PREFACE.
History does not offer an example of such disinterested efforts, towards the enlargement of human knowledge, as have been made by the British nation, since the accession of his present Majesty to the Throne. America, with all its riches, might long have remained undiscovered, if the unequalled perseverance and the glorious enthusiasm of Columbus had not providentially surmounted every difficulty, and, in spite of ignorance and envy, forced their way to Ferdinand and Isabella. That immortal navigator was protected at last, only because he opened a new and evident source of gain. But a friendship between Plutus and the Muses was too singular to be sincere; it only lasted whilst they, with no better success than the Danaids, poured heaps of gold into his treasury.
The triumph of science was reserved to later periods of time. Three voyages of discovery, from the most liberal motives, had already been performed, when a fourth was undertaken by order of an enlightened monarch, upon a more enlarged and majestic plan than ever was put in
