American Scenes, Tudor to Georgian, in the English Literary Mirror

it is a singular piece of good fortune that America makes its entry by name into the earliest phase of Tudor drama. Columbus in search, as he thought, of the fabled empire of Cathay landed in the Bahamas in October, 1492. In June, 1497, John Cabot, sailing from Bristol with letters patent from Henry VII, discovered the coast of Labrador. According to his own untrustworthy account, the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci had reached the mainland shortly before Cabot. Two of his later voyages in 1499 and 1501 are better authenticated and he succeeded in having the western continent named after him. The great Lorraine cartographer Martin Waldseemuller published in 1507 the first edition of his Cosmographiea Introduction with an accompanying map and globe. He there stated that the newly found ‘quarta orbis pars’ had the right to be called America because Americus had first discovered it, and he so marked it on his map and globe. In the earlier part of 1517 the first entirely English band of Venturers’ set out on a voyage of discovery to the western lands, but a mutinous outbreak brought the enterprise to an ignominious close. Among the venturers was the printer and playwright, John Rastell, who, as Dr. A. W. Reed has shown, referred to this disastrous happening in his interlude The Nature of the Four Elements (1519). In the course of this didactic piece Experience gives Studious Desire a geographical lecture in which, as has recently been proved, Rastell follows Waldseemuller closely. 1 Thus Experience declares: These new lands found lately Been called America by cause only Americus did first them find.