the money of Venice, formed such a connexion
as gave the Venetians almost a monopoly of
the trade.
The great profits of the Venetians tempted
the avidity of the Portuguese. They had been
endeavouring, during the course of the fifteenth
century, to find out by sea a way to
the countries from which the Moors brought
them ivory and gold dust across the desert.
They discovered the Madeiras, the Canaries,
the Azores, the Cape de Verd islands, the
coast of Guinea, that of Loango, Congo, Angola,
and Benguela, and, finally, the Cape of
Good Hope. They had long wished to share
in the profitable traffic of the Venetians, and
this last discovery opened to them a probable
prospect of doing so. In 1497, Vasco de
Gamo sailed from the port of Lisbon with a
fleet of four ships, and, after a navigation of
eleven months, arrived upon the coast of Indostan;
and thus completed a course of discoveries
which had been pursued with great
steadiness, and with very little interruption,
for near a century together.
Some years before this, while the expectations
of Europe were in suspense about the
projects of the Portuguese, of which the success
appeared yet to be doubtful, a Genoese
pilot formed the yet more daring project of
sailing to the East Indies by the west. The
situation of those countries was at that time
very imperfectly known in Europe. The few
European travellers who had been there, had
magnified the distance, perhaps through simplicity
and ignorance; what was really very
great, appearing almost infinite to those who
could not measure it; or, perhaps, in order
to increase somewhat more the marvellous of
their own adventures in visiting regions so
immensely remote from Europe. The longer
the way was by the east, Columbus very justly
concluded, the shorter it would be by the west.
He proposed, therefore, to take that way, as
both the shortest and the surest, and he had
the good fortune to convince Isabella of Castile
of the probability of his project. He sailed
from the port of Palos in August 1492, near
five years before the expedition of Vasco de
Gamo set out from Portugal; and, after a
voyage of between two and three months, discovered
first some of the small Bahama or
Lucyan islands, and afterwards the great island
of St. Domingo.
But the countries which Columbus discovered,
either in this or in any of his subsequent
voyages, had no resemblance to those
which he had gone in quest of. Instead of
the wealth, cultivation, and populousness of
China and Indostan, he found, in St. Domingo,
and in all the other parts of the new world
which he ever visited, nothing but a country
quite covered with wood, uncultivated, and
inhabited only by some tribes of naked and
miserable savages. He was not very willing,
however, to believe that they were not the
same with some of the countries described by
Marco Polo, the first European who had visited,
or at least had left behind him any description
of China or the East Indies; and a
very slight resemblance, such as that which he
found between the name of Cibao, a mountain
in St. Domingo, and that of Cipange,
mentioned by Marco Polo, was frequently
sufficient to make him return to this favourite
prepossession, though contrary to the clearest
evidence. In his letters to Ferdinand and Isabella,
he called the countries which he had
discovered the Indies. He entertained no
doubt but that they were the extremity of those
which had been described by Marco Polo, and
that they were not very distant from the
Ganges, or from the countries which had been
conquered by Alexander. Even when at last
convinced that they were different, he still
flattered himself that those rich countries were
at no great distance; and in a subsequent
voyage, accordingly, went in quest of them
along the coast of Terra Firma, and towards
the Isthmus of Darien.
In consequence of this mistake of Columbus,
the name of the Indies has stuck to those
unfortunate countries ever since; and when
it was at last clearly discovered that the new
were altogether different from the old Indies,
the former were called the West, in contradistinction
to the latter, which were called the
East Indies.
It was of importance to Columbus, however,
that the countries which he had discovered,
whatever they were, should be represented
to the court of Spain as of very great
consequence; and, in what constitutes the real
riches of every country, the animal and vegetable
productions of the soil, there was at that
time nothing which could well justify such a
representation of them.
The cori, something between a rat and a
rabbit, and supposed by Mr Buffon to be the
same with the aperea of Brazil, was the largest
viviparous quadruped in St. Domingo. This
species seems never to have been very numerous;
and the dogs and cats of the Spaniards
are said to have long ago almost entirely extirpated
it, as well as some other tribes of a
still smaller size. These, however, together
with a pretty large lizard, called the ivana or
iguana, constituted the principal part of the
animal food which the land afforded.
The vegetable food of the inhabitants,
though, from their want of industry, not very
abundant, was not altogether so scanty. It
consisted in Indian corn, yams, potatoes, bananas,
&c., plants which were then altogether
unknown in Europe, and which have never
since been very much esteemed in it, or supposed
to yield a sustenance equal to what is
drawn from the common sorts of grain and
pulse, which have been cultivated in this part
of the world time out of mind.
The cotton plant, indeed, afforded the material