(Columbus and his successors), the origin of the Indians
presented no difficulty. To them America was supposed to
be simply an outlying part of Eastern Asia, which had
been known by repute and by tradition for centuries past.
Finding, therefore, the tropical islands of the Caribbean
sea with a climate and plants and animals such as they
imagined those of Asia and the Indian ocean to be, and
inhabited by men of dusky colour and strange speech, they
naturally thought the place to be part of Asia, or the
Indies. The name 'Indians,' given to the aborigines of
North America, records for us this historical
misunderstanding.

But a new view became necessary after Balboa had crossed
the isthmus of Panama and looked out upon the endless
waters of the Pacific, and after Magellan and his Spanish
comrades had sailed round the foot of the continent, and
then pressed on across the Pacific to the real Indies.
It was now clear that America was a different region from
Asia. Even then the old error died hard. Long after the
Europeans realized that, at the south, America and Asia
were separated by a great sea, they imagined that these
continents were joined together at the north. The European
ideas of distance and of the form of the globe were still
confused and inexact. A party of early explorers in
Virginia carried a letter of introduction with them from
the King of England to the Khan of Tartary: they expected
to find him at the head waters of the Chickahominy.
Jacques Cartier, nearly half a century after Columbus,
was expecting that the Gulf of St Lawrence would open