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Updated: May 1, 2025
Though they seem to have set out early in May of 1497, it was not until June 24 that they sighted land. What the land was like, and what they thought of it, we know from letters written in England by various persons after their return.
H. Major, in his history of Prince Henry the Navigator, assert that Vespucius' first voyage was in 1497, and consequently that he must have seen the American continent before Columbus, but we prefer to follow Humboldt, who spent so many years in studying the history of the discovery of America, in his opinion that 1499 was the right date, also M. Ed.
It was on Saturday, the 8th of July, 1497, the anchors being weighed and the sails loosed, that Vasco da Gama proceeded down the Tagus on his memorable voyage. He first steered so as to reach the Cape de Verde Islands, where he had ordered the ships to rendezvous in case of separation.
When, therefore, in 1497, Vasco da Gama sailed from Lisbon, passed around the end of Africa, reached India, and came back to Portugal in 1499 with his ship laden with the silks and spices of the East, all explorers turned southward, and for eleven years after the visit of the Cortereals no voyages were made to North America.
Two of these he sent out to his brother Don Bartholomew, who had then begun to build the city of San Domingo, the capital of Hispaniola, which is situated on the southern coast of the island at the mouth of the river Ozama. With the other six ships, Columbus set sail from San Lucar de Barrameda on the 19th May 1497.
Many of England's reigning sovereigns have visited the city, among them being Edward IV and Richard III. Henry VII came thither on 7 October, 1497, on the suppression of Perkin Warbeck's rebellion, when that rebel had attempted to capture the city. The rebels were brought before the king, bareheaded and with halters round their necks, and after they had pleaded for mercy Henry pardoned them.
He found only "lands of vanity and delusion as the miserable graves of Castilian gentlemen," and he died ignorant of the magnitude of his real achievement. Had Columbus perished in mid ocean, it is doubtful whether America would have remained long undiscovered. In 1497 John Cabot, an Italian in the service of Henry VII of England, reached the Canadian coast probably near Cape Breton Island.
Soon after receiving this commission from the king, John Cabot died; and his son Sebastian, who was also a skilful navigator, set sail in 1497, with the express view of discovering a north-west passage to the eastern spice islands.
Now to examine more closely the actual motives given by those authorities and by later, critical writers, for attributing the guilt to Cesare. In September of the year 1497, the Pope had dissolved the marriage of his daughter Lucrezia and Giovanni Sforza, and the grounds for the dissolution were that the husband was impotens et frigidus natura admitted by himself.
George on June 24, 1497, more than one year before Columbus set foot upon the main continent of America, and now, after four hundred years, despite all the chances and changes of this Western World, that banner is floating there, a witness to our existing union with our distant mother-land across the ocean.
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