May, 1506, at Valladolid, believing, as far as we can judge, to the day of his death, that what he had discovered was what he set out to seek—a westward route to the Indies, though his proud epitaph indicates the contrary:—
| A Castilla y á Leon I | To Castille and to Leon |
| Nuevo mondo dió Colon. | A New World gave Colon.[1] |
To this day his error is enshrined in the name we give to the Windward and Antilles Islands—West Indies: in other words, the Indies reached by the westward route. If they had been the Indies at all, they would have been the most easterly of them.
Even if Columbus had discovered a new route to Farther India, he could not, as we have seen, claim the merit of having originated the idea, which, even in detail, he had taken from Toscanelli. But his claim is even a greater one. He it was who first dared to traverse unknown seas without coasting along the land, and his example was the immediate cause of all the remarkable discoveries that followed his earlier voyages. As we have seen, both Vasco da Gama and Cabral immediately after departed from the slow coasting route, and were by that means enabled to carry out to the full the ideas of Prince Henry; but whereas, by the Portuguese method of coasting, it had taken nearly a century to reach the Cape of Good Hope, within thirty years of Columbus's first venture the whole globe had been circumnavigated.
The first aim of his successors was to ascer-
- ↑ Columbus's Spanish name was Cristoval Colon.
