The Americas, or a New and Precise Description of the Fourth Part of the World, Antwerp, 1562, Diego Gutiérrez, cartographer, and Hieronymus Cock, engraver, courtesy of the Library of Congress. The late fifteenth-century landfall by Christopher Columbus on the island of Guanahani, in the Bahamas, forced open the gates to a whole new world for the Spanish and other European explorers. America, as it came to be called, became the destination for numerous expeditions and adventu