success,” said he to Greene, “must be attributed to the justice of our
cause and the gallantry of our troops. My wishes would induce me to name
every sentinel in the corps.” He did name some of his officers in that
original report of the battle dated “Camp near Cain Creek, Jan. 19,
1781,” and it will arouse the pride of every man of Irish blood to read
them. Listen to this much of it: “Major McDowell, of the North Carolina
volunteers, was posted on the right flank in front of the line, one
hundred and fifty yards; and Major Cunningham, of the Georgia
volunteers, on the left, at the same distance in front. Colonels Brannon
and Thomas, of the South Carolinians, were posted in the right of Major
McDowell and Colonel Hayes and McCall, of the same corps, on the left of
Major Cunningham. Captains Tate and Buchanan, with the Augusta riflemen,
to support the right of the line.” In the Maryland Regiment, were Major
Edward Giles, Morgan’s aid; Captain Gilmore, and Ensign McCoskell.
McDowell and Cunningham and Tate and Giles and Gilmore and Hayes and
McCoskell and McCall and Brannon, commissioned officers all, in one
battle! From this array, it would seem that the Irish may modestly lay
claim to have struck at least one blow for Independence!
The military career of Morgan was now nearly ended. Immediately upon the
termination of the engagement, he began that masterly retreat for a
distance of one hundred and fifty miles before the troops of Cornwallis
and Leslie, to form a junction with Greene, which was so necessary to
save his little corps from annihilation or capture. To overtake him,
Cornwallis destroyed his entire baggage train, and converted his army
into light troops. But in vain. Though heavily encumbered by the
captured munitions of the enemy and his celerity retarded by the
prisoners of war, Morgan conducted his retirement with great prudence
and success, and in twenty-one days joined Greene at Guilford Court
House, his pursuers being but twenty-five miles in his rear. His heroic
band was saved.
Emaciated from want and crippled with disease resulting from hardships
he endured in the Canadian campaign, Morgan was now scarcely able to sit
upon his horse. When mounted he could not ride out of a walk. He “was a
sufferer to the verge of human endurance, and was forced to ask for
leave of absence to regain his broken health. Slowly and painfully he
made his way homeward; and he was never again physically fit for active
operations. But his warlike spirit was never at rest while an armed
enemy of his country was in the field. In June, 1781, when Tarleton was
raiding eastern Virginia, he raised and equipped a body of cavalry at
his own expense and at the earnest importunity of Benjamin Harrison and
Archibald Cary, Speakers of the House of Delegates and Senate of
Virginia, he placed himself at their head to join Lafayette. But in
August his old malady compelled him again to retire.
The spirit of the old hero chafed under his enforced idleness. The
termination of the titanic struggle was now discernible to his
experienced eye and he longed to participate in the closing events. The
French fleet was in the Chesapeake, cutting off the escape of Cornwallis
by sea. In his rear was Lafayette—there was no retreat to the southward.
On his flank was the Marquis of St. Simon—there was no flight to the
mountains. And from the north, at the head of the main army, marched
George Washington with his veteran troops.
The stupendous event which took place at Yorktown on the 19th day of
October, 1781, at 4 o’clock p. m., and its influence on the history of
the human race, all the world knows. Morgan was at home at that time on
a bed of sickness. He wrote Washington under date of September 20,
lamenting that his condition prevented him from serving in the field. It
was a letter full of personal and patriotic utterances—so much so that
Washington felt impelled to answer it in kind. His answer is dated
“Headquarters, before York, 5th October, 1781.” “Surrounded as I am,” he
wrote, “with a great variety of concerns on the present occasion, I can
yet find time to answer your letter of the 20th ultimo, which I have
received with much satisfaction; not only as it is filled with such warm
expressions of desire for my success on the present expedition, but as
it breathes the spirit and ardor of a veteran soldier, who, though
impaired in the service of his country, yet retains the sentiments of a
soldier in the firmest degree.
“Be assured that I most sincerely lament your present situation, and
esteem it a peculiar loss to the United States that you are, at this
time, unable to render your services in the field. I most sincerely
thank you for the kind expressions of your good wishes, and earnestly
hope that you may soon be restored to that share of health which you may
desire, and with which you may again be useful to your country in the
same eminent degree as has already distinguished your conduct.”
Within two weeks’ time from the date of that cordial letter, Cornwallis
surrendered his army, the war of the Revolution had been fought to a
finish and the military life of Daniel Morgan was ended.
To his estate in Clarke County, Virginia, which he proudly called
“Saratoga,” he now retired; and there he spent his declining days. For
two years, in obedience to the call of his people, he served them in the
Congress of the nation; but, as he had been most warlike in time of war,
in time of peace he preferred the quiet shades of private life. On the
sixth day of July in the year 1802, in about the sixty-seventh year of
his age, he passed out at Winchester, in Virginia, and there lies his
dust in an humble grave.
Mr. President, the dust of Daniel Morgan is noble dust. Saving alone
those of the commander-in-chief, his services to his struggling country
are the most remarkable in the annals of the war. From the valley of the
Hockhocking in 1774, he pledged himself to the services of his brethren
of Boston and marched his riflemen six hundred miles to their relief.
Into the hardships of the Canadian Campaign he led the van; and three
times before Quebec he guided his men to the fire-fringed heights with
the courage of a demi-god. To him belongs the chief glory of Burgoyne’s
surrender; and at the Cowpens he won what Bancroft affirms was “the most
astonishing victory of the war.” His life was a succession of sacrifices
for his country. Measure his services as you may—in number, in value, or
in brilliancy—they are not surpassed by those of any officer of the
Revolution, saving always the unapproachable Washington. In fifty
contests with the enemy he participated—eight of them being general
engagements—and in those in which he was charged with the responsibility
of command, he was either successful or achieved results which were
equivalent thereto. His patriotism was proof against British allurements
when he was a ragged prisoner of war; and his sense of honor repelled
the temptations of a superior brother-officer in the hour of victorious
exultation. Into every danger where wartime duty called him, he “fought
a good fight”; in spite of every wile of the seducer, “he kept the
faith”; into the quietude of private life he carried the praises of the
whole army and the plaudits of the civil representatives of his country.
But he did not escape calumny. He paid the inevitable penalty which
success entails, and paid it with the smile of scorn and the noble
silence of conscious rectitude. The American people, as yet, have no
Madeleine, no Valhalla, no Westminster, wherein repose the ashes of
their mighty dead. But when that national mausoleum comes, as come it
ought and come it will, to it in some future generation the dust of
Daniel Morgan will be tenderly borne and in honor inurned beneath its
vaulted halls. Meantime, he sleeps yonder at Winchester amidst the
lovely hills of Old Virginia, and, “in honored rest,” sleeps well well—
“His truth and valor wearing.”
No marble pile marks his resting place. He needs none! Congresses may,
his countrymen never will, forget his devotion to the Republic. On the
portals of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the stranger who would behold the
monument of its architect, Sir Christopher Wren, is admonished in
stately Latin to “look around him.” _Si quaeris monumentum,
circumspici!_ Ye who would behold the monument of Daniel Morgan, lift
your eyes to the towering dome of your country’s Capitol and consider
all that it represents! Read the Bill of Rights incorporated in the
charters of your commonwealths, and reflect upon the inalienable
prerogatives it preserves to eighty millions of freemen! Study the
constitution itself and realize with Gladstone that it is “the most
wonderful work ever struck off in a given time by the brain and
purpose of man!” Ponder those blessings of liberty which, in their
full flower and fruition, every American enjoys tonight! And when ye
have done this, remember that Daniel Morgan was of the fathers by
whose blood and spirit they were established. Sublimer than effigies
of brass, more enduring than granite shafts, are these memorials of
the men of the old heroic days. Upon the rights of mankind are they
founded, and they will remain even unto the last day of recorded time.
And when Time shall be no longer—when, in the ultimate convulsion of
nature, the archangel-trumpeter shall sound his summons for the living
and the dead to render final accounting of their stewardship—before
the Judge of the Nations in the group of immortals who blazed the way
for the glory of the American Republic, will stand the tall Irish
chieftain of the Virginia Riflemen, “with a countenance like the
lightning and in raiment as white as snow.”
ST. BRENDAN, AMERICA’S FIRST DISCOVERER. HOW A LEARNED AND ADVENTUROUS
IRISHMAN AND SIXTY MONKS OUTSTRIPPED COLUMBUS BY NEARLY TEN CENTURIES IN
HIS QUEST OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE—A GRAPHIC AND CONVINCING TREATISE.
BY THOMAS S. LONERGAN, NEW YORK CITY.
During all historic time, the Irish have been noted for their love of
adventure and travel, and had commercial intercourse with the leading
ports of Europe and Asia for centuries before and after St. Patrick’s
time, which is proof that they had sailing vessels of no mean order. The
conversion of the Irish people to Christianity, in the fifth century, is
unique in the annals of Christendom, because it was accomplished by one
man and without the shedding of a single drop of human blood—but the
discovery of America by Irish monks in the middle of the sixth century
is still a mooted question, notwithstanding the historical researches of
Irish, French, German and American scholars, which prove that St.
Brendan was the first discoverer of this western hemisphere. His
expedition was essentially a religious undertaking, as well as the
fulfillment of a well-known prophecy.
St. Brendan was born in the year 484, at a place now called Tralee, in
the County of Kerry, Ireland. He was the son of Finnlogha, of the race
of Ciar, son of Fergus. He was educated by his relative, the Bishop of
Erc, who was head of a local monastery at Kerry. When a child, young
Brendan was placed in charge of St. Ita, at Killeedy, in the County of
Limerick, where he remained for five years, after which he returned to
Bishop Erc’s monastery, and began his ecclesiastical studies with marked
ability. He was sent from there to St. Jarlath’s College of Tuan for the
purpose of studying the laws and rules of the saints of Ireland, with
the injunction to return to Bishop Erc for holy orders, and in due
course of time he was ordained.
[Illustration:
THOMAS S. LONERGAN, ESQ.,
Of New York City.
Member of the Society, Litterateur and Lecturer.
]
St. Brendan belonged to what is known as the second order of Irish
Saints. Shortly after his ordination, a passionate desire took
possession of him to go forth on expeditions for the discovery of
strange lands and the salvation of souls. At his ordination the words of
St. Luke produced a profound impression on his mind, which subsequently
formed his determination to forsake his native country and to embark on
a voyage to a mysterious land, far from human ken and beyond a mighty
ocean.
It is certain that Irishmen, in ancient days, found their way to the
Hebrides, the Shetland and Faroe Islands, and even to Iceland. St.
Brendan is said to have visited the Western and Northern Islands, and
Brittany in France between 530 and 540. When he returned home the
passion to discover the Land of Promise, as foretold in St. Patrick’s
prophecy, was stronger than ever. He went to St. Ita, his old nurse, for
counsel, and she advised him to build a ship of wood, and she told him
that he would find the distant land beyond the great ocean. He
immediately set out for Galway in Connacht, and gathered several of his
faithful monks about him, and they there and then began to build a large
wooden ship. We are told that they built a peculiar mast in the middle
of the ship, and secured all the other rigging for such a craft. They
put aboard various kinds of herbs, seeds and provisions. They sailed
from Galway along the Irish Coast to the Bay of Kerry.
In 545, according to the Irish annals and the Latin manuscripts, St.
Brendan and sixty Irish monks, sailed from the Bay of Kerry, which still
bears his name, and after an adventurous voyage of forty days, they
reached the shores of what is now Virginia or Carolina, and are said to
have remained in this western hemisphere for seven years, exploring and
preaching the Gospel of Christ to the natives, especially along the
shores of the Ohio River. Most probably they trod the soil of New
England. The reports of what they saw and endured are simply marvellous.
They found a fertile land, thickly wooded and full of birds and flowers,
strange animals and strange human beings.
There is every reason to believe that before the close of that eventful
century the story of St. Brendan’s voyages and discovery was well known
in every part of Europe. There are still extant thirteen Latin
manuscripts in the National Library of Paris which have come down from
the tenth century, and contain elaborate accounts of St. Brendan’s
discovery of America. The Bodlien Library of Oxford and the Nuremburg
Library of Germany contain several of the Brendan MSS. There are also
versions of the discovery in Gaelic, German, Spanish, Portuguese and
Italian.
In the year 1892, the late General Daniel Butterfield, the noted
American soldier and scholar, photographed one of the original Latin
manuscripts of Brendan in the Bibleothèque Nationale of Paris, which he
translated on his arrival in this country, and he subsequently prepared
a learned lecture on the subject, which he delivered before the New York
Gaelic Society. The translation, has been vouched for by Cardinal
Gibbons of Baltimore as being almost literal.
The manuscript begins with a sketch of St. Brendan’s career and of the
confession made to him by Father Barindus, which was instrumental in
firing the imagination of the great abbot to make a voyage in search of
the Land of Promise, which was America. St. Brendan laid his full
statement of the confession before the seven wisest counsellors of his
community, which concluded in the following words, as translated:
“My Beloved Fellow Warriors: I now ask of you counsel and help,
inasmuch as my thoughts and my heart are bent on one desire, if it be
the will of God. That land whereof Father Barindus has spoken, is the
land of promise of the saints. I have yet set my heart upon. What say
you? What counsel do you give me? Their answer was, ‘Abbot, your will
is ours; have we not left our parents, have we not forsaken our
inheritance, have we not delivered ourselves up unto you? Therefore
with you we are ready to go unto life or death.’”
They considered the story or confession a revelation to enable them to
reach the land, of which Patrick’s prophecy had foretold. When once upon
the highlands of Munster, and looking out upon the Atlantic Ocean, St.
Patrick said that a man of renown should arise in those lands and go out
upon the sea and find the promised land. That prophecy has been a
household word with the people in the Kerry region for more than
fourteen centuries, and was well known for several years before St.
Brendan was born. The traditions of the Brendanian voyages, like
Banquo’s ghost, will never down, because they are embodied in the
literature of many European nations.
The following passage appears in Otway’s Sketches, published in Dublin
in 1845.
“Brendan, having prosecuted his inquiries with all diligence, returned
to his native Kerry, and from a bay sheltered by a lofty mountain,
that is now known by his name, he set sail for the Atlantic land and
directing his course towards the Southwest, in order to meet the
summer solstice, or what we call the ‘tropic’ after a long and rough
voyage, came to summer seas where he was carried without sail or oar
for many a long day. This, it is presumed, was the great Gulf Stream
and which brought his vessel to shore, somewhere about the Virginia
Capes, or where the American coast tends eastward and forms the New
England States. There landing, he and his companions marched far into
the interior and came to a large river, flowing East and West, which
was evidently the Ohio River. After some years’ exploration, the holy
adventurer was about to cross the river when he was accosted by a
person of noble presence (but whether a real or imaginary man does not
appear), who told him that he had gone far enough in that direction
and that further discoveries were reserved for other men who would in
due time come and Christianize all that pleasant land. The above, when
tested by common sense, clearly shows that Brendan landed on a
continent and went a good way into the interior.”
It is now supposed that St. Brendan and his companions soon returned to
Ireland. Some writers state that he made a second voyage to this
country, but there is no proof for that statement.
In the sagas of Scandinavia, America is called Irland Mikla, or “Great
Ireland.” The Scandinavian records contain an account of three voyages
made to America after the time of St. Brendan and before the arrival of
Columbus. Voraginius, the Provincial of the Dominicans and Bishop of
Genoa in the thirteenth century, devotes much space in his “Golden
Legend” to St. Brendan’s Land. Wynkyn de Worde, the first English
printer, wrote a life of St. Brendan, which was published in 1483, just
nine years before Columbus sailed from Palos. Several Italians, who
wrote in the fifteenth century, had much to say about St. Brendan’s
discovery, and it is to be presumed that the mind of Columbus was well
stored with the traditions of America’s first discoverer, which had come
down through the Middle Ages.
Here are a few sentences spoken by St. Brendan on the banks of what is
now supposed to be the Ohio River:
“Behold the land which you have longed for so long a time.
“The reason you saw it not sooner was that God desired to show you the
secrets of the ocean.
“Return, therefore, to the land of thy nativity, carrying with you of
the fruits and gems of all that your ship will carry, for the days of
your journey are near to a close, and you shall sleep with your
fathers. But after the lapse of many years this land shall be made
known to your descendants, when Christianity shall overcome Pagan
persecution. Now, this river which you see divides the land, as it now
appears to you rich in fruits, so shall it always appear without any
shadow of night, for its light is Christ.”
If the foregoing is not positive proof, it is at least pretty good
circumstantial evidence of St. Brendan’s discovery of this western
hemisphere.
Nearly all writers on Columbus bear witness to the traditional value of
the voyage of St. Brendan in guiding and inspiring Lief Erickson in the
tenth century, and Columbus in the fifteenth, to the discovery of the
New World.
The legend of St. Brendan is treated in the general histories of
American discovery. In Winsor’s “Narrative and Critical History of
America,” volume I, page 48, there is a list of some of the different
texts of the legend. Payne’s “History of America” gives a brief summary
of the legend. He says: “No story was more popular in the end of the
fifteenth century. The critic who does not absolutely reject it, as the
Bollandists have done, may take his choice of original versions of it in
eight different languages: and St. Brandan occupies ten dense pages in
William Caxton’s version of the Golden Legend.” An English version of
the legend was published by the Percy Society in 1844 under the title,
“St. Brandan, a mediæval legend of the sea, in English prose and verse
(London, 1844).”
Gaffarel’s “Histoire de la dècouverte de l’Amerique,” volume I, contains
a chapter entitled “Les Irlandais en Amerique avant Colomb,” in which he
gives an extended account of the story of St. Brendan, with references
to authorities.
[Illustration:
HON. THOMAS B. FITZPATRICK,
Of Boston, Mass.
Vice-President-General of the Society.
]
De Roo, in his “History of America Before Columbus,” published in 1900,
says: “The story of St. Brendan was one of the most remarkable and
widely spread of the middle ages. The number of its ancient copies,
carefully preserved to the present day, its various translations and its
learned commentaries, published of late, sufficiently testify to the
living interest which the ‘Navigatio’ of St. Brendan excited. There is
scarcely a MSS. Collection in Europe, of any account, where it cannot be
found.” There is a copy of the “Navigatio” in the Vatican Library since
the Ninth Century. De Roo gives full credence to the St. Brendan
narrative.
Learned writers like Moosmuller of Germany, Gravier of France, Palfry
and De Costa of America, not to speak of Irish scholars, have written
much on St. Brendan and prehistoric America. Cardinal Moran of Australia
has recently written a very able work on St. Brendan. O’Donoghue’s
Brendaniana and Webb’s Compendium of Irish Biography make mighty
interesting reading.
There are several ancient maps in the European Libraries which mention
St. Brendan’s Land or “Great Ireland” and those maps are being closely
examined by historical students interested in pre-Columbian discoveries.
Columbus himself, while he was endeavoring to fit out his first
expedition, wrote these words: “The land of St. Brendan is the land of
the Blessed, towards the West, which no one can reach except by the
power of God.”
It is not too much to claim that the Irish chapter in American history
began with St. Brendan. It is to be hoped and expected that the future
historians of this Western Hemisphere will recognize Brendan, the Irish
monk and famous navigator, as America’s first discoverer and give credit
to whom credit is due.
There is still extant in the Monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland, an
ancient MS. containing the prayer of St. Brendan for the safety of
himself and his companions in his trans-Atlantic voyage.
“Judging by the ancient documents,” says the learned Dane, Professor
Rafn, “we can have no doubt that Great Ireland was settled long before
the year 1000 by a Christian Colony from Ireland.” What Rafn calls Great
Ireland, we now call the United States of America. Rafn also claims that
a people speaking the Irish language were found in Florida as far back
as the eighth century.
The latest book on this subject is by Mrs. Marion Mulhall, the wife of
the famous statistician, entitled “Explorers in the New World Before
Columbus,” recently published by Longmans, Green & Co. Every student of
pre-Columbian discoveries ought to read that splendid work, which deals
with a mighty interesting theme in the field of historical research.
In the sixteenth century, traces of Gaelic speech and a knowledge of the
poems of Ossian were discovered among the Indians of Florida. Ossian was
an Irish poet who flourished two centuries before St. Brendan was born.
Both Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon considered him the greatest poet that
ever lived.
In the light of modern historical research, it is absurd to claim that
Columbus was the first discoverer of America. I am fully satisfied that
Lief Erickson and his Norsemen from the islands of the Baltic discovered
this Continent 500 years before Columbus; and I am as fully convinced
that St. Brendan and his Irish Monks landed on the shores of this
country about the middle of the sixth century. Owing to the fact that no
permanent settlement or lasting results came from these discoveries,
therefore they do not take a jot or tittle from the achievement of
Christopher Columbus, whose name and fame are bound to live forever in
the annals of the human race.
The Oxford University press has just published a number of Irish
manuscripts in the English language which have been in the Bodlien
Library for centuries. Some of those Gaelic manuscripts also refer to
the Brendanian voyages and discoveries.
The early Portuguese explorers believed in the existence of the El
Dorado, the undiscovered country of St. Brendan. The strongest proof of
this is that when the Crown of Portugal was ceded to the Castilians, the
treaty included St. Brendan’s land as a certain future discovery.