America, i.e., the land of Americus," and America it was
thenceforward--one of the great injustices of history. Since it had to
be so, let us be thankful that it was Vespucci's first name which was
selected, and not his last one.

Meanwhile, the Spaniards had pushed their way across the Caribbean and
explored the shores of the gulf, finding at last in Mexico a land of
gold. World-worn, disease-racked Ponce de Leon, conqueror and governor
of Porto Rico, struggled through the everglades of Florida, seeking the
fountain of eternal youth, and getting his death-wound there instead.
Ferdinand Magellan, man of iron if there ever was one, seeking a western
passage to the Moluccas, skirted the coast of South America, wintered
amid the snows of Patagonia, worked his way through the strait which
bears his name, and held on westward across the Pacific, making the
first circumnavigation of the globe, a feat so startling in audacity
that there is none in our day to compare with it, except, perhaps, a
journey to another planet. Magellan himself never again saw Europe,
meeting his death in a fight with the natives of the Philippines, but
one of his ships, with eighteen men, struggled south along the coast of
Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and so home.

Half a century was to elapse before the feat was repeated--this time by
that slave-trader, pirate, and doughty scourge of the Spaniard, Sir
Francis Drake, who, following in Magellan's wake, and pausing only long
enough to harry the Spanish settlements in Chili and Peru and capture a
Spanish treasureship, held northward along the coast as far as southern
Oregon, and then turned westward across the Pacific, around the Cape of
Good Hope, and home again, where Elizabeth, in spite of Spanish
protests, was waiting to reward him with a touch of sword to shoulder.
The Muse of History smiles ironically when she records that Drake's