the passing wayfarer, is no mere modern custom. When the sites of
Greenland settlements of the Northmen of the tenth century were
discovered in our own day, the runic inscriptions left no room for doubt
as to their former presence there. By like evidence we learn of them in
southern lands, from their runes still legible on the marble lion of the
Piræus, since transported to its later site in the arsenal of Venice. At
Maeshowe in Orkney, in St. Molio’s Cave on the Clyde, at Kirk Michael in
the Isle of Man, and on many a rock and stone by the Baltic, the
sea-rovers from the north have left enduring evidence of their
wanderings. So was it with the Roman. From the Moray Firth to the Libyan
desert, and from the Iberian shore to the Syrian valleys, sepulchral,
legionary, and mythological inscriptions, as well as coins, medals,
pottery, and works of art, mark the footprints of the masters of the
world. In Italy itself Perusinian, Eugubine, Etruscan, and Greek
inscriptions tell the story of a succession of races in that beautiful
peninsula. It was the same, through all the centuries of Hellenic
intellectual rule, back to the unrivalled inscription at Abbu Simbel.
This was cut, says Dr. Isaac Taylor,[3] “when what we call Greek history
can hardly be said to have commenced: two hundred years before
Herodotus, the Father of History, had composed his work; a century
before Athens began to rise to power. More ancient even than the epoch
assigned to Solon, Thales, and the seven wise men of Greece: it must be
placed in the half-legendary period at which the laws of Dracon are said
to have been enacted”;—the period, in fact, from which the legend of
Atlantis was professedly derived. Yet there the graven characters
perpetuate their authentic bit of history, legible to this day, of the
son of Theokles, sailing with his company up the Nile, when King
Psamatichos came to Elephantina. So it is with Egyptians, Assyrians,
Phœnicians, and with the strange forgotten Hittites, whose vast empire
has vanished out of the world’s memory. The lion of the Piræus, with its
graven runes, is a thing of yesterday, compared with the inscribed lion
from Marash, with its Hittite hieroglyphs, now in the museum at
Constantinople; for the Hittite capital, Ketesh, was captured by the
Egyptian Sethos, B.C. 1340. All but the name of this once powerful
people seemed to have perished. Yet the inscribed stones, by which they
were to be restored to their place in history, remained, awaiting the
interpretation of an enlightened age.
If then, traces of the lost Atlantis are ever to be recovered in the New
World, it must be by some indubitable memorial of a like kind. Old as
the legend may be, it is seen that literal graphic memorials—Assyrian,
Phœnician, Khita, Egyptian, and Greek,—still remain to tell of times
even beyond the epoch assigned to Solon. The antiquaries of New England
have sought in vain for runic memorials of the Northmen of the tenth
century; and the diligence of less trustworthy explorers for traces of
ancient records has been stimulated to excess, throughout the North
American continent, with results little more creditable to their honesty
than their judgment. What some chance disclosure may yet reveal, who can
presume to guess? But thus far it appears to be improbable that within
the area north of the Gulf of Mexico, evidences of the presence of
Phœnician, Greek, or other ancient historic race will now be found.
Certain it is that, whatever transient visits may have been paid to
North America by representatives of Old World progress, no long-matured
civilisation, whether of native or foreign origin, has existed there.
Through all the centuries of which definite history has anything to
tell, it has remained a world apart, secure in its isolation, with
languages, arts, and customs essentially native in character. The
nations of the Maya stock appear to have made the greatest progress in
civilisation of all the communities of Central America. They dwelt in
cities adorned with costly structures dedicated to the purposes of
religion and the state; and had political government, and forms of
social organisation, to all appearance, the slow growth of many
generations. They had, also, a well-matured system of chronology; and
have left behind them graven and written records, analogous to those of
ancient Egypt, which still await decipherment. Whether this culture was
purely of native growth, or had its origin from the germs of an Old
World civilisation, can only be determined when its secrets have been
fully mastered. The region is even now very partially explored. The
students of American ethnology and archæology are only awakening to some
adequate sense of its importance. But there appears to have been the
centre of a native American civilisation whence light was slowly
radiating on either hand, before the vandals of the Spanish Conquest
quenched it in blood. The civilisation of Mexico was but a borrowed
reflex of that of Central America; and its picture-writing is a very
inferior imitation of the ideography of the Maya hieroglyphics.
A tendency manifests itself anew to trace the metallurgy, the letters,
the astronomical science, and whatever else marks the quickening into
intellectual life of this American leading race, to an Asiatic or other
Old World origin. The point, however, is by no means established; nor
can any reason be shown why the human intellect might not be started on
the same course in Central America, as in Mesopotamia or the valley of
the Nile. If we assume the primary settlement of Central America by
expeditions systematically carried on under the auspices of some ancient
maritime power of the Mediterranean, or of an early seat of Iberian or
Libyan civilisation, then they would, undoubtedly, transplant the arts
of their old home to the New World. But, on the more probable
supposition of wanderers, either by the Atlantic or the Pacific, being
landed on its shores, and becoming the undesigned settlers of the
continent, it is otherwise; and the probabilities are still further
diminished if we conceive of ocean wanderers from island to island of
the Pacific, at length reaching the shores of the remote continent after
the traditions of their Asiatic fatherland had faded from the memory of
later generations. The condition of metallurgy as practised by the
Mexicans and Peruvians exhibited none of the matured phases of an
inheritance from remote generations, but partook rather of the tentative
characteristics of immature native art.
We are prone to overestimate the facilities by which the arts of
civilisation may be transplanted to remote regions. It is not greatly
more difficult to conceive of the rediscovery of some of the essential
elements of human progress than to believe in the transference of them
from the eastern to the western hemisphere by wanderers from either
Europe or Asia. Take the average type of emigrants, such as are annually
landed by thousands at New York. They come from the most civilised
countries of Europe. Yet, how few among them all could be relied upon
for any such intelligent comprehension of metallurgy, if left entirely
to their own resources, as to be found able to turn the mineral wealth
of their new home to practical account; or for astronomical science,
such as would enable them to construct a calendar, and start afresh a
systematic chronology. As to letters, the picture-writing of the Aztecs
was the same in principle as the rude art of the northern Indians; and I
cannot conceive of any reason for rejecting the assumption of its native
origin as an intellectual triumph achieved by the labours of many
generations. Every step is still traceable, from the rude picturings on
the Indian’s grave-post or rock inscription, to the systematic
ideographs of Palenque or Copan. Hieroglyphics, as the natural outgrowth
of pictorial representation, must always have a general family likeness;
but all attempts to connect the civilisation of Central and Southern
America with that of Egypt fail, so soon as a comparison is instituted
between the Egyptian calendar and any of the native American systems of
recording dates and computing time. The vague year of 365 days, and the
corrected solar year, with the great Sothic Cycle of 1460 years, so
intimately interwoven with the religious system and historical
chronology of the Egyptians, abundantly prove the correction of the
Egyptian calendar by accumulated experience, at a date long anterior to
the resort of the Greek astronomer, Thales, to Egypt. At the close of
the fifteenth century, the Aztecs had learned to correct their calendar
to solar time; but their cycle was one of only fifty-two years. The
Peruvians also had their recurrent religious festivals, connected with
the adjustment of their sacred calendar to solar time; but the
geographical position of Peru, with Quito, its holy city, lying
immediately under the equator, greatly simplified the process by which
they regulated their religious festivals by the solstices and equinoxes.
The facilities which their equatorial position afforded for determining
the few indispensable periods in their calendar were, indeed, a doubtful
advantage, for they removed all stimulus to progress. The Mexican
calendar is the most remarkable evidence of the civilisation attained by
that people. Humboldt unhesitatingly connected it with the ancient
science of south-eastern Asia. But instead of its exhibiting any such
inevitable accumulation of error as that which gave so peculiar a
character to the historical chronology of the Egyptians, its computation
differed less from true solar time than the unreformed Julian calendar
which the Spaniards had inherited from pagan Rome. But though this
suffices to show that the civilisation of Mexico was of no great
antiquity, it only accords with other evidence of its borrowed
character. The Mexicans stood in the same relation to Central America as
the Northern Barbarians of the third and fourth century did to Italy;
and the intruding Spaniard nipped their germ of borrowed civilisation in
the bud. So long as the search for evidences either of a native or
intruded civilisation is limited to the northern continent of America,
it is equivalent to an attempt to recover the traces of Greek and Roman
civilisation in transalpine Europe. The Mexican calendar stone is no
more than the counterpart of some stray Greek or Roman tablet beyond the
Alps; or rather, perhaps, of some Mæsogothic product of borrowed art.
We must await, then, the intelligent exploration of Central America,
before any certain conclusion can be arrived at relative to the story of
the New World’s unknown past. On the sculptured tablets of Palenque,
Quiriqua, Chichenitza, and Uxmal, and on the colossal statues at Copan
and other ancient sites, are numerous inscriptions awaiting the
decipherment of the future Young or Champolion of American palæography.
The whole region was once in occupation by a lettered race, having the
same written characters and a common civilisation. If they owed to some
apostle from the Mediterranean the grand invention of letters, which, as
Bacon says, “as ships, pass through the vast seas of time, and make ages
so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations and inventions,
the one of the other:” then, we may confidently anticipate the recovery
of some graphic memorial of the messenger, confirming the oft-recurring
traditions of bearded white men who came from beyond the sea, introduced
the arts of civilisation, and were reverenced as divine benefactors. It
cannot be that Egyptian, Assyrian, Hittite, Phœnician, and other most
ancient races, are still perpetuated by so many traces of their
wanderings in the Old World; that the Northmen’s graphic runes have
placed beyond all question their pre-Columbian explorations; and yet
that not a single trace of Mediterranean wanderers to the lost Atlantis
survives. In Humboldt’s _Researches_, a fragment of a reputed Phœnician
inscription is engraved. It was copied by Ranson Bueno, a Franciscan
monk, from a block of granite which he discovered in a cavern in the
mountain chain, between the Orinoco and the Amazon. Humboldt recognised
in it some resemblance to the Phœnician alphabet. We must remember,
however, what rudely traced Phœnician characters are; and as to their
transcriber, it may be presumed that he had no knowledge of Phœnician.
Humboldt says of him: “The good monk seemed to be but little interested
about this pretended inscription,” though, he adds, he had copied it
very carefully.
* * * * *
The lost Atlantis, then, lies still in the future. The earlier studies
of the monuments and prehistoric remains of the American continent
seemed to point conclusively to a native source for its civilisation.
From quipu and wampum, pictured grave-post and buffalo robe, to the most
finished hieroglyphs of Copan or Palenque, continuous steps appear to be
traceable whereby American man developed for himself the same wondrous
invention of letters which ancient legend ascribed to Thoth or Mercury;
or, in less mythic form, to the Phœnician Cadmus. Nor has the generally
accepted assumption of a foreign origin for American metallurgy been
placed as yet on any substantial basis. Gold, as I believe, was
everywhere the first metal wrought. The bright nugget tempted the
savage, with whom personal ornaments precede dress. It was readily
fashioned into any desired shape. The same is true, though in a less
degree, of copper; and wherever, as on the American continent, native
copper abounds, the next step in metallurgy is to be anticipated. With
the discovery of the economic use of the metals, an all-important step
had been achieved, leading to the fashioning of useful tools, to
architecture, sculpture, pictorial ornamentation, and so to ideography.
The facilities for all this were, at least, as abundant in Central and
Southern America as in Egypt. The progress was, doubtless, slow; but
when the Neolithic age began to yield to that of the metallurgist, the
all-important step had been taken. The history of this first step is
embodied in myths of the New World, no less than of the Old. Tubal-cain,
Dædalus, Hephæstus, Vulcan, Vœlund, Galant, and Wayland the Saxon
smith-god, are all legendary variations of the first mastery of the use
of the metals; and so, too, the New World has Quetzalcoatl, its divine
instructor in the same priceless art.
It forms one of the indisputable facts of ancient history that, long
before Greece became the world’s intellectual leader, the eastern
Mediterranean was settled by maritime races whose adventurous enterprise
led them to navigate the Atlantic. There was no greater impediment to
such adventurous mariners crossing that ocean in earliest centuries
before Christ, than at any subsequent date prior to the revival of
navigation in the fifteenth century. It would not, therefore, in any
degree, surprise me to learn of the discovery of a genuine Phœnician, or
other inscription; or, of some hoard of Assyrian gryphons, or shekels of
the merchant princes of Tyre “that had knowledge of the sea,” being
recovered among the still unexplored treasures of the buried empire of
Montezuma, or the long-deserted ruins of Central America. Such a
discovery would scarcely be more surprising than that of the Punic
hoards found at Corvo, the most westerly island of the Azores. Yet it
would furnish a substantial basis for the legend of Atlantis, akin to
that which the runic monuments of Kingiktorsoak and Igalikko supplied in
confirmation of the fabled charms of a Hesperian region lying within the
Arctic circle; and of the first actual glimpses of the American mainland
by Norse voyagers of the tenth century, as told in more than one of
their old Sagas. But until such evidence is forthcoming, the legendary
Atlantis must remain a myth, and pre-Columbian America be still credited
with a self-achieved progress.
-----
[1] _Popular Science Monthly_, xxviii. 296.
[2] _Races of Man_ (Bohn), p. 445.
[3] _The Alphabet_, ii. 10.
II
THE VINLAND OF THE NORTHMEN
THE idea that the western hemisphere was known to the Old World, prior
to the ever-memorable voyage of Columbus four centuries ago, has
reproduced itself in varying phases, not only in the venerable Greek
legend of the lost Atlantis; and the still vaguer myth of the Garden of
the Hesperides on the far ocean horizon, the region of the setting sun;
but in mediæval fancies and mythical epics. The Breton, in _The Earthly
Paradise_ of William Morris—
Spoke of gardens ever blossoming
Across the western sea, where none grew old,
E’en as the books at Micklegarth had told;
And said moreover that an English knight
Had had the Earthly Paradise in sight;
And heard the songs of those that dwelt therein;
But entered not; being hindered by his sin.
A legend of mediæval hagiology tells of the Island of St. Brandon, the
retreat of an Irish hermit of the sixth century. Another tale comes down
to us from the time of the Caliph Walid, and the invincible Musa, of the
“Seven Islands” whither the Christians of Gothic Spain fled under the
guidance of their seven bishops, when, in the eighth century, the
peninsula passed under the yoke of the victorious Saracens. The
Eyrbyggja Saga has a romantic story of Biorn Ashbrandsson, who narrowly
escapes in a tempest raised by his enemy, with the aid of one skilled in
the black art. After undergoing many surprising adventures, he is
finally discovered by voyagers, “in the latter days of Olaf the Saint,”
in a strange land beyond the ocean, the chief of a warlike race speaking
a language that seemed to be Irish. Biorn warned the voyagers to depart,
for the people had evil designs against them. But before they sailed, he
took a gold ring from his hand, and gave it to Gudleif, their leader,
along with a goodly sword; and commissioned him to give the sword to
Kiartan, the son of Thurid, wife of an Iceland thane at Froda, of whom
he had been enamoured; and the gold ring to his mother. This done, he
warned them that no man venture to renew the search for what later
commentators refer to as White Man’s Land. In equally vague form the
fancy of lands beyond the ocean perpetuated itself in an imaginary
island of Brazil that flitted about the charts of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries with ever-varying site and proportions, till it
vanished in the light of modern exploration.
A more definite character has been given to the tale of Madoc, a Welsh
prince of the twelfth century. Southey wove into an elaborate epic this
legend of the son of Owen Gwyneth, king of North Wales, who, _circa_
A.D. 1170, sailed into the unknown west in search of a resting-place
beyond reach of his brother Yorwerth, then ridding himself of all rivals
to the throne. He found a home in the New World, returned to Wales for
additional colonists to join the pioneer band; and setting sail with
them, vanished beyond the western horizon, and was heard of no more. The
poet, while adapting it to the purpose of his art, was not without faith
in the genuineness of the legend which he amplified into his epic; and
notes in the preface appended to it: “Strong evidence has been adduced
that he (Prince Madoc) reached America; and that his posterity exist
there to this day on the southern branch of the Missouri, retaining
their complexion, their language, and in some degree, their arts.” But
later explorations have failed to discover any “Welsh Indians” on the
Missouri or its tributaries.
A small grain of fact will suffice at times for the crystallisation of
vague and visionary fancies into a well-credited tradition. Before the
printing-press came into play, with its perpetuation of definite
records, and prosaic sifting of evidence, this was no uncommon
occurrence; but even in recent times fancy may be seen transmuted into
accepted fact.
When exploring the great earthworks of the Ohio valley, in 1874, I found
myself on one occasion in a large Welsh settlement, a few miles from
Newark, where a generation of native-born Americans still perpetuate the
language of their Cymric forefathers, and conduct their religious
services in the Welsh tongue. My attention was first called to this by
the farmer, who had invited me to an early dinner after a morning’s
digging in a mound on “The Evan’s Farm,” preceding our repast with a
long Welsh grace. From him I learned that the district had been settled
in 1802 by a Welsh colony; and that in two churches in neighbouring
valleys—one Calvinistic Congregational and another Methodist,—the
entire services are still conducted in their mother tongue. Such a
perpetuation of the language and traditions of the race, in a quiet
rural district, only required time and the confusion of dates and
genealogies by younger generations, to have engrafted the story of
Prince Madoc on the substantial basis of a genuine Welsh settlement.
Southey’s epic was published in 1805, within three years after this
Welsh immigration to the Ohio valley. The subject of the poem naturally
gave it a special attraction for American readers; and it was speedily
reprinted in the United States, doubtless with the same indifference to
the author’s claim of copyright as long continued to characterise the
ideas of literary ethics beyond the Atlantic. But the idea of a Welsh
Columbus of the twelfth century was by no means received with universal
favour there. Southey quoted at a long-subsequent date a critical
pamphleteer who denounced the author of _Madoc_ as having “meditated a
most serious injury against the reputation of the New World by
attributing its discovery and colonisation to a vagabond Welsh prince;
this being a most insidious attempt against the honour of America, and
the reputation of Columbus!”
It is inevitable that America should look back to the Old World when in
search of some elements of civilisation, and for the diversities of race
and language traceable throughout the western hemisphere. The early
students of the sculptured monuments and hieroglyphic records of Mexico,
Central America, and Peru, naturally turned to Egypt as their probable
source; though mature reflection has dissipated much of the reasoning
based on superficial analogies. The gradations from the most primitive
picture-writing of the Indian savage to ideography and abbreviated
symbolism, are so clearly traceable in the various stages of progress,
from the rude forest tribes to the native centres of civilisation in
Central and Southern America, that no necessity remains for assuming any
foreign source for their origin.
That the world beyond the Atlantic had remained through unnumbered
centuries apart from Europe and the old East, until that memorable year
1492, is indisputable; and there was at one time a disposition to resent
any rivalry with the grand triumph of Columbus; as though patriotic
spirit and national pride demanded an unquestioning faith in that as the
sole link that bound America to the Old World. But the same spirit
stimulated other nations to claim precedence of Spain and the great
Genoese; and for this the Scandinavian colonists of Iceland had every
probability in their favour. They had navigated the Arctic Ocean with no
other compass than the stars; and the publication in 1845, by the Danish
antiquaries, of the _Grenlands Historiske Mindesmærker_ recalled minute
details of their settlements in the inhospitable region of the western
hemisphere to which they gave the strange misnomer of Greenland. But the
year 1837 may be regarded as marking an epoch in the history of
ante-Columbian research. The issue in that earlier year of the
_Antiquitates Americanæ, sive scriptores septentrionales rerum
ante-Columbiarum in America_, by the Royal Society of Northern
Antiquaries, under the editorship of Professor Charles Christian Rafn,
produced a revolution, alike in the form and the reception of
illustrations of ante-Columbian American history. The publication of
that work gave a fresh interest to the vaguest intimations of a dubious
past; while it superseded them by tangible disclosures, which, though
modern in comparison with such mythic antiquities as the Atlantis of
Plato’s _Dialogues_, nevertheless added some five centuries to the
history of the New World. From its appearance, accordingly, may be dated
the systematic aim of American antiquaries and historians to find
evidence of intercourse with the ancient world prior to the fifteenth
century.
This influence became manifest in all ways; and abundant traces of the
novel idea are to be found in the popular literature of the time. It
seemed as though the adventurous spirit of the early Greenland explorers
had revived, as in the days of the first Vinlanders, as told in the Saga
of Eric the Red: “About this time there began to be much talk at
Brattahlid, to the effect that Vinland the Good should be explored; for
it was said that country must be possessed of many good qualities. And
so it came to pass that Karlsefne and Snorri fitted out their ship for
the purpose of going in search of that country.” Only the modern
Vinlanders who follow in their wake have had for their problem to—
Sail up the current of departed time
And seek along its banks that vanished clime
By ancient Scalds in Runic verse renowned,
Now like old Babylon no longer found.[4]