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Written Expressly for Rapid Reference

1492-It is generally admitted that previously to the time of Columbus, Europeans had visited America. The Scandinavians, it is claimed, had by the year 1000, discovered the continent as far down as 41. 30 n. lat., apoint near New Bedford, Mass. But these enterprises were barren of results, and do not appear to have left any impress on the character or prospects of the new continent. No permanent colonies had been founded, the route hither was lost and every existence of the new land was forgotten.

With the discovery by Columbus, in 1492, the true history of the New World begins. Christopher Columbus, a native of Genoa, having secured the patronage of the crown of Spain, sailed from the port of Palos, August 3, of that year, with a fleet of three vessels, and a crew of one hundred and twenty men, and landed on the island of San Salvador (supposed to be the present Wattling's Island) on the 12th of the following October.

Columbus had no suspicion of the existence of a new continent, but believing the earth to be round, then a new idea, he concluded that he could reach the East Indies by sailing to the west. Much of our subsequent knowledge of America has been owing to the same desire to reach the east by sailing westward; as was the aim of Davis, Baffin and Hudson at the north; of Magellan, Shouten and Lemaire at the south, and of Balboa at the Isthmus.

1493-Having returned to Spain, where he gave a glowing account of the newly discovered lands to their majesties Ferdinand and Isabella, Columbus made three more voyages to the New World. On his second voyage he discovered more of the West India islands, and on his third voyage, he discovered the continent August 1, but imagining it to be an island he named it Isla Santa. He died believing that it was the east coast of Asia he had discovered.

1499-Americus Vespucius, or Vespucci, a friend of Columbus, gave his name to the New World. He was a Florentine, and made four voyages across the Atlantic between 1499 and 1503. King Ferdinand, after his return to Spain, appointed him to draw sea-charts descriptive of the New World; and a German, Waldsee-Müller, having shortly afterward published an account of the adventures of Americus, suggested that the New World be named America. The name was accordingly adopted by geographers, but Americus had no part in imposing his name on the new continent.

1497-John Cabot, a navigator of Bristol, England, whose birth-place is a matter of dispute, fourteen months before Columbus, in one of his subsequent voyages discovered the main continent, and concluded that as the degrees of longitude diminished in length as they approached the Pole, India could be reached in a shorter time sailing northwest, instead of west. He first sighted, if a map of Cabot's preserved in Paris is correct, Cape Breton, which he named Frima Vista, and not Labrador; and this four years (1494), instead of fourteen months before the discovery of the mainland by any other European.