century, gives an account of things which happened three centuries
before it was written. A cautious scholar will, as a rule, be slow to
consider any historical narrative as quite satisfactory authority, even
when it contains no improbable statements, unless it is nearly
contemporary with the events which it records. Such was the rule laid
down by the late Sir George Cornewall Lewis, and it is a very good rule;
the proper application of it has disencumbered history of much rubbish.
At the same time, like all rules, it should be used with judicious
caution and not allowed to run away with us. As applied by Lewis to
Roman history it would have swept away in one great cataclysm not only
kings and decemvirs, but Brennus and his Gauls to boot, and left us with
nothing to swear by until the invasion of Pyrrhus.[242] Subsequent
research has shown that this was going altogether too far. The mere fact
of distance in time between a document and the events which it records
is only negative testimony against its value, for it may be a faithful
transcript of some earlier document or documents since lost. It is so
difficult to prove a negative that the mere lapse of time simply raises
a presumption the weight of which should be estimated by a careful
survey of all the probabilities in the case. Among the many Icelandic
vellums that are known to have perished[243] there may well have been
earlier copies of Eric the Red's Saga.
[Footnote 242: Lewis's _Inquiry into the Credibility of the
Early Roman History_, 2 vols., London, 1855.]
[Footnote 243: And notably in that terrible fire of October,
1728, which consumed the University Library at Copenhagen, and
broke the heart of the noble collector of manuscripts, Arni
Magnusson. The great eruption of Hecla in 1390 overwhelmed two
famous homesteads in the immediate neighbourhood. From the
local history of these homesteads and their inmates, Vigfusson
thinks it not unlikely that some records may still be there
"awaiting the spade and pickaxe of a new Schliemann."
_Sturlunga Saga_, p. cliv.]
[Sidenote: Hauk Erlendsson and his manuscripts.]
Hauk Erlendsson reckoned himself a direct descendant, in the eighth
generation, from Snorro, son of Thorfinn and Gudrid, born in Vinland. He
was an important personage in Iceland, a man of erudition, author of a
brief book of contemporary annals and a treatise on arithmetic in which
he introduced the Arabic numerals into Iceland. In those days the lover
of books, if he would add them to his library, might now and then obtain
an original manuscript, but usually he had to copy them or have them
copied by hand. The Hauks-bók, with its 200 skins, one of the most
extensive Icelandic vellums now in existence, is really Hauk's private
library, or what there is left of it, and it shows that he was a man who
knew how to make a good choice of books. He did a good deal of his
copying himself, and also employed two clerks in the same kind of
work.[244]
[Footnote 244: An excellent facsimile of Hauk's handwriting is
given in Rafn, tab. iii., lower part; tab. iv. and the upper
part of tab. iii. are in the hands of his two amanuenses. See
Vigfusson, _op. cit._ p. clxi.]
[Sidenote: The story is not likely to have been preserved to Hauk's time
by oral tradition only.]
Now I do not suppose it will occur to any rational being to suggest that
Hauk may have written down his version of Eric the Red's Saga from an
oral tradition nearly three centuries old. The narrative could not have
been so long preserved in its integrity, with so little extravagance of
statement and so many marks of truthfulness in details foreign to
ordinary Icelandic experience, if it had been entrusted to oral
tradition alone. One might as well try to imagine Drake's "World
Encompassed" handed down by oral tradition from the days of Queen
Elizabeth to the days of Queen Victoria. Such transmission is possible
enough with heroic poems and folk-tales, which deal with a few dramatic
situations and a stock of mythical conceptions familiar at every
fireside; but in a simple matter-of-fact record of sailors' observations
and experiences on a strange coast, oral tradition would not be long in
distorting and jumbling the details into a result quite undecipherable.
The story of the Zeno brothers, presently to be cited, shows what
strange perversions occur, even in written tradition, when the copyist,
instead of faithfully copying records of unfamiliar events, tries to
edit and amend them. One cannot reasonably doubt that Hauk's vellum of
Eric the Red's Saga, with its many ear-marks of truth above mentioned,
was copied by him--and quite carefully and faithfully withal--from some
older vellum not now forthcoming.
[Sidenote: Allusions to Vinland in other documents.]
As we have no clue, however, beyond the internal evidence, to the age or
character of the sources from which Hauk copied, there is nothing left
for us to do but to look into other Icelandic documents, to see if
anywhere they betray a knowledge of Vinland and the voyages thither.
Incidental references to Vinland, in narratives concerned with other
matters, are of great significance in this connection; for they imply on
the part of the narrator a presumption that his readers understand such
references, and that it is not necessary to interrupt his story in order
to explain them. Such incidental references imply the existence, during
the interval between the Vinland voyages and Hauk's manuscript, of many
intermediate links of sound testimony that have since dropped out of
sight; and therefore they go far toward removing whatever presumption
may be alleged against Hauk's manuscript because of its distance from
the events.
[Sidenote: Eyrbyggja Saga.]
Now the Eyrbyggja Saga, written between 1230 and 1260, is largely
devoted to the settlement of Iceland, and is full of valuable notices of
the heathen institutions and customs of the tenth century. The
Eyrbyggja, having occasion to speak of Thorbrand Snorrason, observes
incidentally that he went from Greenland to Vinland with Karlsefni and
was killed in a battle with the Skrælings.[245] We have already
mentioned the death of this Thorbrand, and how Freydis found his body in
the woods.
[Footnote 245: Vigfusson, _Eyrbyggja Saga_, pp. 91, 92. Another
of Karlsefni's comrades, Thorhall Gamlason, is mentioned in
_Grettis Saga_, Copenhagen, 1859, pp. 22, 70; he went back to
Iceland, settled on a farm there, and was known for the rest of
his life as "the Vinlander." See above, pp. 165, 168.]
[Sidenote: The abbot Nikulas, etc.]
Three Icelandic tracts on geography, between the twelfth and fourteenth
centuries, mention Helluland and Vinland, and in two of these accounts
Markland is interposed between Helluland and Vinland.[246] One of these
tracts mentions the voyages of Leif and Thorfinn. It forms part of an
essay called "Guide to the Holy Land," by Nikulas Sæmundsson, abbot of
Thvera, in the north of Iceland, who died 1159. This Nikulas was curious
in matters of geography, and had travelled extensively.
[Footnote 246: Werlauf, _Symbolæ ad Geogr. Medii Ævi_,
Copenhagen, 1820.]
[Sidenote: Ari Fródhi.]
With the celebrated Ari Thorgilsson, usually known as Fródhi, "the
learned," we come to testimony nearly contemporaneous in time and
extremely valuable in character. This erudite priest, born in 1067, was
the founder of historical writing in Iceland. He was the principal
author of the "Landnáma-bók," already mentioned as a work of thorough
and painstaking research unequalled in mediæval literature. His other
principal works were the "Konunga-bók," or chronicle of the kings of
Norway, and the "Islendinga-bók," or description of Iceland.[247] Ari's
books, written not in monkish Latin, but in a good vigorous vernacular,
were a mine of information from which all subsequent Icelandic
historians were accustomed to draw such treasures as they needed. To his
diligence and acumen they were all, from Snorro Sturlason down, very
much indebted. He may be said to have given the tone to history-writing
in Iceland, and it was a high tone.
[Footnote 247: For a critical estimate of Ari's literary
activity and the extent of his work, the reader is referred to
Möbius, _Are's Isländerbuch_, Leipsic, 1869; Maurer, "Über Ari
Thorgilsson und sein Isländerbuch," in _Germania_, xv.; Olsen,
_Ari Thorgilsson hinn Fródhi_, Reykjavik, 1889, pp. 214-240.]
[Sidenote: Ari's significant allusion to Vinland.]
Unfortunately Ari's Islendinga-bók has perished. One cannot help
suspecting that it may have contained the contemporary materials from
which Eric the Red's Saga in the Hauks-bók was ultimately drawn. For
Ari made an abridgment or epitome of his great book, and this epitome,
commonly known as "Libellus Islandorum," still survives. In it Ari makes
brief mention of Greenland, and refers to his paternal uncle, Thorkell
Gellison, as authority for his statements. This Thorkell Gellison, of
Helgafell, a man of high consideration who flourished about the middle
of the eleventh century, had visited Greenland and talked with one of
the men who accompanied Eric when he went to settle in Brattahlid in
986. From this source Ari gives us the interesting information that
Eric's party found in Greenland "traces of human habitations, fragments
of boats, and stone implements; so from this one might conclude that
people of the kind who inhabited Vinland and were known by the (Norse)
Greenlanders as Skrælings must have roamed about there."[248] Observe
the force of this allusion. The settlers in Greenland did not at first
(nor for a long time) meet with barbarous or savage natives there, but
only with the vestiges of their former presence. But when Ari wrote the
above passage, the memory of Vinland and its fierce Skrælings was still
fresh, and Ari very properly inferred from the archæological remains in
Greenland that a people similar (in point of barbarism) to the
Skrælings must have been there. Unless Ari and his readers had a
distinct recollection of the accounts of Vinland, such a reference would
have been only an attempt to explain the less obscure by the more
obscure. It is to be regretted that we have in this book no more
allusions to Vinland; but if Ari could only leave us one such allusion,
he surely could not have made that one more pointed.
[Footnote 248: Their "fundo thar manna vister bæthi austr ok
vestr á landi ok kæiplabrot ok steinsmíthi, that es af thví má
scilja, at thar hafdhi thessconar thjóth farith es Vínland
hefer bygt, ok Grænlendínger calla Skrelínga," i. e.
"invenerunt ibi, tam in orientali quam occidentali terræ parte,
humanæ habitationis vestigia, navicularum fragmenta et opera
fabrilia ex lapide, ex quo intelligi potest, ibi versatum esse
nationem quæ Vinlandiam incoluit quamque Grænlandi Skrælingos
appellant." Rafn, p. 207.]
[Sidenote: Other references.]
But this is not quite the only reference that Ari makes to Vinland.
There are three others that must in all probability be assigned to him.
Two occur in the Landnáma-bók, the first in a passage where mention is
made of Ari Marsson's voyage to a place in the western ocean near
Vinland;[249] the only point in this allusion which need here concern us
is that Vinland is tacitly assumed to be a known geographical situation
to which others may be referred. The second reference occurs in one of
those elaborate and minutely specific genealogies in the Landnáma-bók:
"Their son was Thordhr Hest-höfdhi, father of Karlsefni, who found
Vinland the Good, Snorri's father," etc.[250] The third reference occurs
in the Kristni Saga, a kind of supplement to the Landnáma-bók, giving an
account of the introduction of Christianity into Iceland; here it is
related how Leif Ericsson came to be called "Leif the Lucky," 1. from
having rescued a shipwrecked crew off the coast of Greenland, 2. from
having discovered "Vinland the Good."[251] From these brief allusions,
and from the general relation in which Ari Fródhi stood to later
writers, I suspect that if the greater Islendinga-bók had survived to
our time we should have found in it more about Vinland and its
discoverers. At any rate, as to the existence of a definite and
continuous tradition all the way from Ari down to Hauk Erlendsson, there
can be no question whatever.[252]
[Footnote 249: _Landnáma-bók_, part ii. chap. xxii.]
[Footnote 250: Id. part iii. chap. x.]
[Footnote 251: _Kristni Saga_, apud _Biskupa Sögur_,
Copenhagen, 1858, vol. i. p. 20.]
[Footnote 252: Indeed, the parallel existence of the
Flateyar-bók version of Eric the Red's Saga, alongside of the
Hauks-bók version, is pretty good proof of the existence of a
written account older than Hauk's time. The discrepancies
between the two versions are such as to show that Jón
Thordharson did not copy from Hauk, but followed some other
version not now forthcoming. Jón mentions six voyages in
connection with Vinland: 1. Bjarni Herjulfsson; 2. Leif; 3.
Thorvald; 4. Thorstein and Gudrid; 5. Thorfinn Karlsefni; 6.
Freydis. Hauk, on the other hand, mentions only the two
principal voyages, those of Leif and Thorfinn; ignoring Bjarni,
he accredits his adventures to Leif on his return voyage from
Norway in 999, and he makes Thorvald a comrade of Thorfinn, and
mixes his adventures with the events of Thorfinn's voyage. Dr.
Storm considers Hauk's account intrinsically the more probable,
and thinks that in the Flateyar-bók we have a later
amplification of the tradition. But while I agree with Dr.
Storm as to the general superiority of the Hauk version, I am
not convinced by his arguments on this point. It seems to me
likely that the Flateyar-bók here preserves more faithfully the
details of an older tradition too summarily epitomized in the
Hauks-bók. As the point in no way affects the general
conclusions of the present chapter, it is hardly worth arguing
here. The main thing for us is that the divergencies between
the two versions, when coupled with their agreement in the most
important features, indicate that both writers were working
upon the basis of an antecedent written tradition, like the
authors of the first and third synoptic gospels. Only here, of
course, there are in the divergencies no symptoms of what the
Tübingen school would call "_tendenz_," impairing and obscuring
to an indeterminate extent the general trustworthiness of the
narratives. On the whole, it is pretty clear that Hauks-bók and
Flateyar-bók were independent of each other, and collated, each
in its own way, earlier documents that have probably since
perished.]
[Sidenote: Adam of Bremen.]
The testimony of Adam of Bremen brings us yet one generation nearer to
the Vinland voyages, and is very significant. Adam was much interested
in the missionary work in the north of Europe, and in 1073, the same
year that Hildebrand was elected to the papacy, he published his famous
"Historia Ecclesiastica" in which he gave an account of the conversion
of the northern nations from the time of Leo III. to that of
Hildebrand's predecessor. In prosecuting his studies, Adam made a visit
to the court of Swend Estridhsen, king of Denmark, nephew of Cnut the
Great, king of Denmark and England. Swend's reign began in 1047, so that
Adam's visit must have occurred between that date and 1073. The voyage
of Leif and Thorfinn would at that time have been within the memory of
living men, and would be likely to be known in Denmark, because the
intercourse between the several parts of the Scandinavian world was
incessant; there was continual coming and going. Adam learned what he
could of Scandinavian geography, and when he published his history, he
did just what a modern writer would do under similar circumstances; he
appended to his book some notes on the geography of those remote
countries, then so little known to his readers in central and southern
Europe. After giving some account of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, he
describes the colony in Iceland, and then the further colony in
Greenland, and concludes by saying that out in that ocean there is
another country, or island, which has been visited by many persons, and
is called Vinland because of wild grapes that grow there, out of which a
very good wine can be made. Either rumour had exaggerated the virtues of
fox-grape juice, or the Northmen were not such good judges of wine as of
ale. Adam goes on to say that corn, likewise, grows in Vinland without
cultivation; and as such a statement to European readers must needs have
a smack of falsehood, he adds that it is based not upon fable and
guess-work, but upon "trustworthy reports (_certa relatione_) of the
Danes."
[Sidenote: Adam's misconception of the situation.]
Scanty as it is, this single item of strictly contemporary testimony is
very important, because quite incidentally it gives to the later
accounts such confirmation as to show that they rest upon a solid basis
of continuous tradition and not upon mere unintelligent hearsay.[253]
The unvarying character of the tradition, in its essential details,
indicates that it must have been committed to writing at a very early
period, probably not later than the time of Ari's uncle Thorkell, who
was contemporary with Adam of Bremen. If, however, we read the whole
passage in which Adam's mention of Vinland occurs, it is clear from the
context that his own information was not derived from an inspection of
Icelandic documents. He got it, as he tells us, by talking with King
Swend; and all that he got, or all that he thought worth telling, was
this curious fact about vines and self-sown corn growing so near to
Greenland; for Adam quite misconceived the situation of Vinland, and
imagined it far up in the frozen North. After his mention of Vinland,
the continental character of which he evidently did not suspect, he goes
on immediately to say, "After this island nothing inhabitable is to be
found in that ocean, all being covered with unendurable ice and
boundless darkness." That most accomplished king, Harold Hardrada, says
Adam, tried not long since to ascertain how far the northern ocean
extended, and plunged along through this darkness until he actually
reached the end of the world, and came near tumbling off![254] Thus the
worthy Adam, while telling the truth about fox-grapes and maize as well
as he knew how, spoiled the effect of his story by putting Vinland in
the Arctic regions. The juxtaposition of icebergs and vines was a little
too close even for the mediæval mind so hospitable to strange yarns.
Adam's readers generally disbelieved the "trustworthy reports of the
Danes," and when they thought of Vinland at all, doubtless thought of it
as somewhere near the North Pole.[255] We shall do well to bear this in
mind when we come to consider the possibility of Columbus having
obtained from Adam of Bremen any hint in the least likely to be of use
in his own enterprise.[256]
[Footnote 253: It is further interesting as the only undoubted
reference to Vinland in a mediæval book written beyond the
limits of the Scandinavian world. There is also, however, a
passage in Ordericus Vitalis (_Historia Ecclesiastica_, iv.
29), in which _Finland_ and the Orkneys, along with Greenland
and Iceland, are loosely described as forming part of the
dominions of the kings of Norway. This Finland does not appear
to refer to the country of the Finns, east of the Baltic, and
it has been supposed that it may have been meant for Vinland.
The book of Ordericus was written about 1140.]
[Footnote 254: The passage from Adam of Bremen deserves to be
quoted in full: "Præterea unam adhuc insulam [regionam]
recitavit [i. e. Svendus rex] a multis in eo repertam oceano,
quæ dicitur Vinland, eo quod ibi vites sponte nascantur, vinum
bonum gerentes [ferentes]; nam et fruges ibi non seminatas
abundare, non fabulosa opinione, sed certa comperimus relatione
Danorum. Post quam insulam terra nulla invenitur habitabilis in
illo oceano, sed omnia quæ ultra sunt glacie intolerabili ac
caligine immensa plena sunt; cujus rei Marcianus ita meminit:
ultra Thyle, inquiens, navigare unius diei mare concretum est.
Tentavit hoc nuper experientissimus Nordmannorum princeps
Haroldus, qui latitudinem septentrionalis oceani perscrutatus
navibus, tandem caligantibus ante ora deficientis mundi
finibus, immane abyssi baratrum, retroactis vestigiis, vix
salvus evasit." _Descriptio insularum aquilonis_, cap. 38, apud
_Hist. Ecclesiastica_, iv. ed. Lindenbrog, Leyden, 1595. No
such voyage is known to have been undertaken by Harold of
Norway, nor is it likely. Adam was probably thinking of an
Arctic voyage undertaken by one Thorir under the auspices of
King Harold; one of the company brought back a polar bear and
gave it to King Swend, who was much pleased with it. See Rafn,
339. "Regionam" and "ferentes" in the above extract are variant
readings found in some editions.]
[Footnote 255: "Det har imidlertid ikke forhindret de senere
forfattere, der benyttede Adam, fra at blive mistænksomme, og
saalænge Adams beretning stod alene, har man i regelen vægret
sig for at tro den. Endog den norske forfatter, der skrev
'Historia Norvegiæ' og som foruden Adam vel ogsaa bar kjendt de
hjemlige sagn om Vinland, maa have anseet beretningen for
fabelagtig og derfor forbigaaet den; han kjendte altfor godt
Grønland som et nordligt isfyldt Polarland til at ville tro
paa, at i nærheden fandtes et Vinland." Storm, in _Aarbøger for
Nordisk Oldkyndighed_, etc., Copenhagen, 1887, p. 300.]
[Footnote 256: See below, p. 386.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Summary of the argument.]
To sum up the argument:--we have in Eric the Red's Saga, as copied by
Hauk Erlendsson, a document for the existence of which we are required
to account. That document contains unmistakable knowledge of some
things which mediæval Europeans could by no human possibility have
learned, except through a visit to some part of the coast of North
America further south than Labrador or Newfoundland. It tells an
eminently probable story in a simple, straightforward way, agreeing in
its details with what we know of the North American coast between Point
Judith and Cape Breton. Its general accuracy in the statement and
grouping of so many remote details is proof that its statements were
controlled by an exceedingly strong and steady tradition,--altogether
too strong and steady, in my opinion, to have been maintained simply by
word of mouth. These Icelanders were people so much given to writing
that their historic records during the Middle Ages were, as the late Sir
Richard Burton truly observed, more complete than those of any other
country in Europe.[257] It is probable that the facts mentioned in
Hauk's document rested upon some kind of a written basis as early as the
eleventh century; and it seems quite clear that the constant tradition,
by which all the allusions to Vinland and the Skrælings are controlled,
had become established by that time. The data are more scanty than we
could wish, but they all point in the same direction as surely as straws
blown by a steady wind, and their cumulative force is so great as to
fall but little short of demonstration. For these reasons it seems to me
that the Saga of Eric the Red should be accepted as history; and there
is another reason which might not have counted for much at the
beginning of this discussion, but at the end seems quite solid and
worthy of respect. The narrative begins with the colonization of
Greenland and goes on with the visits to Vinland. It is unquestionably
sound history for the first part; why should it be anything else for the
second part? What shall be said of a style of criticism which, in
dealing with one and the same document, arbitrarily cuts it in two in
the middle and calls the first half history and the last half legend?
which accepts its statements as serious so long as they keep to the
north of the sixtieth parallel, and dismisses them as idle as soon as
they pass to the south of it? Quite contrary to common sense, I should
say.
[Footnote 257: Burton, _Ultima Thule_, London, 1875, i. 237.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Absurd speculations of zealous antiquarians.]
[Sidenote: There is no reason for supposing that the Northmen founded a
colony in Vinland.]
[Sidenote: No archæological remains of the Northmen have been found
south of Davis strait.]
The only discredit which has been thrown upon the story of the Vinland
voyages, in the eyes either of scholars or of the general public, has
arisen from the eager credulity with which ingenious antiquarians have
now and then tried to prove more than facts will warrant. It is
peculiarly a case in which the judicious historian has had frequent
occasion to exclaim, Save me from my friends! The only fit criticism
upon the wonderful argument from the Dighton inscription is a reference
to the equally wonderful discovery made by Mr. Pickwick at Cobham;[258]
and when it was attempted, some sixty years ago, to prove that Governor
Arnold's old stone windmill at Newport[259] was a tower built by the
Northmen, no wonder if the exposure of this rather laughable notion
should have led many people to suppose that the story of Leif and
Thorfinn had thereby been deprived of some part of its support. But the
story never rested upon any such evidence, and does not call for
evidence of such sort. There is nothing in the story to indicate that
the Northmen ever founded a colony in Vinland, or built durable
buildings there. The distinction implicitly drawn by Adam of Bremen, who
narrates the colonization of Iceland and Greenland, and then goes on to
speak of Vinland, not as colonized, but simply as discovered, is a
distinction amply borne out by our chronicles. Nowhere is there the
slightest hint of a colony or settlement established in Vinland. On the
contrary, our plain, business-like narrative tells us that Thorfinn
Karlsefni tried to found a colony and failed; and it tells us why he
failed. The Indians were too many for him. The Northmen of the eleventh
century, without firearms, were in much less favourable condition for
withstanding the Indians than the Englishmen of the seventeenth; and at
the former period there existed no cause for emigration from Norway and
Iceland at all comparable to the economic, political, and religious
circumstances which, in a later age, sent thousands of Englishmen to
Virginia and New England. The founding of colonies in America in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was no pastime; it was a tale of
drudgery, starvation, and bloodshed, that curdles one's blood to read;
more attempts failed than succeeded. Assuredly Thorfinn gave proof of
the good sense ascribed to him when he turned his back upon Vinland. But
if he or any other Northman had ever succeeded in establishing a colony
there, can anybody explain why it should not have stamped the fact of
its existence either upon the soil, or upon history, or both, as
unmistakably as the colony of Greenland? Archæological remains of the
Northmen abound in Greenland, all the way from Immartinek to near Cape
Farewell; the existence of one such relic on the North American
continent has never yet been proved. Not a single vestige of the
Northmen's presence here, at all worthy of credence, has ever been
found. The writers who have, from time to time, mistaken other things
for such vestiges, have been led astray because they have failed to
distinguish between the different conditions of proof in Greenland and
in Vinland. As Mr. Laing forcibly put the case, nearly half a century
ago, "Greenland was a colony with communications, trade, civil and
ecclesiastical establishments, and a considerable population," for more
than four centuries. "Vinland was only visited by flying parties of
woodcutters, remaining at the utmost two or three winters, but never
settling there permanently.... To expect here, as in Greenland, material
proofs to corroborate the documentary proofs, is weakening the latter by
linking them to a sort of evidence which, from the very nature of the
case,--the temporary visits of a ship's crew,--cannot exist in Vinland,
and, as in the case of Greenland, come in to support them."[260]
[Footnote 258: See _Pickwick Papers_, chap. xi. I am indebted
to Mr. Tillinghast, of Harvard University Library, for calling
my attention to a letter from Rev. John Lathrop, of Boston, to
Hon. John Davis, August 10, 1809, containing George
Washington's opinion of the Dighton inscription. When President
Washington visited Cambridge in the fall of 1789, he was shown
about the college buildings by the president and fellows of the
university. While in the museum he was observed to "fix his
eye" upon a full-size copy of the Dighton inscription made by
the librarian, James Winthrop. Dr. Lathrop, who happened to be
standing near Washington, "ventured to give the opinion which
several learned men had entertained with respect to the origin
of the inscription." Inasmuch as some of the characters were
thought to resemble "oriental" characters, and inasmuch as the
ancient Phoenicians had sailed outside of the Pillars of
Hercules, it was "conjectured" that some Phoenician vessels had
sailed into Narragansett bay and up the Taunton river. "While
detained by winds, or other causes now unknown, the people, it
has been conjectured, made the inscription, now to be seen on
the face of the rock, and which we may suppose to be a record
of their fortunes or of their fate."
"After I had given the above account, the President smiled and
said he believed the learned gentlemen whom I had mentioned
were mistaken; and added that in the younger part of his life
his business called him to be very much in the wilderness of
Virginia, which gave him an opportunity to become acquainted
with many of the customs and practices of the Indians. The
Indians, he said, had a way of writing and recording their
transactions, either in war or hunting. When they wished to
make any such record, or leave an account of their exploits to
any who might come after them, they scraped off the outer bark
of a tree, and with a vegetable ink, or a little paint which
they carried with them, on the smooth surface they wrote in a
way that was generally understood by the people of their
respective tribes. As he had so often examined the rude way of
writing practised by the Indians of Virginia, and observed many
of the characters on the inscription then before him so nearly
resembled the characters used by the Indians, he had no doubt
the inscription was made long ago by some natives of America."
_Proceedings of Massachusetts Historical Society_, vol. x. p.
115. This pleasant anecdote shows in a new light Washington's
accuracy of observation and unfailing common-sense. Such
inscriptions have been found by the thousand, scattered over
all parts of the United States; for a learned study of them see
Garrick Mallery, "Pictographs of the North American Indians,"
_Reports of Bureau of Ethnology_, iv. 13-256. "The voluminous
discussion upon the Dighton rock inscription," says Colonel
Mallery, "renders it impossible wholly to neglect it.... It is
merely a type of Algonquin rock-carving, not so interesting as
many others.... It is of purely Indian origin, and is executed
in the peculiar symbolic character of the Kekeewin," p. 20. The
characters observed by Washington in the Virginia forests would
very probably have been of the same type. Judge Davis, to whom
Dr. Lathrop's letter was addressed, published in 1809 a paper
maintaining the Indian origin of the Dighton inscription.
A popular error, once started on its career, is as hard to kill
as a cat. Otherwise it would be surprising to find, in so
meritorious a book as Oscar Peschel's _Geschichte des
Zeitalters der Entdeckungen_, Stuttgart, 1877, p. 82, an
unsuspecting reliance upon Rafn's ridiculous interpretation of
this Algonquin pictograph. In an American writer as well
equipped as Peschel, this particular kind of blunder would of
course be impossible; and one is reminded of Humboldt's remark,
"Il est des recherches qui ne peuvent s'exécuter que près des
sources mêmes." _Examen critique_, etc., tom. ii. p. 102.
In old times, I may add, such vagaries were usually saddled
upon the Phoenicians, until since Rafn's time the Northmen have
taken their place as the pack-horses for all sorts of
antiquarian "conjecture."]
[Footnote 259: See Palfrey's _History of New England_, vol. i.
pp. 57-59; Mason's _Reminiscences of Newport_, pp. 392-407.
Laing (_Heimskringla_, pp. 182-185) thinks the Yankees must
have intended to fool Professor Rafn and the Royal Society of
Antiquaries at Copenhagen; "Those sly rogues of Americans,"
says he, "dearly love a quiet hoax;" and he can almost hear
them chuckling over their joke in their club-room at Newport. I
am afraid these Yankees were less rogues and more fools than
Mr. Laing makes out.]
[Footnote 260: Laing, _Heimskringla_, vol. i. p. 181.]
[Sidenote: If the Northmen had founded a successful colony, they would
have introduced domestic cattle into the North American fauna;]
[Sidenote: and such animals could not have vanished and left no trace of
their existence.]
The most convincing proof that the Northmen never founded a colony in
America, south of Davis strait, is furnished by the total absence of
horses, cattle, and other domestic animals from the soil of North
America until they were brought hither by the Spanish, French, and
English settlers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If the
Northmen had ever settled in Vinland, they would have brought cattle
with them, and if their colony had been successful, it would have
introduced such cattle permanently into the fauna of the country.
Indeed, our narrative tells us that Karlsefni's people "had with them
all kinds of cattle, having the intention to settle in the land if they
could."[261] Naturally the two things are coupled in the narrator's
mind. So the Portuguese carried livestock in their earliest expeditions
to the Atlantic islands;[262] Columbus brought horses and cows, with
vines and all kinds of grain, on his second voyage to the West
Indies;[263] when the French, under Baron Léry, made a disastrous
attempt to found a colony on or about Cape Breton in 1518, they left
behind them, upon Sable island, a goodly stock of cows and pigs, which
throve and multiplied long after their owners had gone;[264] the
Pilgrims at Plymouth had cattle, goats, and swine as early as 1623.[265]
In fact, it would be difficult to imagine a community of Europeans
subsisting anywhere for any length of time without domestic animals. We
have seen that the Northmen took pains to raise cattle in Greenland, and
were quick to comment upon the climate of Vinland as favourable for
pasturage. To suppose that these men ever founded a colony in North
America, but did not bring domestic animals thither, would be absurd.
But it would be scarcely less absurd to suppose that such animals,
having been once fairly introduced into the fauna of North America,
would afterward have vanished without leaving a vestige of their
presence. As for the few cattle for which Thorfinn could find room in
his three or four dragon-ships, we may easily believe that his people
ate them up before leaving the country, especially since we are told
they were threatened with famine. But that domestic cattle, after being
supported on American soil during the length of time involved in the
establishment of a successful colony (say, for fifty or a hundred
years), should have disappeared without leaving abundant traces of
themselves, is simply incredible. Horses and kine are not dependent upon
man for their existence; when left to themselves, in almost any part of
the world, they run wild and flourish in what naturalists call a "feral"
state. Thus we find feral horned cattle in the Falkland and in the
Ladrone islands, as well as in the ancient Chillingham Park, in
Northumberland; we find feral pigs in Jamaica; feral European dogs in La
Plata; feral horses in Turkestan, and also in Mexico, descended from
Spanish horses.[266] If the Northmen had ever founded a colony in
Vinland, how did it happen that the English and French in the
seventeenth century, and from that day to this, have never set eyes upon
a wild horse, or wild cattle, pigs, or hounds, or any such indication
whatever of the former presence of civilized Europeans? I do not
recollect ever seeing this argument used before, but it seems to me
conclusive. It raises against the hypothesis of a Norse colonization in
Vinland a presumption extremely difficult if not impossible to
overcome.[267]
[Footnote 261: "Their höfdhu medh sèr allskonar fènadh, thvíat
their ætlödhu at byggja landit, ef their mætti that," i. e.,
"illi omne pecudum genus secum habuerunt, nam terram, si
liceret, coloniis frequentare cogitarunt." Rafn, p. 57.]
[Footnote 262: Major, _Prince Henry the Navigator_, p. 241.]
[Footnote 263: Irving's _Life of Columbus_, New York, 1828,
vol. i. p. 293.]
[Footnote 264: _Histoire chronologique de la Nouvelle France_,
pp. 40, 58; this work, written in 1689 by the Recollet friar
Sixte le Tac, has at length been published (Paris, 1888) with
notes and other original documents by Eugène Réveillaud. See,
also, Læt, _Novus Orbis_, 39.]
[Footnote 265: John Smith, _Generall Historie_, 247.]
[Footnote 266: Darwin, _Animals and Plants under
Domestication_, London, 1868, vol. i pp. 27, 77, 84.]
[Footnote 267: The views of Professor Horsford as to the
geographical situation of Vinland and its supposed colonization
by Northmen are set forth in his four monographs, _Discovery of
America by Northmen--address at the unveiling of the statue of
Leif Eriksen_, etc., Boston, 1888; _The Problem of the
Northmen_, Cambridge, 1889; _The Discovery of the Ancient City
of Norumbega_, Boston, 1890; _The Defences of Norumbega_,
Boston, 1891. Among Professor Horsford's conclusions the two
principal are: 1. that the "river flowing through a lake into
the sea" (Rafn, p. 147) is Charles river, and that Leif's
booths were erected near the site of the present Cambridge
hospital; 2. that "Norumbega"--a word loosely applied by some
early explorers to some region or regions somewhere between the
New Jersey coast and the Bay of Fundy--was the Indian utterance
of "Norbega" or "Norway;" and that certain stone walls and dams
at and near Watertown are vestiges of an ancient "city of
Norumbega," which was founded and peopled by Northmen and
carried on a more or less extensive trade with Europe for more
than three centuries.
With regard to the first of these conclusions, it is perhaps as
likely that Leif's booths were within the present limits of
Cambridge as in any of the numerous places which different
writers have confidently assigned for them, all the way from
Point Judith to Cape Breton. A judicious scholar will object
not so much to the conclusion as to the character of the
arguments by which it is reached. Too much weight is attached
to hypothetical etymologies.
With regard to the Norse colony alleged to have flourished for
three centuries, it is pertinent to ask, what became of its
cattle and horses? Why do we find no vestiges of the
burial-places of these Europeans? or of iron tools and weapons
of mediæval workmanship? Why is there no documentary mention,
in Scandinavia or elsewhere in Europe, of this transatlantic
trade? etc., etc. Until such points as these are disposed of,
any further consideration of the hypothesis may properly be
postponed.]
[Illustration: Ruins of the church at Kakortok.]
[Sidenote: Further fortunes of the Greenland colony.]
[Sidenote: Bishop Eric's voyage in search of Vinland, 1121.]
[Sidenote: The ship from Markland, 1347.]
As for the colony in Greenland, while its population seems never to have
exceeded 5,000 or 6,000 souls, it maintained its existence and its
intercourse with Europe uninterruptedly from its settlement in 986, by
Eric the Red, for more than four hundred years. Early in the fourteenth
century the West Bygd, or western settlement, near Godthaab, seems to
have contained ninety farmsteads and four churches; while the East Bygd,
or eastern settlement, near Julianeshaab, contained one hundred and
ninety farmsteads, with one cathedral and eleven smaller churches, two
villages, and three or four monasteries.[268] Between Tunnudliorbik and
Igaliko fiords, and about thirty miles from the ruined stone houses of
Brattahlid, there now stands, imposing in its decay, the simple but
massive structure of Kakortok church, once the "cathedral" church of the
Gardar bishopric, where the Credo was intoned and censers swung, while
not less than ten generations lived and died. About the beginning of the
twelfth century there was a movement at Rome for establishing new
dioceses in "the islands of the ocean;" in 1106 a bishop's see was
erected in the north of Iceland, and one at about the same time in the
Færoes. In 1112, Eric Gnupsson,[269] having been appointed by Pope
Paschal II. "bishop of Greenland and Vinland _in partibus infidelium_,"
went from Iceland to organize his new diocese in Greenland. It is
mentioned in at least six different vellums that in 1121 Bishop Eric
"went in search of Vinland."[270] It is nowhere mentioned that he found
it, and Dr. Storm thinks it probable that he perished in the enterprise,
for, within the next year or next but one, the Greenlanders asked for a
new bishop, and Eric's successor, Bishop Arnold, was consecrated in
1124.[271] After Eric there was a regular succession of bishops
appointed by the papal court, down at least to 1409, and seventeen of
these bishops are mentioned by name. We do not learn that any of them
ever repeated Eric's experiment of searching for Vinland. So far as
existing Icelandic vellums know, there was no voyage to Vinland after
1121. Very likely, however, there may have been occasional voyages for
timber from Greenland to the coast of the American continent, which did
not attract attention or call for comment in Iceland. This is rendered
somewhat probable from an entry in the "Elder Skálholt Annals," a vellum
written about 1362. This informs us that in 1347 "there came a ship from
Greenland, less in size than small Icelandic trading-vessels. It was
without an anchor. There were seventeen men on board, and they had
sailed to Markland, but had afterwards been driven hither by storms at
sea."[272] This is the latest mention of any voyage to or from the
countries beyond Greenland.
[Footnote 268: Laing, _Heimskringla_, i. 141. A description of
the ruins may be found in two papers in _Meddelelser om
Gronland_, Copenhagen, 1883 and 1889.]
[Footnote 269: Sometimes called Eric Uppsi; he is mentioned in
the Landnáma-bók as a native of Iceland.]
[Footnote 270: Storm, _Islandske Annaler_, Christiania, 1888;
Reeves, _The Finding of Wineland the Good_, London, 1890, pp.
79-81.]
[Footnote 271: Storm, in _Aarbøger for Nordisk Oldkyndighed_,
1887, p. 319.]
[Footnote 272: Reeves, _op. cit._ p. 83. In another vellum it
is mentioned that in 1347 "a ship came from Greenland, which
had sailed to Markland, and there were eighteen men on board."
As Mr. Reeves well observes: "The nature of the information
indicates that the knowledge of the discovery had not
altogether faded from the memories of the Icelanders settled in
Greenland. It seems further to lend a measure of plausibility
to a theory that people from the Greenland colony may from time
to time have visited the coast to the southwest of their home
for supplies of wood, or for some kindred purpose. The visitors
in this case had evidently intended to return directly from
Markland to Greenland, and had they not been driven out of
their course to Iceland, the probability is that this voyage
would never have found mention in Icelandic chronicles, and all
knowledge of it must have vanished as completely as did the
colony to which the Markland visitors belonged."]
[Sidenote: The Greenland colony attacked by Eskimos.]
If the reader is inclined to wonder why a colony could be maintained in
southern Greenland more easily than on the coasts of Nova Scotia or
Massachusetts, or even why the Northmen did not at once abandon their
fiords at Brattahlid and come in a flock to these pleasanter places, he
must call to mind two important circumstances. First, the settlers in
southern Greenland did not meet with barbarous natives, but only with
vestiges of their former presence. It was not until the twelfth century
that, in roaming the icy deserts of the far north in quest of seals and
bearskins, the Norse hunters encountered tribes of Eskimo using stone
knives and whalebone arrow-heads;[273] and it was not until the
fourteenth century that we hear of their getting into a war with these
people. In 1349 the West Bygd was attacked and destroyed by Eskimos; in
1379 they invaded the East Bygd and wrought sad havoc; and it is
generally believed that some time after 1409 they completed the
destruction of the colony.
[Footnote 273: Storm, _Monumenta historica Norvegiæ_, p. 77.]
[Sidenote: Queen Margaret's monopoly, and its baneful effects.]
Secondly, the relative proximity of Greenland to the mother country,
Iceland, made it much easier to sustain a colony there than in the more
distant Vinland. In colonizing, as in campaigning, distance from one's
base is sometimes the supreme circumstance. This is illustrated by the
fact that the very existence of the Greenland colony itself depended
upon perpetual and untrammelled exchange of commodities with Iceland;
and when once the source of supply was cut off, the colony soon
languished. In 1380 and 1387 the crowns of Norway and Denmark descended
upon Queen Margaret, and soon she made her precious contribution to the
innumerable swarm of instances that show with how little wisdom the
world is ruled. She made the trade to Greenland, Iceland, and the Færoe
isles "a royal monopoly which could only be carried on in ships
belonging to, or licensed by, the sovereign.... Under the monopoly of
trade the Icelanders could have no vessels, and no object for sailing to
Greenland; and the vessels fitted out by government, or its lessees,
would only be ready to leave Denmark or Bergen for Iceland at the season
they ought to have been ready to leave Iceland to go to Greenland. The
colony gradually fell into oblivion."[274] When this prohibitory
management was abandoned after 1534 by Christian III., it was altogether
too late. Starved by the miserable policy of governmental interference
with freedom of trade, the little Greenland colony soon became too weak
to sustain itself against the natives whose hostility had, for half a
century, been growing more and more dangerous. Precisely when or how it
perished we do not know. The latest notice we have of the colony is of a
marriage ceremony performed (probably in the Kakortok church), in 1409,
by Endrede Andreasson, the last bishop.[275] When, after three
centuries, the great missionary, Hans Egede, visited Greenland, in 1721,
he found the ruins of farmsteads and villages, the population of which
had vanished.
[Footnote 274: Laing, _Heimskringla_, i. 147. It has been
supposed that the Black Death, by which all Europe was ravaged
in the middle part of the fourteenth century, may have crossed
to Greenland, and fatally weakened the colony there; but
Vigfusson says that the Black Death never touched Iceland
(_Sturlunga Saga_, vol. i. p. cxxix.), so that it is not so
likely to have reached Greenland.]
[Footnote 275: Laing, _op. cit._ i. 142.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The story of the Venetian brothers.]
Our account of pre-Columbian voyages to America would be very incomplete
without some mention of the latest voyage said to have been made by
European vessels to the ancient settlement of the East Bygd. I refer to
the famous narrative of the Zeno brothers, which has furnished so many
subjects of contention for geographers that a hundred years ago John
Pinkerton called it "one of the most puzzling in the whole circle of
literature."[276] Nevertheless a great deal has been done, chiefly
through the acute researches of Mr. Richard Henry Major and Baron
Nordenskjöld, toward clearing up this mystery, so that certain points in
the Zeno narrative may now be regarded as established;[277] and from
these essential points we may form an opinion as to the character of
sundry questionable details.
[Footnote 276: Yet this learned historian was quite correct in
his own interpretation of Zeno's story, for in the same place
he says, "If real, his Frisland is the Ferro islands, and his
Zichmni is Sinclair." Pinkerton's _History of Scotland_,
London, 1797, vol. i. p. 261.]
[Footnote 277: Major, _The Voyages of the Venetian Brothers,
Nicolò and Antonio Zeno, to the Northern Seas in the XIVth
Century_, London, 1873 (Hakluyt Society); cf. Nordenskjöld, _Om
bröderna Zenos resor och de äldsta kartor öfner Norden_,
Stockholm, 1883.]
[Sidenote: The Zeno family.]
[Sidenote: Nicolò Zeno wrecked upon one of the Færoe islands, 1390.]
[Sidenote: Nicolò's voyage to Greenland, cir. 1394.]
[Sidenote: Voyage of Earl Sinclair and Antonio Zeno.]
The Zeno family was one of the oldest and most distinguished in Venice.
Among its members in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries we find a
doge, several senators and members of the Council of Ten, and military
commanders of high repute. Of these, Pietro Dracone Zeno, about 1350,
was captain-general of the Christian league for withstanding the Turks;
and his son Carlo achieved such success in the war against Genoa that he
was called the Lion of St. Mark, and his services to Venice were
compared with those of Camillus to Rome. Now this Carlo had two
brothers,--Nicolò, known as "the Chevalier," and Antonio. After the
close of the Genoese war the Chevalier Nicolò was seized with a desire
to see the world,[278] and more particularly England and Flanders. So
about 1390 he fitted up a ship at his own expense, and, passing out from
the strait of Gibraltar, sailed northward upon the Atlantic. After some
days of fair weather, he was caught in a storm and blown along for many
days more, until at length the ship was cast ashore on one of the Færoe
islands and wrecked, though most of the crew and goods were rescued.
According to the barbarous custom of the Middle Ages, some of the
natives of the island (Scandinavians) came swarming about the
unfortunate strangers to kill and rob them, but a great chieftain, with
a force of knights and men-at-arms, arrived upon the spot in time to
prevent such an outrage. This chief was Henry Sinclair of Roslyn, who in
1379 had been invested by King Hacon VI., of Norway, with the earldom of
the Orkneys and Caithness. On learning Zeno's rank and importance,
Sinclair treated him with much courtesy, and presently a friendship
sprang up between the two. Sinclair was then engaged with a fleet of
thirteen vessels in conquering and annexing to his earldom the Færoe
islands, and on several occasions profited by the military and nautical
skill of the Venetian captain. Nicolò seems to have enjoyed this
stirring life, for he presently sent to his brother Antonio in Venice an
account of it, which induced the latter to come and join him in the
Færoe islands. Antonio arrived in the course of 1391, and remained in
the service of Sinclair fourteen years, returning to Venice in time to
die there in 1406. After Antonio's arrival, his brother Nicolò was
appointed to the chief command of Sinclair's little fleet, and assisted
him in taking possession of the Shetland islands, which were properly
comprised within his earldom. In the course of these adventures, Nicolò
seems to have had his interest aroused in reports about Greenland. It
was not more than four or five years since Queen Margaret had undertaken
to make a royal monopoly of the Greenland trade in furs and whale oil,
and this would be a natural topic of conversation in the Færoes. In
July, 1393, or 1394, Nicolò Zeno sailed to Greenland with three ships,
and visited the East Bygd. After spending some time there, not being
accustomed to such a climate, he caught cold, and died soon after his
return to the Færoes, probably in 1395. His brother Antonio succeeded to
his office and such emoluments as pertained to it; and after a while, at
Earl Sinclair's instigation, he undertook a voyage of discovery in the
Atlantic ocean, in order to verify some fishermen's reports of the
existence of land a thousand miles or more to the west. One of these
fishermen was to serve as guide to the expedition, but unfortunately he
died three days before the ships were ready to sail. Nevertheless, the
expedition started, with Sinclair himself on board, and encountered
vicissitudes of weather and fortune. In fog and storm they lost all
reckoning of position, and found themselves at length on the western
coast of a country which, in the Italian narrative, is called "Icaria,"
but which has been supposed, with some probability, to have been Kerry,
in Ireland. Here, as they went ashore for fresh water, they were
attacked by the natives and several of their number were slain. From
this point they sailed out into the broad Atlantic again, and reached a
place supposed to be Greenland, but which is so vaguely described that
the identification is very difficult.[279] Our narrative here ends
somewhat confusedly. We are told that Sinclair remained in this place,
"and explored the whole of the country with great diligence, as well as
the coasts on both sides of Greenland." Antonio Zeno, on the other hand,
returned with part of the fleet to the Færoe islands, where he arrived
after sailing eastward for about a month, during five and twenty days of
which he saw no land. After relating these things and paying a word of
affectionate tribute to the virtues of Earl Sinclair, "a prince as
worthy of immortal memory as any that ever lived for his great bravery
and remarkable goodness," Antonio closes his letter abruptly: "But of
this I will say no more in this letter, and hope to be with you very
shortly, and to satisfy your curiosity on other subjects by word of
mouth."[280]
[Footnote 278: "Or M. Nicolò il Caualiere ... entrò in
grandissimo desiderio di ueder il mondo, e peregrinare, e farsi
capace di varij costumi e di lingue de gli huomini, acciò che
con le occasioni poi potesse meglio far seruigio alla sua
patria ed à se acquistar fama e onore." The narrative gives
1380 as the date of the voyage, but Mr. Major has shown that it
must have been a mistake for 1390 (_op. cit._ xlii.-xlviii.).]
[Footnote 279: It appears on the Zeno map as "Trin
p[-p]montor," about the site of Cape Farewell; but how could
six days' sail W. from Kerry, followed by four days' sail N.
E., reach any such point? and how does this short outward sail
consist with the return voyage, twenty days E. and eight days
S. E., to the Færoes? The place is also said to have had "a
fertile soil" and "good rivers," a description in nowise
answering to Greenland.]
[Footnote 280: "Però non ni dirò altro in questa lettera,
sperando tosto di essere con uoi, e di sodisfarui di molte
altre cose con la uiua uoce." Major, p. 34.]
[Sidenote: Publication of the remains of the documents by the younger
Nicolò Zeno.]
The person thus addressed by Antonio was his brother, the illustrious
Carlo Zeno. Soon after reaching home, after this long and eventful
absence, Antonio died. Besides his letters he had written a more
detailed account of the affairs in the northern seas. These papers
remained for more than a century in the palace of the family at Venice,
until one of the children, in his mischievous play, got hold of them and
tore them up. This child was Antonio's great-great-great-grandson,
Nicolò, born in 1515. When this young Nicolò had come to middle age, and
was a member of the Council of Ten, he happened to come across some
remnants of these documents, and then all at once he remembered with
grief how he had, in his boyhood, pulled them to pieces.[281] In the
light of the rapid progress in geographical discovery since 1492, this
story of distant voyages had now for Nicolò an interest such as it could
not have had for his immediate ancestors. Searching the palace he found
a few grimy old letters and a map or sailing chart, rotten with age,
which had been made or at any rate brought home by his ancestor Antonio.
Nicolò drew a fresh copy of this map, and pieced together the letters as
best he could, with more or less explanatory text of his own, and the
result was the little book which he published in 1558.[282]
[Footnote 281: "All these letters were written by Messire
Antonio to Messire Carlo, his brother; and I am grieved that
the book and many other writings on these subjects have, I
don't know how, come sadly to ruin; for, being but a child when
they fell into my hands, I, not knowing what they were, tore
them in pieces, as children will do, and sent them all to ruin:
a circumstance which I cannot now recall without the greatest
sorrow. Nevertheless, in order that such an important memorial
should not be lost, I have put the whole in order, as well as I
could, in the above narrative." Major, p. 35.]
[Footnote 282: Nicolò Zeno, _Dello scoprimento dell' isole
Frislanda, Eslanda, Engronelanda, Estotilanda, & Icaria, fatto
per due fratelli Zeni, M. Nicolò it Caualiere, & M. Antonio.
Libro Vno, col disegno di dette Isole._ Venice, 1558. Mr.
Major's book contains the entire text, with an English
translation.]
[Illustration: Zeno Map, cir. 1400--western half.]
[Illustration: Zeno Map, cir. 1400--eastern half.]
[Sidenote: Queer transformations of names.]
[Sidenote: "Frislanda."]
Unfortunately young Nicolò, with the laudable purpose of making it all
as clear as he could, thought it necessary not simply to reproduce
the old weather-beaten map, but to amend it by putting on here and there
such places and names as his diligent perusal of the manuscript led him
to deem wanting to its completeness.[283] Under the most favourable
circumstances that is a very difficult sort of thing to do, but in this
case the circumstances were far from favourable. Of course Nicolò got
these names and places into absurd positions, thus perplexing the map
and damaging its reputation. With regard to names, there was obscurity
enough, to begin with. In the first place, they were Icelandic names
falling upon the Italian ears of old Nicolò and Antonio, and spelled by
them according to their own notions; in the second place, these
outlandish names, blurred and defaced withal in the weather-stained
manuscript, were a puzzle to the eye of young Nicolò, who could but
decipher them according to _his_ notions. The havoc that can be wrought
upon winged words, subjected to such processes, is sometimes
marvellous.[284] Perhaps the slightest sufferer, in this case, was the
name of the group of islands upon one of which the shipwrecked Nicolò
was rescued by Sinclair. The name _Færoislander_ sounded to Italian
ears as _Frislanda_, and was uniformly so written.[285] Then the
pronunciation of _Shetland_ was helped by prefixing a vowel sound, as is
common in Italian, and so it came to be _Estland_ and _Esland_. This led
young Nicolò's eye in two or three places to confound it with _Islanda_,
or _Iceland_, and probably in one place with _Irlanda_, or _Ireland_.
Where old Nicolò meant to say that the island upon which he was living
with Earl Sinclair was somewhat larger than Shetland, young Nicolò
understood him as saying that it was somewhat larger than Ireland; and
so upon the amended map "Frislanda" appears as one great island
surrounded by tiny islands.[286] After the publication of this map, in
1558, sundry details were copied from it by the new maps of that day, so
that even far down into the seventeenth century it was common to depict
a big "Frislanda" somewhere in mid-ocean. When at length it was proved
that no such island exists, the reputation of the Zeno narrative was
seriously damaged. The nadir of reaction against it was reached when it
was declared to be a tissue of lies invented by the younger Nicolò,[287]
apparently for the purpose of setting up a Venetian claim to the
discovery of America.
[Footnote 283: The map is taken from Winsor's _Narr. and Crit.
Hist._, i. 127, where it is reduced from Nordenskjöld's
_Studien ok Forskningar_. A better because larger copy may be
found in Major's _Voyages of the Venetian Brothers_. The
original map measures 12 x 15-1/2 inches. In the legend at the
top the date is given as M CCC LXXX. but evidently one X has
been omitted, for it should be 1390, and is correctly so given
by Marco Barbaro, in his _Genealogie dei nobili Veneti_; of
Antonio Zeno he says, "Scrisse con il fratello Nicolò Kav. li
viaggi dell' Isole sotto il polo artico, e di quei scoprimente
del 1390, e che per ordine di Zieno, re di Frislanda, si portò
nel continente d'Estotilanda nell' America settentrionale e che
si fermò 14 anni in Frislanda, cioè 4 con suo fratello Nicolò e
10 solo." (This valuable work has never been published. The
original MS., in Barbaro's own handwriting, is preserved in the
Biblioteca di San Marco at Venice. There is a seventeenth
century copy of it among the Egerton MSS. in the British
Museum.)--Nicolò did not leave Italy until after December 14,
1388 (Muratori, _Rerum Italicarum Scriptores_, tom. xxii. p.
779). The map can hardly have been made before Antonio's
voyage, about 1400. The places on the map are wildly out of
position, as was common enough in old maps. Greenland is
attached to Norway according to the general belief in the
Middle Ages. In his confusion between the names "Estland" and
"Islanda," young Nicolò has tried to reproduce the Shetland
group, or something like it, and attach it to Iceland.
"Icaria," probably Kerry, in Ireland, has been made into an
island and carried far out into the Atlantic. The queerest of
young Nicolò's mistakes was in placing the monastery of St.
Olaus ("St. Thomas"). He should have placed it on the southwest
coast of Greenland, near his "Af [-p]montor;" but he has got it
on the extreme northeast, just about where Greenland is joined
to Europe.]
[Footnote 284: "Combien de coquilles typographiques ou de
lectures défectueuses ont créé de noms boiteux, qu'il est
ensuite bien difficile, quelquefois impossible de redresser!
L'histoire et la géographie en sont pleines." Avezac, _Martin
Waltzemüller_, p. 9.
It is interesting to see how thoroughly words can be disguised
by an unfamiliar phonetic spelling. I have seen people
hopelessly puzzled by the following bill, supposed to have been
made out by an illiterate stable-keeper somewhere in England:--
Osafada 7s 6d
Takinonimome 4d
------
7s 10d
Some years ago Professor Huxley told me of a letter from France
which came to the London post-office thus addressed:--
Sromfrédévi,
Piqué du lait,
Londres,
Angleterre.
This letter, after exciting at first helpless bewilderment and
then busy speculation, was at length delivered to the right
person, _Sir Humphry Davy_, in his rooms at the Royal
Institution on Albemarle street, just off from _Piccadilly_!]
[Footnote 285: Columbus, on his journey to Iceland in 1477,
also heard the name _Færoislander_ as _Frislanda_, and so wrote
it in the letter preserved for us in his biography by his son
Ferdinand, hereafter to be especially noticed. See Major's
remarks on this, _op. cit._ p. xix.]
[Footnote 286: Perhaps in the old worn-out map the archipelago
may have been blurred so as to be mistaken for one island. This
would aid in misleading young Nicolò.]
[Footnote 287: See the elaborate paper by Admiral Zahrtmann, in
_Nordisk Tidsskrift for Oldkyndighed_, Copenhagen, 1834, vol.
i., and the English translation of it in _Journal of Royal
Geographical Society_, London, 1836, vol. v. All that human
ingenuity is ever likely to devise against the honesty of
Zeno's narrative is presented in this erudite essay, which has
been so completely demolished under Mr. Major's heavy strokes
that there is not enough of it left to pick up. As to this part
of the question, we may now safely cry, "finis, laus Deo!"]
[Sidenote: The narrative nowhere makes a claim to the "discovery of
America."]
The narrative, however, not only sets up no such claim, but nowhere
betrays a consciousness that its incidents entitle it to make such a
claim. It had evidently not occurred to young Nicolò to institute any
comparison between his ancestors' voyages to Greenland and the voyages
of Columbus to the western hemisphere, of which _we now know_ Greenland
to be a part. The knowledge of the North American coast, and of the
bearing of one fact upon another fact in relation to it, was still, in
1558, in an extremely vague and rudimentary condition. In the mind of
the Zeno brothers, as the map shows, Greenland was a European peninsula;
such was the idea common among mediæval Northmen, as is nowhere better
illustrated than in this map. Neither in his references to Greenland,
nor to Estotiland and Drogio, presently to be considered, does young
Nicolò appear in the light of a man urging or suggesting a "claim." He
appears simply as a modest and conscientious editor, interested in the
deeds of his ancestors and impressed with the fact that he has got hold
of important documents, but intent only upon giving his material as
correctly as possible, and refraining from all sort of comment except
such as now and then seems needful to explain the text as he himself
understands it.
[Sidenote: Earl Sinclair.]
[Sidenote: Bardsen's "Description of Greenland."]
The identification of "Frislanda" with the Færoe islands was put beyond
doubt by the discovery that the "Zichmni" of the narrative means Henry
Sinclair; and, in order to make this discovery, it was only necessary to
know something about the history of the Orkneys; hence old Pinkerton, as
above remarked, got it right. The name "Zichmni" is, no doubt, a fearful
and wonderful bejugglement; but Henry Sinclair is a personage well known
to history in that corner of the world, and the deeds of "Zichmni," as
recounted in the narrative, are neither more nor less than the deeds of
Sinclair. Doubtless Antonio spelled the name in some queer way of his
own, and then young Nicolò, unable to read his ancestor's pot-hooks
where--as in the case of proper names--there was no clue to guide him,
contrived to make it still queerer. Here we have strong proof of the
genuineness of the narrative. If Nicolò had been concocting a story in
which Earl Sinclair was made to figure, he would have obtained his
knowledge from literary sources, and thus would have got his names
right; the earl might have appeared as Enrico de Santo Claro, but not as
"Zichmni." It is not at all likely, however, that any literary knowledge
of Sinclair and his doings was obtainable in Italy in the sixteenth
century. The Zeno narrative, moreover, in its references to Greenland in
connection with the Chevalier Nicolò's visit to the East Bygd, shows a
topographical knowledge that was otherwise quite inaccessible to the
younger Nicolò. Late in the fourteenth century Ivar Bardsen, steward to
the Gardar bishopric, wrote a description of Greenland, with sailing
directions for reaching it, which modern research has proved to have
been accurate in every particular. Bardsen's details and those of the
Zeno narrative mutually corroborate each other. But Bardsen's book did
not make its way down into Europe until the very end of the sixteenth
century,[288] and then amid the dense ignorance prevalent concerning
Greenland its details were not understood until actual exploration
within the last seventy years has at length revealed their meaning. The
genuineness of the Zeno narrative is thus conclusively proved by its
knowledge of Arctic geography, such as could have been obtained only by
a visit to the far North at a time before the Greenland colony had
finally lost touch with its mother country.
[Footnote 288: It was translated into Dutch by the famous
Arctic explorer, William Barentz, whose voyages are so
graphically described in Motley's _United Netherlands_, vol.
iii. pp. 552-576. An English translation was made for Henry
Hudson. A very old Danish version may be found in Rafn's
_Antiquitates Americanæ_, pp. 300-318; Danish, Latin, and
English versions in Major's _Voyages of the Venetian Brothers_,
etc., pp. 39-54; and an English version in De Costa's _Sailing
Directions of Henry Hudson_, Albany, 1869, pp. 61-96.]
[Sidenote: The monastery of St. Olaus and its hot spring.]
The visit of the Chevalier Nicolò, therefore, about 1394, has a peculiar
interest as the last distinct glimpse afforded us of the colony founded
by Eric the Red before its melancholy disappearance from history.
Already the West Bygd had ceased to exist. Five and forty years before
that time it had been laid waste and its people massacred by Eskimos,
and trusty Ivar Bardsen, tardily sent with a small force to the rescue,
found nothing left alive but a few cattle and sheep running wild.[289]
Nicolò Zeno, arriving in the East Bygd, found there a monastery
dedicated to St. Olaus, a name which in the narrative has become St.
Thomas. To this monastery came friars from Norway and other countries,
but for the most part from Iceland.[290] It stood "hard by a hill which
vomited fire like Vesuvius and Etna." There was also in the
neighbourhood a spring of hot water which the ingenious friars conducted
in pipes into their monastery and church, thereby keeping themselves
comfortable in the coldest weather. This water, as it came into the
kitchen, was hot enough to boil meats and vegetables. The monks even
made use of it in warming covered gardens or hot-beds in which they
raised sundry fruits and herbs that in milder climates grow out of
doors.[291] "Hither in summertime come many vessels from ... the Cape
above Norway, and from Trondheim, and bring the friars all sorts of
comforts, taking in exchange fish ... and skins of different kinds of
animals.... There are continually in the harbour a number of vessels
detained by the sea being frozen, and waiting for the next season to
melt the ice."[292]
[Footnote 289: So he tells us himself: "Quo cum venissent,
nullum hominem, neque christianum neque paganum, invenerunt,
tantummodo fera pecora et oves deprehenderunt, ex quibus
quantum naves ferre poterant in has deportato domum redierunt."
_Descriptio Groenlandiæ_, apud Major, p. 53. The glacial men
had done their work of slaughter and vanished.]
[Footnote 290: "Ma la maggior parte sono delle Islande." Mr.
Major is clearly wrong in translating it "from the Shetland
Isles." The younger Nicolò was puzzled by the similarity of the
names Islanda and Eslanda, and sometimes confounded Iceland
with the Shetland group. But in this place Iceland is evidently
meant.]
[Footnote 291: This application of the hot water to purposes of
gardening reminds us of the similar covered gardens or hot-beds
constructed by Albertus Magnus in the Dominican monastery at
Cologne in the thirteenth century. See Humboldt's _Kosmos_, ii.
130.]
[Footnote 292: Major, _op. cit._ p. 16. The narrative goes on
to give a description of the skin-boats of the Eskimo
fishermen.]
[Sidenote: Volcanoes of the north Atlantic ridge.]
[Sidenote: Fate of Gunnbjörn's Skerries, 1456.]
[Sidenote: Volcanic phenomena in Greenland.]
This mention of the volcano and the hot spring is very interesting. In
the Miocene period the Atlantic ridge was one of the principal seats of
volcanic activity upon the globe; the line of volcanoes extended all the
way from Greenland down into central France. But for several hundred
thousand years this activity has been diminishing. In France, in the
western parts of Great Britain and the Hebrides, the craters have long
since become extinct. In the far North, however, volcanic action has
been slower in dying out. Iceland, with no less than twenty active
volcanoes, is still the most considerable centre of such operations in
Europe. The huge volcano on Jan Mayen island, between Greenland and
Spitzbergen, is still in action. Among the submerged peaks in the
northern seas explosions still now and then occur, as in 1783, when a
small island was thrown up near Cape Reykianes, on the southern coast of
Iceland, and sank again after a year.[293] Midway between Iceland and
Greenland there appears to have stood, in the Middle Ages, a small
volcanic island discovered by that Gunnbjörn who first went to
Greenland. It was known as Gunnbjörn's Skerries, and was described by
Ivar Bardsen.[294] This island is no longer above the surface, and its
fate is recorded upon Ruysch's map of the world in the 1508 edition of
Ptolemy: "Insula hæc anno Domini 1456 fuit totaliter combusta,"--this
island was entirely burnt (i. e. blown up in an eruption) in 1456; and
in later maps Mr. Major has found the corrupted name "Gombar Scheer"
applied to the dangerous reefs and shoals left behind by this
explosion.[295] Where volcanic action is declining geysers and boiling
springs are apt to abound, as in Iceland; where it has become extinct at
a period geologically recent, as in Auvergne and the Rhine country, its
latest vestiges are left in the hundreds of thermal and mineral springs
whither fashionable invalids congregate to drink or to bathe.[296] Now
in Greenland, at the present day, hot springs are found, of which the
most noted are those on the island of Ounartok, at the entrance to the
fiord of that name. These springs seem to be the same that were
described five hundred years ago by Ivar Bardsen. As to volcanoes, it
has been generally assumed that those of Greenland are all extinct; but
in a country as yet so imperfectly studied this only means that
eruptions have not been recorded.[297] On the whole, it seems to me that
the mention, in our Venetian narrative, of a boiling spring and an
active volcano in Greenland is an instance of the peculiar sort--too
strange to have been invented, but altogether probable in itself--that
adds to the credit of the narrative.
[Footnote 293: Daubeny, _Description of Active and Extinct
Volcanoes_, London, 1848, pp. 307; cf. Judd, _Volcanoes_,
London, 1881, p. 234.]
[Footnote 294: "Ab Snefelsneso Islandiæ, quâ brevissimus in
Gronlandiam trajectus est, duorum dierum et duarum noctium
spatio navigandum est recto cursu versus occidentem; ibique
Gunnbjoernis scopulos invenies, inter Gronlandiam et Islandiam
medio situ interjacentes. Hic cursus antiquitûs frequentabatur,
nunc vero glacies ex recessu oceani euroaquilonari delata
scopulos ante memoratos tam prope attigit, ut nemo sine vitæ
discrimine antiquum cursum tenere possit, quemadmodum infra
dicetur." _Descriptio Groenlandiæ_, apud Major, _op. cit._ p.
40.]
[Footnote 295: _Op. cit._ p. lxxvi. See below, vol. ii. p. 115,
note B.]
[Footnote 296: Judd, _op. cit._ pp. 217-220.]
[Footnote 297: My friend, Professor Shaler, tells me that "a
volcano during eruption might shed its ice mantle and afterward
don it again in such a manner as to hide its true character
even on a near view;" and, on the other hand, "a voyager not
familiar with volcanoes might easily mistake the cloud-bonnet
of a peak for the smoke of a volcano." This, however, will not
account for Zeno's "hill that vomited fire," for he goes on to
describe the use which the monks made of the pumice and
calcareous tufa for building purposes.]
Thus far, in dealing with the places actually visited by Nicolò or
Antonio, or by both brothers, we have found the story consistent and
intelligible. But in what relates to countries beyond Greenland,
countries which were not visited by either of the brothers, but about
which Antonio heard reports, it is quite a different thing. We are
introduced to a jumble very unlike the clear, business-like account of
Vinland voyages in the Hauks-bók. Yet in this medley there are some
statements curiously suggestive of things in North America. It will be
remembered that Antonio's voyage with Sinclair (somewhere about 1400)
was undertaken in order to verify certain reports of the existence of
land more than a thousand miles west of the Færoe islands.
[Sidenote: Estotiland.]
About six and twenty years ago, said Antonio in a letter to Carlo, four
small fishing craft, venturing very far out upon the Atlantic, had been
blown upon a strange coast, where their crews were well received by the
people. The land proved to be an island rather smaller than Iceland (or
Shetland?), with a high mountain whence flowed four rivers. The
inhabitants were intelligent people, possessed of all the arts, but did
not understand the language of these Norse fishermen.[298] There
happened, however, to be one European among them, who had himself been
cast ashore in that country and had learned its language; he could speak
Latin, and found some one among the shipwrecked men who could understand
him. There was a populous city with walls, and the king had Latin books
in his library which nobody could read.[299] All kinds of metals
abounded, and especially gold.[300] The woods were of immense extent.
The people traded with Greenland, importing thence pitch(?), brimstone,
and furs. They sowed grain and made "beer." They made small boats, but
were ignorant of the loadstone and the compass. For this reason, they
held the newcomers in high estimation.[301] The name of the country was
Estotiland.
[Footnote 298: They were, therefore, not Northmen.]
[Footnote 299: Pruning this sentence of its magniloquence,
might it perhaps mean that there was a large palisaded village,
and that the chief had some books in Roman characters, a relic
of some castaway, which he kept as a fetish?]
[Footnote 300: With all possible latitude of interpretation,
this could not be made to apply to any part of America north of
Mexico.]
[Footnote 301: The magnetic needle had been used by the
mariners of western and northern Europe since the end of the
thirteenth century.]
There is nothing so far in this vague description to show that
Estotiland was an American country, except its western direction and
perhaps its trading with Greenland. The points of unlikeness are at
least as numerous as the points of likeness. But in what follows there
is a much stronger suggestion of North America.
[Sidenote: Drogio.]
For some reason not specified an expedition was undertaken by people
from Estotiland to a country to the southward named Drogio, and these
Norse mariners, or some of them, because they understood the compass,
were put in charge of it.[302] But the people of Drogio were cannibals,
and the people from Estotiland on their arrival were taken prisoners and
devoured,--all save the few Northmen, who were saved because of their
marvellous skill in catching fish with nets. The barbarians seemed to
have set much store by these white men, and perhaps to have regarded
them as objects of "medicine." One of the fishermen in particular became
so famous that a neighbouring tribe made war upon the tribe which kept
him, and winning the victory took him over into its own custody. This
sort of thing happened several times. Various tribes fought to secure
the person and services of this Fisherman, so that he was passed about
among more than twenty chiefs, and "wandering up and down the country
without any fixed abode, ... he became acquainted with all those parts."
[Footnote 302: "Fanno nauigli e nauigano, ma non hanno la
calamìta ne intendeno col bossolo la tramontana. Per ilche
questi pescatori furono in gran pregio, si che il re li spedì
con dodici nauigli uerso ostro nel paese che essi chiamano
Drogio." Major, _op. cit._ p. 21.]
[Sidenote: Inhabitants of Drogio and the countries beyond.]
And now comes quite an interesting passage. The Fisherman "says that it
is a very great country, and, as it were, a new world; the people are
very rude and uncultivated, for they all go naked, and suffer cruelly
from the cold, nor have they the sense to clothe themselves with the
skins of the animals which they take in hunting [a gross exaggeration].
They have no kind of metal. They live by hunting, and carry lances of
wood, sharpened at the point. They have bows, the strings of which are
made of beasts' skins. They are very fierce, and have deadly fights
amongst each other, and eat one another's flesh. They have chieftains
and certain laws among themselves, but differing in the different
tribes. The farther you go southwestwards, however, the more refinement
you meet with, because the climate is more temperate, and accordingly
there they have cities and temples dedicated to their idols, in which
they sacrifice men and afterwards eat them. In those parts they have
some knowledge and use of gold and silver. Now this Fisherman, having
dwelt so many years in these parts, made up his mind, if possible, to
return home to his own country; but his companions, despairing of ever
seeing it again, gave him God's speed, and remained themselves where
they were. Accordingly, he bade them farewell, and made his escape
through the woods in the direction of Drogio, where he was welcomed and
very kindly received by the chief of the place, who knew him, and was a
great enemy of the neighbouring chieftain; and so passing from one chief
to another, being the same with whom he had been before, after a long
time and with much toil, he at length reached Drogio, where he spent
three years. Here, by good luck, he heard from the natives that some
boats had arrived off the coast; and full of hope of being able to carry
out his intention, he went down to the seaside, and to his great delight
found that they had come from Estotiland. He forthwith requested that
they would take him with them, which they did very willingly, and as he
knew the language of the country, which none of them could speak, they
employed him as their interpreter."[303]
[Footnote 303: Major, _op. cit._ pp. 20-22.]
[Sidenote: The Fisherman's return to "Frislanda."]
Whither the Fisherman was first carried in these boats or vessels,
Antonio's letter does not inform us. We are only told that he engaged in
some prosperous voyages, and at length returned to the Færoes after
these six and twenty years of strange adventures. It was apparently the
Fisherman's description of Estotiland as a very rich country (_paese
ricchissimo_) that led Sinclair to fit out an expedition to visit it,
with Antonio as his chief captain. As we have already seen, the
Fisherman died just before the ships were ready to start, and to
whatever land they succeeded in reaching after they sailed without him,
the narrative leaves us with the impression that it was not the
mysterious Estotiland.
To attempt to identify that country from the description of it, which
reads like a parcel of ill-digested sailors' yarns, would be idle. The
most common conjecture has identified it with Newfoundland, from its
relations to other points mentioned in the Zeno narrative, as indicated,
with fair probability, on the Zeno map. To identify it with Newfoundland
is to brand the description as a "fish story," but from such a
conclusion there seems anyway to be no escape.
[Sidenote: Was the account of Drogio woven into the narrative by the
younger Nicolò?]
With Drogio, however, it is otherwise. The description of Drogio and the
vast country stretching beyond it, which was like a "new world," is the
merest sketch, but it seems to contain enough characteristic details to
stamp it as a description of North America, and of no other country
accessible by an Atlantic voyage. It is a sketch which apparently must
have had its ultimate source in somebody's personal experience of
aboriginal North America. Here we are reminded that when the younger
Nicolò published this narrative, in 1558, some dim knowledge of the
North American tribes was beginning to make its way into the minds of
people in Europe. The work of Soto and Cartier, to say nothing of other
explorers, had already been done. May we suppose that Nicolò had thus
obtained some idea of North America, and wove it into his reproduction
of his ancestors' letters, for the sake of completeness and point, in
somewhat the same uncritical mood as that in which the most worthy
ancient historians did not scruple to invent speeches to put into the
mouths of their heroes? It may have been so, and in such case the
description of Drogio loses its point for us as a feature in the
pre-Columbian voyages to America. In such case we may dismiss it at
once, and pretty much all the latter part of the Zeno narrative,
relating to what Antonio heard and did, becomes valueless; though the
earlier part, relating to the elder Nicolò, still remains valid and
trustworthy.
[Sidenote: Or does it represent actual experiences in North America?]
But suppose we take the other alternative. As in the earlier part of the
story we feel sure that young Nicolò must have reproduced the ancestral
documents faithfully, because it shows knowledge that he could not have
got in any other way; let us now suppose that in the latter part also he
added nothing of himself, but was simply a faithful editor. It will then
follow that the Fisherman's account of Drogio, reduced to writing by
Antonio Zeno about 1400, must probably represent personal experiences in
North America; for no such happy combination of details characteristic
only of North America is likely at that date to have been invented by
any European. Our simplest course will be to suppose that the Fisherman
really had the experiences which are narrated, that he was bandied about
from tribe to tribe in North America, all the way, perhaps, from Nova
Scotia to Mexico, and yet returned to the Færoe islands to tell the
tale! Could such a thing be possible? Was anything of the sort ever done
before or since?
[Sidenote: The case of David Ingram, 1568.]
Yes: something of the sort appears to have been done about ten years
after the Zeno narrative was published. In October, 1568, that great
sailor, Sir John Hawkins, by reason of scarcity of food, was compelled
to set about a hundred men ashore near the Rio de Minas, on the Mexican
coast, and leave them to their fate. The continent was a network of rude
paths or trails, as it had doubtless been for ages, and as central
Africa is to-day. Most of these Englishmen probably perished in the
wilderness. Some who took southwestern trails found their way to the
city of Mexico, where, as "vile Lutheran dogges," they were treated with
anything but kindness. Others took northeasterly trails, and one of
these men, David Ingram, made his way from Texas to Maine, and beyond to
the St. John's river, where he was picked up by a friendly French ship
and carried to France, and so got home to England. The journey across
North America took him about eleven months, but one of his comrades, Job
Hortop, had no end of adventures, and was more than twenty years in
getting back to England. Ingram told such blessed yarns about houses of
crystal and silver, and other wonderful things, that many disbelieved
his whole story, but he was subjected to a searching examination before
Sir Francis Walsingham, and as to the main fact of his journey through
the wilderness there seems to be no doubt.[304]
[Footnote 304: Ingram's narrative was first published in
Hakluyt's folio of 1589, pp. 557-562, but in his larger work,
_Principal Navigations_, etc., London, 1600, it is omitted. As
Purchas quaintly says, "As for David Ingram's perambulation to
the north parts, Master Hakluyt in his first edition published
the same; but it seemeth some incredibilities of his reports
caused him to leaue him out in the next impression, the reward
of lying being not to be beleeued in truths." _Purchas his
Pilgrimes_, London, 1625, vol. iv. p. 1179. The examination
before Walsingham had reference to the projected voyage of Sir
Humphrey Gilbert, which was made in 1583. Ingram's relation,
"w^{ch} he reported vnto S^{r} Frauncys Walsingh[~m], Knight,
and diuers others of good judgment and creditt, in August and
Septembar, A^{o} Dñi, 1582," is in the British Museum, Sloane
MS. No. 1447, fol. 1-18; it was copied and privately printed in
Plowden Weston's _Documents connected with the History of South
Carolina_, London, 1856. There is a MS. copy in the Sparks
collection in the Harvard University library. See the late Mr.
Charles Deane's note in his edition of Hakluyt's _Discourse
concerning Westerne Planting_, Cambridge, 1877, p. 229
(_Collections of Maine Hist. Soc._, 2d series, vol. ii.); see,
also, Winsor, _Narr. and Crit. Hist._, iii. 186.]
[Sidenote: The case of Cabeza de Vaca, 1528-36.]
Far more important, historically, and in many ways more instructive than
the wanderings of David Ingram, was the journey of Cabeza de Vaca and
his ingenious comrades, in 1528-36, from the Mississippi river to their
friends in Mexico. This remarkable journey will receive further
consideration in another place.[305] In the course of it Cabeza de Vaca
was for eight years held captive by sundry Indian tribes, and at last
his escape involved ten months of arduous travel. On one occasion he and
his friends treated some sick Indians, among other things breathing upon
them and making the sign of the cross. As the Indians happened to get
well, these Spaniards at once became objects of reverence, and different
tribes vied with one another for access to them, in order to benefit by
their supernatural gifts. In those early days, before the red men had
become used to seeing Europeans, a white captive was not so likely to be
put to death as to be cherished as a helper of vast and undetermined
value.[306] The Indians set so much store by Cabeza de Vaca that he
found it hard to tear himself away; but at length he used his influence
over them in such wise as to facilitate his moving in a direction by
which he ultimately succeeded in escaping to his friends. There seems to
be a real analogy between his strange experiences and those of the
Fisherman in Drogio, who became an object of reverence because he could
do things that the natives could not do, yet the value of which they
were able to appreciate.
[Footnote 305: See below, vol. ii. p. 501.]
[Footnote 306: In the first reception of the Spaniards in Peru,
we shall see a similar idea at work, vol. ii. pp. 398, 407.]
Now if the younger Nicolò had been in the mood for adorning his
ancestors' narrative by inserting a few picturesque incidents out of his
own hearsay knowledge of North America, it does not seem likely that he
would have known enough to hit so deftly upon one of the peculiarities
of the barbaric mind. Here, again, we seem to have come upon one of
those incidents, inherently probable, but too strange to have been
invented, that tend to confirm the story. Without hazarding anything
like a positive opinion, it seems to me likely enough that this voyage
of Scandinavian fishermen to the coast of North America in the
fourteenth century may have happened.
[Sidenote: There may have been unrecorded instances of visits to North
America.]
It was this and other unrecorded but possible instances that I had in
mind at the beginning of this chapter, in saying that occasional visits
of Europeans to America in pre-Columbian times may have occurred oftener
than we are wont to suppose. Observe that our scanty records--naturally
somewhat perplexed and dim, as treating of remote and unknown
places--refer us to that northern Atlantic region where the ocean is
comparatively narrow, and to that northern people who, from the time of
their first appearance in history, have been as much at home upon sea as
upon land. For a thousand years past these hyperborean waters have been
furrowed in many directions by stout Scandinavian keels, and if, in
aiming at Greenland, the gallant mariners may now and then have hit upon
Labrador or Newfoundland, and have made flying visits to coasts still
farther southward, there is nothing in it all which need surprise
us.[307]
[Footnote 307: The latest pre-Columbian voyage mentioned as
having occurred in the northern seas was that of the Polish
pilot John Szkolny, who, in the service of King Christian I. of
Denmark, is said to have sailed to Greenland in 1476, and to
have touched upon the coast of Labrador. See Gomara, _Historia
de las Indias_, Saragossa, 1553, cap. xxxvii.; Wytfliet,
_Descriptionis Ptolemaicæ Augmentum_, Douay, 1603, p. 102;
Pontanus, _Rerum Danicarum Historia_, Amsterdam, 1631, p. 763.
The wise Humboldt mentions the report without expressing an
opinion, _Examen critique_, tom. ii. p. 153.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The pre-Columbian voyages made no real contributions to
geographical knowledge;]
[Sidenote: and were in no true sense a Discovery of America.]
Nothing can be clearer, however, from a survey of the whole subject,
than that these pre-Columbian voyages were quite barren of results of
historic importance. In point of colonization they produced the two
ill-fated settlements on the Greenland coast, and nothing more.
Otherwise they made no real addition to the stock of geographical
knowledge, they wrought no effect whatever upon the European mind
outside of Scandinavia, and even in Iceland itself the mention of
coasts beyond Greenland awakened no definite ideas, and, except for a
brief season, excited no interest. The Zeno narrative indicates that the
Vinland voyages had practically lapsed from memory before the end of the
fourteenth century.[308] Scholars familiar with saga literature of
course knew the story; it was just at this time that Jón Thórdharson
wrote out the version of it which is preserved in the Flateyar-bók. But
by the general public it must have been forgotten, or else the
Fisherman's tale of Estotiland and Drogio would surely have awakened
reminiscences of Markland and Vinland, and some traces of this would
have appeared in Antonio's narrative or upon his map. The principal
naval officer of the Færoes, and personal friend of the sovereign, after
dwelling several years among these Northmen, whose intercourse with
their brethren in Iceland was frequent, apparently knew nothing of Leif
or Thorfinn, or the mere names of the coasts which they had visited.
Nothing had been accomplished by those voyages which could properly be
called a contribution to geographical knowledge. To speak of them as
constituting, in any legitimate sense of the phrase, a Discovery of
America is simply absurd. Except for Greenland, which was supposed to be
a part of the European world, America remained as much undiscovered
after the eleventh century as before. In the midsummer of 1492 it
needed to be discovered as much as if Leif Ericsson or the whole race of
Northmen had never existed.
[Footnote 308: Practically, but not entirely, for we have seen
Markland mentioned in the "Elder Skálholt Annals," about 1362.
See above, p. 223.]
As these pre-Columbian voyages produced no effect in the eastern
hemisphere, except to leave in Icelandic literature a scanty but
interesting record, so in the western hemisphere they seem to have
produced no effect beyond cutting down a few trees and killing a few
Indians. In the outlying world of Greenland it is not improbable that
the blood of the Eskimos may have received some slight Scandinavian
infusion. But upon the aboriginal world of the red men, from Davis
strait to Cape Horn, it is not likely that any impression of any sort
was ever made. It is in the highest degree probable that Leif Ericsson
and his friends made a few voyages to _what we now know to have been_
the coast of America; but it is an abuse of language to say that they
"discovered" America. In no sense was any real contact established
between the eastern and the western halves of our planet until the great
voyage of Columbus in 1492.