Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 June 1892 — A Common Error. [ARTICLE]

A Common Error.

Why is it that well-informed people so persistently forget the name of the man who first discovered the Pacific Ocean? In the songs of poets and the speech of emperors poor Vasco Nunez de Balboa is forgotten and his achievement ascribed to almost anybody else,' Keats, “on looking into a volume of Chapman’s Homer.” thought of the oceans and the stars, and sang: Then felt 1 like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken. Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes He gazed at the PaclUc; all his men Gazed at each other with a wild surmise, Silent upon a peak in Darien. Now comes the German Emperor, and credits Sir Francis Drake with having first seen the “great water.” For the benefit of emperors, poets, “and sich” it may be stated that the first European to see the Pacific Ocean from the American continent was Vasco Nunez de Balboa, w.ho beheld it from the eminence now known as Mount Culebra, about half way across the Isthmus of Panama. Neither Cortez nor Sir Francis Drake had any share in his achievement.—New York Tribune.