a 150-1. b 1507. natural that they should be tender of the reputation of Columbus, although he was not a Spaniard, for his discoveries reflected great luster upon the Spanish crown. For this reason they have ever disputed the claims of Vespucci, and denounced him as a liar and a charlatan. These denunciations, however, prove nothing, and the fame of Columbus loses none of its brightness by admitting the claims of the Florentine; claims, it must be acknowledged, that have sound logic and fair inferences as a basis. Amerigo seems to have been the first who published an account of the discoveries in the New World, and for this priority the narrow and selfish policy of the Spanish government is responsible. His first announcement was made in a letter to Lorenzo de Medici,a and soon afterward he published a volume giving an account of his four voyages, which he dedicated to the Duke of Lorraine.b In these he claims the merit of discovering the continent, having landed upon the coast of Paria,c in Colombia, South America, and traversed the shores, according to his own account, as far northward as the Gulf of Mexico. statement is true, he visited the continent nearly a year previous to the landing of Columbus at the mouth of the Oronoco, in the same district of Paria. From the circumstance of Amerigo making the first publication on the subject, and claiming to be the discoverer of the continent, the New World was called AMERICA, and the Florentine bears the honor of the name; but to neither Columbus nor Vespucci does the honor of first discoverer of America properly belong, but to John Cabot, for he and his crew first saw its soil and inhabitants. He alone, of all those voyagers in the fifteenth century, beheld North America. Whether to Columbus, Vespucci, or Cabot, truth should award the palm, Italy bears the imperishable and undisputed honor of giving birth to all three. c 1497. If this The discoveries of the Cabots turned attention to the regions north of the West India Islands. Emanuel of Portugal dispatched an expedition, under the command of Gaspar Cortereal, in 1501, to follow in the track of the Cabots. Cortereal sailed between two and three hundred leagues along the North American coast, but his voyage was fruitless of good results, either to science or humanity. He made few discoveries of land, carried on no traffic, planted no settlements, but kidnapped and carried to Portugal several friendly na tives, to be sold as slaves! Perfidy and cruelty marked the first intercourse of the whites with the tribes of our continent; is it to be wondered that the bitter fruits of suspicion and hostility should have flourished among them? Ponce de Leon, one of the companions of Columbus, and first governor of Porto Rico, a small island sixty miles east of Haiti, sailed on a voyage of discovery among the Ba- 1512. hamas, in search of the fabled Fountain of Youth. It was generally believed in Porto Rico, and the story had great credence in Old Spain, that the waters of a clear spring, bubbling up in the midst of a vast forest, upon an island among the Bahamas, possessed the singular property of restoring age and ugliness to youth and beauty, and perpetuating the lives of those who should bathe in its stream. De Leon was an old man, and, impressed with the truth of this legend, he sought that wonderful fountain. After cruising for a while among the Bahamas, he landed upon the peninsula of Florida, in the harbor of St. Augustine. It was on Palm Sunday when he debarked. That day is called by the Spaniards Pasqua de Flores, and, partly from that circumstance, and partly on account of the great profusion of flowers which, at that early season of the year, were blooming on every side, brother and two sisters, Amerigo, Eliza, and Teresa Vespucci, made a similar petition to Congress. They mention the fact that Elena, "possessing a disposition somewhat indocile and unmanageable, absented herself from her father's house, and proceeded to London. Hence she crossed the ocean, and landed upon the shores of Brazil, at Rio Janeiro. From that city she proceeded to Washington, the capital of the United States." Elena Vespucci was treated with respect. Possessed of youth and beauty, she attracted much attention at the metropolis, but the prayer in the petition of both herself and family was denied. She was living at Ogdensburgh, New York, when I visited that place in 1848. Ponce de Leon gave the country (which he supposed to be a large island like Cuba) the name of FLORIDA. He took formal possession in the name of the Spanish monarch; but, feeling unauthorized to proceed to making conquests without a royal commission, he sailed for Spain to obtain one, after failing in his search after the Fountain of Youth. 1520. He had plunged into every stream, however turbid, with the vain expectation of rising from it young and blooming; but, according to Oviedo, instead of returning to vigorous youth, he arrived at a second childhood within a few years. He was afterward appointed Governer of Florida, and was killed while on an expedition against the natives. While Ponce de Leon was in Europe, where he remained several years, some wealthy gentlemen of Haiti fitted out two vessels to explore the Bahamas. The squadron was commanded by Lucas Vasquez d'Aillon or Allyon, a Spanish navigator. Their vessels were driven northward by a hurricane, and came near being stranded upon the low coasts. They finally made land in St. Helen's Sound, near the mouth of the Combahee River, in South Carolina, about half way between Charleston and Savannah. D'Aillon called the river Jordan, and the country Chicora. He carried off several natives, whom he enticed on board his ships, with the intention of selling them as slaves in Haiti. A storm destroyed one of the vessels, and the captured Indians in the other voluntarily starved themselves to death, so the avaricious whites were disappointed in their expectations of gain. D'Aillon afterward returned, with three ships, to conquer the whole of Chicora. The natives feigned friendship, decoyed the whites on shore, and then, with poisoned arrows, massacred nearly the whole of them, in revenge for their former perfidy. But few returned with D'Aillon to Haiti. This was the first discovery of the Carolina coast. April 22, 1528. While these events were in progress, Cortez, at the head of an expedition fitted out by Velasquez, the governor of Cuba, was destroying the empire of Montezuma, in Mexico, then recently discovered. The success of Cortez excited the jealousy of Velasquez, for he feared a renunciation of his authority by that bold leader. He sent Pamphilo de Narvaez, with a strong force, to arrest and supersede Cortez; but he was defeated, and most of his troops joined his enemy. Narvaez afterward obtained from the Spanish court a commission as adelantado or Governor of Florida, a territory quite indefinite in extent, reaching from the southern capes of the peninsula to the Panuco River in Mexico. With a force of three hundred men, eighty of whom were well mounted, Narvaez landed in Florida, where he raised the royal standard, and took possession of the country for the crown of Spain. With the hope of finding some wealthy region like Mexico and Peru, he penetrated the vast swamps and everglades in the interior of the flat country along the northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico. His men suffered terribly from the almost daily attacks of the natives and the nightly assaults of the deadly malaria of the fens. They reached the fertile regions of the Appalachians; but the capital of the tribe, instead of being a gorgeous city like Mexico or Cuzco, was a mean village of two hundred huts and wigwams. Disappointed, and one third of his number dead, Narvaez turned southward, reached the Gulf near the present site of St. Mark's, on the Appalachie Bay, constructed five frail barks, and launched upon the waters. Nearly all his men, with himself, perished during a storm. Four of the crew, who were saved, wandered for years through the wild regions of Louisiana and Texas, and finally reached a Spanish settlement in Northern Mexico. These men gave the first intelligence of the fate of the June, 1528. 1536. expedition. 1538. Two years after the return of these members of the expedition of Narvaez, Fernando de Soto planned an expedition to explore the interior of Florida, as all North America was then called, in search of a populous and wealthy region supposed to exist there. By permission of the Spanish monarch, he undertook the exploration and conquest of Florida at his own risk and expense. He was commissioned governor-general of that country and of Cuba for life. Leaving his wife to govern Cuba during his absence, he sailed in FERNANDO DE SOTO. 1539. June, 1539, and landed at Tampa Bay with in May they broke up their encampment, Early 1540. and, marching northeasterly, reached the head-waters of the Savannah River. After a brief tarry there, they turned their faces westward, and, on the twenty-eighth of October, came upon a fortified town, near the junction of the Alabama and Tombeck bee Rivers. A severe battle of nine hours' duration ensued. Several thousands of the half-naked Indians were slain, and their village reduced to ashes. Several of the mailed Spaniards were killed, and the victory availed De Soto nothing. All his baggage was consumed, and much provision was destroyed. Early in the The wild tribes, for many leagues around, were aroused by this event. De Soto went into winter quarters in a deserted Indian village on the Yazoo. There he was attacked by the swarming natives, bent on revenge. The town was burned, all the clothing of the Spaniards, together with many horses and nearly all the swine which they brought from Cuba, were destroyed or carried away, and several of the whites were killed. spring the shorn invaders pushed westward, and discovered the Mississippi. They crossed it at the Chickasaw Bluffs, and traversed the country on its western shore up to the thirtyseventh degree, nearly opposite the mouth of the Ohio. They penetrated the wilderness almost three hundred miles west of the Mississippi during the summer, and wintered upon the Washita, in Arkansas. They passed down the Red River to the Mississippi in the spring, where De Soto sickened and died. a He had appointed a successor, who now attempted to lead the remnant of the expedition to Spanish settlements in Mexico. For several months they wandered in the wilderness, but returned in December, b to winter upon the Mississippi, a short distance above the mouth of the Red River. There they constructed seven large boats, and in July following embarked in them. reaching the Gulf of Mexico, they crawled cautiously along its sinuous coast, until the twentieth of September, when, half naked and almost famished, they reached a white settlement near the mouth of the Panuco River, about thirty miles north of Tampico. a May 31, 1542. b 1513. On While the Spaniards were making these useless discoveries of the southern regions of our Republic along the Gulf of Mexico, the French fitted out several expeditions to explore the coast between the peninsula of Florida and the banks of Newfoundland. John Verrazzani, a celebrated Florentine navigator, proceeded to America with a squadron of four ships, under the auspices of Francis the First of France, in 1523. Three of his vessels were so damaged by a storm that they were sent back; in the fourth, he proceeded on his voyage. were unsuccessful. VERRAZZANI. Weathering a terrible tempest, he reached our coast near the mouth of Cape Fear River, in North Carolina. He explored the whole coast from the Carolinas to Nova Scotia, and taking formal possession of the country in the name of the French king, he called it NEW FRANCE, the title held by Canada while it remained in possession of the French. Verrazzani was followed, the next year, by Cartier (also in the service of the French king), who discovered the Gulf and River St. Lawrence; and soon afterward by the Lord of Roberval, a wealthy nobleman, who proposed to plant a colony in the New World. Roberval failed in his undertaking, and returned to France. He sailed on another voyage, and was never heard of afterward. Other efforts at settlement along the southern coasts were made by the French, but A Protestant French colony, planted in Florida, was destroyed by the Spaniards in 1564, and over the dead bodies of the Huguenots the murderers placed the inscription, We do this not as unto Frenchmen, but as unto Heretics." In 1567, De Gourgues, a Gascon soldier, fitted out an expedition at his own expense, to avenge this outHe surprised the Spanish forts erected near St. Augustine, and hung the soldiers of the garrison upon the trees. Over them he placed the inscription, "I do this not as unto Spaniards or mariners, but as unto traitors, robbers, and murderers." Thus whites were exterminated by whites, and Indians again possessed the land. rage. The history of the early discoveries in North America forms a wonderful chapter in the great chronicle of human progress and achievements, and in its details there are narratives of adventure, prowess, love, and all the elements of romance, more startling and attractive than the most brilliant conceptions of the imagination ever evolved. The story of the progress of settlements which followed is equally marvelous and attractive. These tempt the pen on every side, but as they are connected only incidentally with my subject, I pass them by with brevity of notice. In the preceding pages I have taken a very brief survey of events in the progress of discovery which opened the way to settlements in the New World; a brief survey of the progress of settlements will be found interwoven with the records upon the pages which follow. They are all united by the often invisible threads of God's providence; and each apparently insignificant event in the wondrous history of our continent is a link as important in the great chain of human deeds, directed by divine intelligence, as those which arrest the attention and command the admiration of the world. Never was this truth oftener and more strikingly illustrated than in our history of the war for independence; and the student of that history, desirous of understanding its true philosophy, should make himself familiar with the antecedents which have a visible relation thereto. 2 See page 178, vol. i. PICTORIAL FIELD-BOOK OF THE REVOLUTION. CHAPTER I. "Our young wild land, the free, the proud! For Nature teaches freedom here: Life with its myriad hopes, pursuits, That o'er its mighty frame had crept, STREET. HE love of country, springing up from the rich soil of the domestic affections, is a feeling coexistent and coextensive with social union itself. Although a dreary climate, barren lands, and unrighteous laws, wickedly administered, may repress the luxuriant growth of this sentiment, it will still maintain firm root in the heart, and bear with patience the 'most cruel wrongs. Man loves the soil that gave him birth as the child loves the mother, and from the same inherent impulses. When exiled from his father-land, he yearns for it as a child yearns for home; and though he may, by legal oath, disclaim allegiance to his own and swear fealty to another government, the invisible links of patriotism which bind him to his country can not be severed; his lips and hand bear false witness against his truthful heart. Stronger far is this sentiment in the bosom of him whose country is a pleasant land, where nature in smiling beauty and rich beneficence woos him on every side; where education quickens into refining activity the intellect of society; and where just laws, righteously administered, impress all possession, whether of property or of character, with the broad seal of security. An honest, justified pride elevates the spirit of the citizen of a land so favored; makes him a vigilant guardian of its rights and honor, and inspires him with a profound reverence for the men and deeds consecrated by the opinions of the just as the basis upon which its glory rests. C |