WAS COLUMBUS IN THE NORTH?
[Sidenote: Columbus supposed to have sailed beyond Iceland, 1477.]
There is, in the minds of some inquirers into the early discovery of
America, no more pivotal incident attaching to the career of Columbus
than an alleged voyage made to the vicinity of what is supposed to have
been Iceland, in the assigned year of 1477. The incident is surrounded
with the confusion that belongs to everything dependent on Columbus's
own statements, or on what is put forth as such.
Our chief knowledge of his voyage is in the doubtful Italian rendering
of the _Historie_ of 1571, where, citing a memoir by Columbus himself on
the five habitable zones, the translator or adapter of that book makes
the Admiral say that "in February, 1477, he sailed a hundred leagues
beyond the island Tile, which lies under the seventy-third parallel, and
not under the sixty-third, as some say." The only evidence that he saw
Tile, in sailing beyond it, is in what he further says, that he was able
to ascertain that the tide rose and fell twenty-six fathoms, which
observation necessitates the seeing of some land, whether Tile or not.
[Sidenote: Inconsistencies in the statement.]
There is no land at all in the northern Atlantic under 73°. Iceland
stretches from 64° to 67°; Jan Mayen is too small for Columbus's further
description of the island, and is at 71°, and Spitzbergen is at 76°.
What Columbus says of the English of Bristol trading at this island
points to Iceland; and it is easy, if one will, to imagine a misprint of
the figures, an error of calculation, a carelessness of statement, or
even the disappearance, through some cataclysm, of the island, as has
been suggested.
[Illustration: MAP OF OLAUS MAGNUS, 1539.
[From Dr. Brenner's Essay.]]
Humboldt in his _Cosmos_ quotes Columbus as saying of this voyage near
Thule that "the sea was not at that time covered with ice," and he
credits that statement to the same _Tratado de las Cinco Zonas
Habitables_ of Columbus, and urges in proof that Finn Magnusen had found
in ancient historical sources that in February, 1477, ice had not set in
on the southern coast of that island.
[Sidenote: Thyle.]
Speaking of "Tile," the same narrative adds that "it is west of the
western verge of Ptolemy [that is, Ptolemy's world map], and larger than
England." This expression of its size could point only to Iceland, of
all islands in the northern seas.
There are elements in the story, however, not easily reconcilable with
what might be expected of an experienced mariner; and if the story is
true in its main purpose, there is little more in the details than the
careless inexactness, which characterizes a good many of the
well-authenticated asseverations of Columbus.
[Sidenote: The Zeni's Frisland.]
Again the narrative says, "It is true that Ptolemy's Thule is where that
geographer placed it, but that it is now called Frislande." Does this
mean that the Zeni story had been a matter of common talk forty years
after the voyage to their Frisland had been made, and eighty-four years
before a later scion of the family published the remarkable narrative in
Venice, in 1558? It is possible that the maker of the _Historie_ of
1571, in the way in which it was given to the world, had interpolated
this reference to the Frisland of the Zeni to help sustain the credit of
his own or the other book.
A voyage undertaken by Columbus to such high latitudes is rendered in
all respects doubtful, to say the least, from the fact that in 1492
Columbus detailed for the eyes of his sovereigns the unusual advantages
of the harbors of the new islands which he had discovered, and added
that he was entitled to express such an opinion, because his exploration
had extended from Guinea on the south to England on the north. It was an
occasion when he desired to make his acquaintance seem as wide as the
facts would warrant, and yet he does not profess to have been farther
north than England. A hundred leagues, moreover, beyond Iceland might
well have carried him to the upper Greenland coast, but he makes no
mention of other land being seen in those high latitudes.
[Sidenote: Thyle and Iceland.]
Thyle and Iceland are made different islands in the Ptolemy of 1486,
which, if it does not prove that Iceland was not then the same as Thyle
in the mind of geographers, shows that geographical confusion still
prevailed at the north. It may be further remarked that Muñoz and others
have found no time in Columbus's career to which this voyage to the
north could so easily pertain as to a period anterior to his going to
Portugal, and consequently some years before the 1477 of the _Historie_.
[Sidenote: The English in Iceland.]
[Sidenote: Kolno.]
[Sidenote: The Zeni.]
A voyage to Iceland was certainly no new thing. The English traded
there, and a large commerce was maintained with it by Bristol, and had
been for many years. A story grew up at a later day, and found
expression in Gomara and Wytfliet, that in 1476, the year before this
alleged voyage of Columbus, a Danish expedition, under the command of
the Pole Kolno, or Skolno, had found in these northern regions an
entrance to the straits of Anian, which figure so constantly in later
maps, and which opened a passage to the Indies; but there seems to be no
reason to believe that it had any definite foundation, and it could
hardly have been known to Columbus. It is also easy to conjecture that
Columbus had been impelled to join some English trading vessel from
Bristol, through mere nautical curiosity, and even been urged by reports
which may have reached him of the northern explorations of the Zeni,
long before the accounts were printed. But if he knew anything, he
either treasured it up as a proof of his theories, not yet to be
divulged,--why is not clear,--or, what is vastly more probable, it never
occurred to him to associate any of these dim regions with the coasts of
Marco Polo's Cathay.
[Sidenote: Madoc.]
There was no lack of stories, even at this time, of venturesome voyages
west along the latitude of England and to the northwest, and of these
tales Columbus may possibly have heard. Such was the story which had
been obscurely recorded, that Madoc, a Welsh chieftain, in the later
years of the twelfth century had carried a colony westerly. Nor can it
be positively asserted that the Estotiland and Drogeo of the Zeni
narrative, then lying in the cabinet of an Italian family unknown, had
ever come to his knowledge.
There are stories in the _Historie_ of reports which had reached him,
that mariners sailing for Ireland had been driven west, and had sighted
land which had been supposed to be Tartary, which at a later day was
thought to be the Baccalaos of the Cortereals.
[Sidenote: Bresil, or Brazil, Island.]
The island of Bresil had been floating about the Atlantic, usually in
the latitude of Ireland, since the days when the maker of the Catalan
planisphere, in 1375, placed it in that sea, and current stories of its
existence resulted, at a later day (1480), in the sending from Bristol
of an expedition of search, as has already been said.
[Sidenote: Did Columbus land on Thule?]
Finn Magnusen among the Scandinavian writers, and De Costa and others
among Americans, have thought it probable that Columbus landed at
Hualfiord, in Iceland. Columbus, however, does not give sufficient
ground for any such inference. He says he went beyond Thule, not to it,
whatever Thule was, and we only know by his observations on the tides,
that he approached dry land.
[Sidenote: Bishop Magnus in Iceland.]
Laing, in his introduction to the _Heimskringla_, says confidently that
Columbus "came to Iceland from Bristol, in 1477, on purpose to gain
nautical information,"--an inference merely,--"and must have heard of
the written accounts of the Norse discoveries recorded in" the _Codex
Flatoyensis_. Laing says again that as Bishop Magnus is known to have
been in Iceland in the spring of 1477, "it is presumed Columbus must
have met and conversed with him"!
A great deal turns on this purely imaginary conversation, and the
possibilities of its scope.
[Sidenote: The Norse in Iceland.]
[Sidenote: Eric the Red.]
[Sidenote: Greenland.]
The listening Columbus might, indeed, have heard of Irish monks and
their followers, who had been found in Iceland by the first Norse
visitors, six hundred years before, if perchance the traditions of them
had been preserved, and these may even have included the somewhat vague
stories of visits to a country somewhere, which they called Ireland the
Great. Possibly, too, there were stories told at the firesides of the
adventures of a sea-rover, Gunnbiorn by name, who had been driven
westerly from Iceland and had seen a strange land, which after some
years was visited by Eric the Red; and there might have been wondrous
stories told of this same land, which Eric had called Greenland, in
order to lure settlers, where there is some reason to believe yet
earlier wanderers had found a home.
[Sidenote: _Heimskringla._]
[Sidenote: Position of Greenland.]
[Sidenote: Thought to be a part of Europe.]
There mightpossibly have been shown to Columbus an old manuscript
chronicle of the kings of Norway, which they called the _Heimskringla_,
and which had been written by Snorre Sturlason in the thirteenth
century; and if he had turned the leaves with any curiosity, he could
have read, or have had translated for him, accounts of the Norse
colonization of Greenland in the ninth century. Where, then, was this
Greenland? Could it possibly have had any connection with that Cathay of
Marco Polo, so real in the vision of Columbus, and which was supposed to
lie above India in the higher latitudes? As a student of contemporary
cartography, Columbus would have answered such a question readily, had
it been suggested; for he would have known that Greenland had been
represented in all the maps, since it was first recognized at all, as
merely an extended peninsula of Scandinavia, made by a southward twist
to enfold a northern sea, in which Iceland lay. One certainly cannot
venture to say how far Columbus may have had an acquaintance with the
cartographical repertories, more or less well stocked, as they doubtless
were, in the great commercial centres of maritime Europe, but the
knowledge which we to-day have in detail could hardly have been
otherwise than a common possession among students of geography then. We
comprehend now how, as far back as 1427, a map of Claudius Clavus showed
Greenland as this peninsular adjunct to the northwest of Europe,--a view
enforced also in a map of 1447, in the Pitti palace, and in one which
Nordenskiöld recently found in a Codex of Ptolemy at Warsaw, dated in
1467. A few years later, and certainly before Columbus could have gone
on this voyage, we find a map which it is more probable he could have
known, and that is the engraved one of Nicholas Donis, drawn presumably
in 1471, and later included in the edition of Ptolemy published at Ulm
in 1482. The same European connection is here maintained. Again it is
represented in the map of Henricus Martellus (1489-90), in a way that
produced a succession of maps, which till long after the death of
Columbus continued to make this Norse colony a territorial appendage of
Scandinavian Europe, betraying not the slightest symptom of a belief
that Eric the Red had strayed beyond the circle of European connections.
[Illustration: CLAUDIUS CLAVUS, 1427.
[From Nordenskiöld's _Studien_.]]
[Illustration: BORDONE, 1528.
[Greenland is the Northernmost Peninsula of N. W. Europe.]]
[Sidenote: Made a Part of Asia.]
It is only when we get down to the later years of Columbus's life that
we find, on a Portuguese chart of 1503, a glimmer of the truth, and this
only transiently, though the conception of the mariners, upon which this
map was based, probably associated Greenland with the Asiatic main, as
Ruysch certainly did, by a bold effort to reconcile the Norse traditions
with the new views of his time, when he produced the first engraved map
of the discoveries of Columbus and Cabot in the Roman Ptolemy of 1508.
[Sidenote: Again made a part of Europe.]
It is thus beyond dispute that if Columbus entertained any views as to
the geographical relations of Greenland, which had been practically lost
to Europe since communication with it ceased, earlier in the fifteenth
century, they were simply those of a peninsula of northern Europe, which
could have no connection with any country lying beyond the Atlantic; for
it was not till after his death that any general conception of it
associated with the Asiatic main arose. It is quite certain, however,
that as the conception began to prevail, after the discovery of the
South Sea by Balboa, in 1513, that an interjacent new world had really
been found, there was a tendency, as shown in the map of Thorne (1527),
representing current views in Spain, and in those of Finæus (1531),
Ziegler (1532), Mercator (1538), and Bordone (1528-1547), to relegate
the position of Greenland to a peninsular connection with Europe.
There is a curious instance of the evolution of the correct idea in the
Ptolemy of 1525, and repeated in the same plate as used in the editions
of 1535 and 1545. The map was originally engraved to show "Gronlandia"
as a European peninsula, but apparently, at a later stage, the word
Gronlandia was cut in the corner beside the sketch of an elephant, and
farther west, as if to indicate its transoceanic and Asiatic situation,
though there was no attempt to draw in a coast line.
[Sidenote: Later diverse views.]
Later in the century there was a strife of opinion between the
geographers of the north, as represented in the Olaus Magnus map of
1567, who disconnected the country from Europe, and those of the south,
who still united Greenland with Scandinavia, as was done in the Zeno map
of 1558. By this time, however, the southern geographers had begun to
doubt, and after 1540 we find Labrador and Greenland put in close
proximity in many of their maps; and in this the editors of the Ptolemy
of 1561 agreed, when they altered their reëngraved map--as the plate
shows--in a way to disconnect Greenland from Scandinavia.
It is not necessary to trace the cartographical history of Greenland to
a later day. It is manifest that it was long after Columbus's death when
the question was raised of its having any other connection than with
Europe, and Columbus could have learned in Iceland nothing to suggest to
him that the land of Eric the Red had any connection with the western
shores of Asia, of which he was dreaming.
[Sidenote: Discovery of Vinland.]
If any of the learned men in Iceland had referred Columbus once more to
the _Heimskringla_, it would have been to the brief entry which it shows
in the records as the leading Norse historian made it, of the story of
the discovery of Vinland. There he would have read, "Leif also found
Vinland the Good," and he could have read nothing more. There was
nothing in this to excite the most vivid imagination as to place or
direction.
[Sidenote: Scandinavian views of Vinland.]
[Sidenote: Stephanius's map, 1570.]
It was not till a time long after the period of Columbus that, so far as
we know, any cartographical records of the discoveries associated with
the Vinland voyages were made in the north; and not till the discoveries
of Columbus and his successors were a common inheritance in Europe did
some of the northern geographers, in 1570, undertake to reconcile the
tales of the sagas with the new beliefs. The testimony of these later
maps is presumably the transmitted view then held in the north from the
interpretation of the Norse sagas in the light of later knowledge. This
testimony is that the "America" of the Spaniards, including Terra
Florida and the "Albania" of the English, was a territory south of the
Norse region and beyond a separating water, very likely that of Davis'
Straits. The map of Sigurd Stephanius of this date (1570) puts Vinland
north of the Straits of Belle Isle, and makes it end at the south in a
"wild sea," which separates it [B of map] from "America." Torfæus quotes
Torlacius as saying that this map of Stephanius's was drawn from ancient
Icelandic records. If this cartographical record has its apparent value,
it is not likely that Columbus could have seen in it anything more than
a manifestation of that vague boreal region which was far remote from
the thoughts which possessed him, in seeking a way to India over
against Spain.
[Illustration: SIGURD STEPHANIUS, 1570.]
[Sidenote: Dubious sagas.]
Beside the scant historic record respecting Vinland which has been cited
from the _Heimskringla_, it is further possible that Columbus may have
seen that series of sagas which had come down in oral shape to the
twelfth century. At this period put into writing, two hundred years
after the events of the Vinland voyages, there are none of the
manuscript copies of these sagas now existing which go back of the
fourteenth century. This rendering of the old sagas into script came at
a time when, in addition to the inevitable transformations of long oral
tradition, there was superadded the romancing spirit then rife in the
north, and which had come to them from the south of Europe. The result
of this blending of confused tradition with the romancing of the period
of the written preservation has thrown, even among the Scandinavians
themselves, a shade of doubt, more or less intense at times, which
envelops the saga record with much that is indistinguishable from myth,
leaving little but the general drift of the story to be held of the
nature of a historic record. The Icelandic editor of Egel's saga,
published at Reikjavik in 1856, acknowledges this unavoidable reflex of
the times when the sagas were reduced to writing, and the most
experienced of the recent writers on Greenland, Henrik Rink, has allowed
the untrustworthiness of the sagas except for their general scope.
[Sidenote: Codex Flatoyensis.]
[Sidenote: Leif Erikson.]
Less than a hundred years before the alleged visit of Columbus to Thule,
there had been a compilation of some of the early sagas, and this _Codex
Flatoyensis_ is the only authority which we have for any details of the
Vinland voyages. It is possible that the manuscript now known is but one
copy of several or many which may have been made at an early period, not
preceding, however, the twelfth century, when writing was introduced.
This particular manuscript was discovered in an Icelandic monastery in
the seventeenth century, and there is no evidence of its being known
before. Of course it is possible that copies may have been in the hands
of learned Icelanders at the time of Columbus's supposed voyage to the
north, and he may have heard of it, or have had parts of it read to him.
The collection is recognized by Scandinavian writers as being the most
confused and incongruous of similar records; and it is out of such
romancing, traditionary, and conflicting recitals that the story of the
Norse voyages to Vinland is made, if it is made at all. The sagas say
that it was sixteen winters after the settlement of Greenland that Leif
went to Norway, and in the next year he sailed to Vinland. These are the
data from which the year A. D. 1000 has been deduced as that of the
beginning of the Vinland voyages. The principal events are to be traced
in the saga of Eric the Red, which, in the judgment of Rask, a leading
Norse authority, is "somewhat fabulous, written long after the event,
and taken from tradition."
[Sidenote: Peringskiöld's edition of the sagas.]
Such, then, was the record which, if it ever came to the notice of
Columbus, was little suited to make upon him any impression to be
associated in his mind with the Asia of his dreams. Humboldt, discussing
the chances of Columbus's gaining any knowledge of the story, thinks
that when the Spanish Crown was contesting with the heirs of the Admiral
his rights of discovery, the citing of these northern experiences of
Columbus would have been in the Crown's favor, if there had been any
conception at that time that the Norse discoveries, even if known to
general Europe, had any relation to the geographical problems then under
discussion. Similar views have been expressed by Wheaton and Prescott,
and there is no evidence that up to the time of Columbus an acquaintance
with the Vinland story had ever entered into the body of historical
knowledge possessed by Europeans in general. The scant references in the
manuscripts of Adam of Bremen (A. D. 1073), of Ordericus Vitalis (A. D.
1140), and of Saxo Grammaticus (A. D. 1200), were not likely to be
widely comprehended, even if they were at all known, and a close
scrutiny of the literature of the subject does not seem to indicate that
there was any considerable means of propagating a knowledge of the sagas
before Peringskiöld printed them in 1697, two hundred years after the
time of Columbus. This editor inserted them in an edition of the
_Heimskringla_ and concealed the patchwork. This deception caused it
afterwards to be supposed that the accounts in the _Heimskringla_ had
been interpolated by some later reviser of the chronicle; but the truth
regarding Peringskiöld's action was ultimately known.
[Sidenote: Probabilities.]
Basing, then, their investigation on a narrative confessedly confused
and unauthentic, modern writers have sought to determine with precision
the fact of Norse visits to British America, and to identify the
localities. The fact that every investigator finds geographical
correspondences where he likes, and quite independently of all others,
is testimony of itself to the confused condition of the story. The soil
of the United States and Nova Scotia contiguous to the Atlantic may now
safely be said to have been examined by competent critics sufficiently
to affirm that no archæological trace of the presence of the Norse here
is discernible. As to such a forbidding coast as that of Labrador, there
has been as yet no such familiarity with it by trained archæologists as
to render it reasonably certain that some trace may not be found there,
and on this account George Bancroft allows the possibility that the
Norse may have reached that coast. There remains, then, no evidence
beyond a strong probability that the Norse from Greenland crossed Davis'
Straits and followed south the American coast. That indisputable
archæological proofs may yet be found to establish the fact of their
southern course and sojourn is certainly possible. Meanwhile we must be
content that there is no testimony satisfactory to a careful historical
student, that this course and such sojourn ever took place. A belief in
it must rest on the probabilities of the case.
Many writers upon the Norseman discovery would do well to remember the
advice of Ampère to present as doubtful what is true, sooner than to
give as true what is doubtful.
"Ignorance," says Muñoz, in speaking of the treacherous grounds of
unsupported narrative, "is generally accompanied by vanity and
temerity."
[Sidenote: Did Columbus hear of the saga stories?]
It is an obvious and alluring supposition that this story should have
been presented to Columbus, whatever the effect may have been on his
mind. Lowell in a poem pardonably pictures him as saying:--
"I brooded on the wise Athenian's tale Of happy Atlantis; and heard
Björne's keel Crunch the gray pebbles of the Vinland shore, For I
believed the poets."
But the belief is only a proposition. Rafn and other extreme advocates
of the Norse discovery have made as much as they could of the
supposition of Columbus's cognizance of the Norse voyages. Laing seems
confident that this contact must have happened. The question, however,
must remain unsettled; and whether Columbus landed in Iceland or not,
and whether the bruit of the Norse expeditions struck his ears elsewhere
or not, the fact of his never mentioning them, when he summoned every
supposable evidence to induce acceptance of his views, seems to be
enough to show at least that to a mind possessed as his was of the
scheme of finding India by the west the stories of such northern
wandering offered no suggestion applicable to his purpose. It is,
moreover, inconceivable that Columbus should have taken a course
southwest from the Canaries, if he had been prompted in any way by
tidings of land in the northwest.