United States or Nigeria ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


"Columbus in his fourth voyage found in the Jardinillos, great boats filled with Mexican Indians, and laden with the rich productions and merchandise of Yucatan." Misled by his ardent imagination, he thought he had heard from those navigators, "that they came from a country where the men were mounted on horses,* and wore crowns of gold on their heads."

For example, what could seem wiser, from a mere material point of view, more innocent, from a theological one, to an ancient people, than that they should learn the exact succession of the seasons, as warnings for their husbandmen; or the position of the stars, as guides to their rude navigators? But what has grown out of this search for natural knowledge of so merely useful a character?

In the application of astronomy to geography, he followed Hipparchus principally, and he seems from his residence at Alexandria to have derived much information through the merchants and navigators of that city, as well as from its magnificent and valuable library. There is only a short notice of the division of countries, and it is very seldom that any historical notice is added.

Not a common highway of the world's commerce, but a private path for the gratification of one human being's vanity, had thus been laid out by the bold navigators of the sixteenth century. It was for the Dutch rebels to try conclusions upon this point, as they had done upon so many others, with the master of the land and sea.

After many centuries the "sphere" idea was resurrected and talked about by a few landsmen, and believed in by many practical seamen; and it is quite possible that the young Cristoforo had learned of the theory of a sphere-world from Genoese navigators even before he went to sea.

Somewhat like rats, there seems to be a mysterious distribution of swine all over the face of the earth; and much astonishment was created in the minds of the discoverers of the South Sea Islands, by finding them in those far-off specks of the earth. Perhaps there had been earlier navigators there than ourselves.

The Spanish Netherlands were almost entirely shut off from the sea, the rivers Scheldt and Meuse being hardly navigable for them on account of the control of those waters by Holland. The Dutch were attracting to their dominions all artisans, navigators, and traders. Despising all other nations and giving them the law, they had ruined the obedient provinces.

Elias, following and surrounding the indentations of the coast and including the islands to the westward, its description of the landward margin of the strip was indefinite, resting on the supposed existence of a continuous ridge or range of mountains skirting the coast, as figured in the charts of the early navigators.

Although the climate of Bermuda is very healthy, very salubrious, the isles are nevertheless frightfully beaten by the heavy winter tempests of the Atlantic, and their approach by navigators presents certain difficulties. What the archipelago especially lacks are rivers and rios.

From the galliot, our navigators got a small quantity of pitch, tar, cordage, and twine, and a hundred and forty skins of flour, containing 13,782 lbs. English. The Hospodin Ivaskin from Verchnei had been desired by Mayor Behm to attend the English officers on their return to the harbour, in order to be their interpreter. He now came.