defining the new continent. Perhaps you have seen a photographic
negative slowly take shape in the acid bath--the sharp out-lines first,
then, bit by bit, the detail. Just so did America grow beneath the gaze
of Europe, though two centuries and more were to elapse before it stood
out upon the map clean-cut and definite from border to border.

First to follow Columbus, and the first white men since the vikings to
set foot on the North American continent, which Columbus himself had
never seen, were John and Sebastian Cabot, Italians like their
predecessor, but in the service of the King of England and with an
English ship and an English crew prophetic of the race which was, in
time, to wrest the supremacy of the continent from the other nations of
Europe. They explored the coast from Newfoundland as far south, perhaps,
as Chesapeake Bay, and upon their discoveries rested the English claim
to North America, though they themselves are little more than faint and
ill-defined shadows upon the page of history, so little do we know of
them.

And just as the New World was eventually to be dominated by a nation
other than that which first took possession of it, so was it to be named
after a man other than its discoverer: an inconsiderable adventurer
named Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine, who accompanied three or four
Spanish expeditions as astronomer or pilot, but who had no part in any
real discovery in the New World. He wrote a number of letters describing
the voyages which he claimed to have made, and one of these was printed
in a pamphlet which had a wide circulation, so that Vespucci's name came
to be connected in the public mind with the new land in the west much
more prominently than that of any other man. In 1502, in a little book
dealing with the new discoveries, the suggestion was made that there was
nothing "rightly to hinder us from calling it [the New World] Amerige or