America -- Discovery and exploration -- Spanish; New Mexico -- History -- To 1848; Peru -- History -- Conquest, 1522-1548
Captains Amadas and Barlow, in 1584, saw our coast at Cape Hatteras and
the island of Roanoke, and went away without any permanent result. The
following year Sir Richard Grenville discovered Cape Fear, and there was
an end of it. Then came Sir Walter Raleigh's famous but petty
expeditions to Virginia, the Orinoco, and New Guinea, and the less
important voyages of John Davis (in 1585-87) to the Northwest. Nor must
we forget brave Martin Frobisher's fruitless voyages to Greenland in
1576-81. This was the end of England in America until the seventeenth
century. In 1602 Captain Gosnold coasted nearly our whole Atlantic
seaboard, particularly about Cape Cod; and five years later yet was the
beginning of English occupancy in the New World. The first English
settlement which made a serious mark on history--as Jamestown did
not--was that of the Pilgrim Fathers in 1602; and they came not for the
sake of opening a new world, but to escape the intolerance of the old.
In fact, as Mr. Winsor has pointed out, the Saxon never took any
particular interest in America until it began to be understood as a
_commercial_ opportunity.
[Illustration: ONE OF THE MOQUI TOWNS.
_See page 87._]
But when we turn to Spain, what a record is that of the hundred years
after Columbus and before Plymouth Rock! In 1499 Vincente Yanez de
Pinzon, a companion of Columbus, discovered the coast of Brazil, and
claimed the new country for Spain, but made no settlement. His
discoveries were at the mouths of the Amazon and the Orinoco; and he was
the first European to see the greatest river in the world. In the
following year Pedro Alvarez Cabral, a Portuguese, was driven to the
coast of Brazil by a storm, "took possession" for Portugal, and founded
a colony there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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