On the fourth voyage, which began
in May 1502 and ended in November
1504, Columbus concentrated on trying
to find a westward passage to the main-
land of Asia, which he still felt sure must
lie near Hispaniola and the other islands
that he had explored. Cruising along the
coast of Central America in search of a
passage to the Pacific Ocean, he landed in
what are now the nations of Honduras,
Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, and
Colombia, and even briefly established a
settlement in Panama. He died in Spain
in 1506, having become a wealthy man
from his expeditions but nonetheless
thinking himself slighted by the crown
and cheated out of part of his financial
rights. He did acknowledge that what he
had found did not correspond to any pre-
viously known lands: it was, he said, anSPAIN IN THE AMERICAS 25Following Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, other explorers followed
almost immediately in his wake, particularly from Spain and Portugal. Voyages from both
of those nations typically began with a stop in the islands off Africa’s west coast to take
on supplies. By 1497, England had joined Portugal and Spain in chartering an American
expedition when the country sent Italian mariner John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto) on an
exploratory mission across the North Atlantic, where he traced the coasts of present-day
Labrador, Newfoundland, and New England.European Voyages of Discovery, 1492–1500
AMERIGOVESPUCCI
(Library of Congress)Early in the 16th century, Spain and
other European powers gradually
ceased to think of the lands across
the Atlantic as an arm of Asia and
realized they were a “new world.”
Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci
(1454–1512), who explored parts of
South America on Spanish ex-
peditions, called it just that in his
1504 pamphlet Mundus Novus, or
“New World.” Vespucci was a
shameless self-promoter who is
widely believed to have lied in
claiming to have reached the
American mainland before
Columbus. Yet his use of the term
“New World” stuck, and his claim
of discovery persuaded German
cartographer Martin Waldseemüller
to label the New World “America”
on a map in 1507. That name stuck
too, pushing out other proposed
terms like “Columbiana.”
As for Columbus’s dream of
reaching Asia by sailing west from
Europe, that dream was first real-
ized by another expedition. In
1519–1522, Portuguese navigator
Ferdinand Magellan (ca. 1480–1521)
led a Spanish expedition that suc-
cessfully sailed west from Spain,
through the South American strait
now called the Strait of Magellan,
past Indonesia and the southern tip
of Africa, and finally back to Spain.
The expedition was the first to
circumnavigate the globe, as
Columbus had hoped but failed to
do. Technically, Magellan himself
also failed, for he was killed in a
fight with native peoples in the
Philippines in 1521, leaving the com-
pletion of the voyage to others.