIS DECEASED WIFE CATHARINE V. UPDEGRAFF WEISE PREFACE. It is a fact that America in the early ages was one of the inhabited parts of the earth. The Egyptians, who were among the first of the peoples of the eastern hemisphere to use letters and to write history, furnish the earliest known account of the inhabitants of this continent. It is also a truth that some ancient geographers and philosophers, who had no personal knowledge of the existence of a primitive people in the western hemisphere, regarded the information recorded by the Egyptians as fictitious and incredible. When Columbus proposed to go to this inhabited realm beyond the western ocean almost all the learned men of Portugal and Spain opposed the undertaking as visionary, and not a few of them asserted that the navigator’s opinions were absurd, because, as they argued, no one of all the seamen who had lived since the creation of the world had discovered land beyond Hibernia. The discovery of the continent and the subsequent explorations of the Spaniards not only confuted the fallacious arguments of the learned men of the middle ages but confirmed the statements of the Egyptian records descriptive of the civilization of the Atlantic country. The tradition of the peopling of the continent by the descendants of Euenor, the good man begotten in the beginning from the ground, and of the residence of celestial beings among the inhabitants peculiarly confirms the account in the Bible of the creation of the first man from the dust of the ground and of his descendants having communications with angels. The asserted discovery of America by the Northmen rests more upon conjecture than evidence. It appears that Columbus was not the discoverer of the continent, for it was seen in 1497 not only by Giovanni Caboto but by the commander of the Spanish fleet with whom Amerigo Vespucci first sailed to the New World.