A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [121]
With the discovery of Panama, Colombia, and the mouth of the Amazon, a very long coastline had begun to take shape. It remained for Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine merchant in the service of the Medicis, to define the emerging truth. In Spain on business, Vespucci had caught the exploration fever and sailed westward under the Portuguese flag. Later, in a letter to Italian friends, he wrote that on June 16, 1497, during one of his four expeditions to what he called the novo mondo, he had touched the mainland of a new continent. Although doubt was later cast on this claim, both Columbus and the Spanish government, which awarded Vespucci a lifetime appointment as piloto mayor—chief of Spain’s pilots—believed him reliable. In April 1507 Martin Waldseemüller, professor of cosmography at the University of Saint-Dié, produced the first map showing the Western Hemisphere. He called it “America,” and thirty years later Gerardus Mercator followed Waldseemüller’s precedent, though by then it was clear that the New World comprised more than one continent.
By the second decade of the new century—the 1510s—Europe’s developing image of the Americas resembled an enormous jigsaw puzzle whose pieces were rapidly falling into place. Commissioned by the English crown, John Cabot had explored the St. Lawrence River. Others were mapping the east coast of North America from the Savannah River north to what is now Charleston. On April 2, 1513, Juan Ponce de León, pursuing the medieval dream of eternal youth, landed four hundred miles to the south. Naming his discovery Florida (from Pascua Florida, Easter), he declared it to be Spanish territory. Other Spaniards claimed Argentina and explored the Gulf of Mexico, planting their flag in the Yucatán Peninsula. Toward the end of the decade, Montezuma II made the capital error of cordially welcoming Hernando Cortés, thereby sealing his fate as Mexico’s last Aztec emperor.
Although patriotic ardor burned in all these adventurers, their overarching goal had not changed. They were still looking for the mysterious East. The unexpected appearance of the New World had merely whetted appetites. Columbus had been thoroughly discredited by now, but the riddle remained: If the Americas were where the Orient was supposed to be, where was the Orient? And what, exactly, lay beyond the newly found landmass? Their logs reveal that early in the century several of them had stumbled close to the answer. In 1501 Rodrigo de Bastidas had explored Panama’s Atlantic coast. Late in the following year Columbus himself, making his final Atlantic voyage, had been blown ashore on Panama’s isthmus. It was the worst storm in his experience; his men, he wrote in his journal, “were so worn out that they longed for death to end their dreadful suffering.” Unaware that the Pacific Ocean lay only forty miles away, he and his exhausted crews celebrated Christmas and the New Year in a harbor near the eastern end of what later became the Panama Canal. Seven years later Spanish conquistadores actually founded a colony at Darién. But they, too, failed to cross the narrow strip of land.
Vasco Núñez de Balboa did it. On September 25, 1513, the thirty-eight-year-old Balboa, a member of a Spanish expedition led by Rodrigo de Bastidas, climbed his celebrated peak and beheld the vast Pacific below. Clambering down, he reached the shore of the ocean four days later, christened it the South Sea (El Mar del Sur), and claimed it “and all its shores” for his sovereign. This was both extravagant and, in a way, impious; it defied the Vatican policy