People have disputed about the place where the Discoverer of America was born; they are disputing about the place where he is buried.

But as it seems now certain that he was born in Genoa, so it seems also certain that his bones are really in the tomb in the old Cathedral at Santo Domingo, that old Haytian city which he founded, and where he had so hard a time.
At least a dozen places in the Old World and the New have built monuments and statues in his honor; in the United States, alone, over sixty towns and villages bear his name, or the kindred one of Columbia.
The whole world honors him as the Discoverer of America; and yet the very name that the Western Hemisphere bears comes not from the man who discovered it, but from his friend and comrade Americus Vespucius.
Like Columbus, this Americus Vespucius was an Italian; like him, he was a daring sailor and a fearless adventurer, sailing into strange seas to see what he could find.

He saw more of the American coast than did Columbus, and not being so full of the gold-hunting and slave-getting fever as was the Admiral, he brought back from his four voyages so much information about the new-found lands across the sea, that scholars, who cared more for news than gold, became interested in what he reported.
And some of the map-makers in France, when they had to name the new lands in the West that they drew on their maps--the lands that were not the Indies, nor China, nor Japan--called them after the man who had told them so much about them--Americus Vespucius.

And so it is that to-day you live in America and not in Columbia, as so many people have thought this western world of ours should be named.
And even the titles, and riches, and honors that the king and queen of Spain promised to Columbus came very near being lost by his family, as they had been by himself.

It was only by the hardest work, and by keeping right at it all the time, that the Admiral's eldest son, Diego Columbus, almost squeezed out of King Ferdinand of Spain the things that had been promised to his father.
But Diego was as plucky, and as brave, and as persistent as his father had been; then, too, he had lived at court so long--he was one of the queen's pages, you remember that he knew just what to do and how to act so as to get what he wanted.