gave him confidence to steer boldly westward in search of the Asiatic
Cipango: the existence of a continent beyond the Atlantic was no mere
possibility. So early, at least, as 1474 he had conceived the design of
reaching Asia by sailing to the West; and in that year he is known to
have expounded his plans to Paolo Toscanelli, the learned Florentine
physician and cosmographer, and to have received from him hearty
encouragement. Assuming the world to be a sphere, he fortunately erred
alike in under-estimating its size, and in over-estimating the extent to
which the continent of Asia stretched eastward. In this way he
diminished the distance between the coasts of Europe and Asia; and so,
when at length he sighted the new-found land of the West, so far from
dreaming of another ocean wider than the Atlantic between him and the
object of his quest, he unhesitatingly designated the natives of
Guanahani, or San Salvador, “Indians,” in the confident belief that this
was an outlying coast of Asiatic India. Nor was his reasoning unsound.
He sought, and would have found, a western route to that old east by the
very track he followed, had no American continent intervened. It was not
till his third voyage that the great Admiral for the first time beheld
the new continent,—not indeed the Asiatic mainland, nor even the
northern continent,—but the embouchures of the Orinoco river, with its
mighty volume of fresh water, proving beyond dispute that it drained an
area of vast extent, and opened up access far into the interior of a new
world.
Columbus had realised his utmost anticipations, and died in the belief
that he had reached the eastern shores of Asia. Nor is the triumph in
any degree lessened by this assumption. The dauntless navigator, pushing
on ever westward into the mysterious waters of the unexplored Atlantic
in search of the old East, presents one of the most marvellous examples
of intelligent faith that science can adduce. To estimate all that it
implied, we have to turn back to a period when his unaccomplished
purpose rested solely on that sure and well-grounded faith in the
demonstrations of science.
In the city of Salamanca there assembled in the Dominican convent of San
Esteban, in the year 1487, a learned and orthodox conclave, summoned by
Prior Fernando de Talavera, to pronounce judgment on the theory
propounded by Columbus; and to decide whether in that most catholic of
Christian kingdoms, on the very eve of its final triumph over the
infidel, it was a permissible belief that the Western World had even a
possible existence. Columbus set before them the scientific
demonstration which constituted for himself indisputable evidence of an
ocean highway across the Atlantic to the continent beyond. The clerical
council included professors of mathematics, astronomy, and geography, as
well as other learned friars and dignitaries of the Church: probably as
respectable an assemblage of cloister-bred pedantry and orthodox
conservatism as that fifteenth century could produce. Philosophical
deductions were parried by a quotation from St. Jerome or St. Augustine;
and mathematical demonstrations by a figurative text of Scripture; and
in spite alike of the science and the devout religious spirit of
Columbus, the divines of Salamanca pronounced the idea of the earth’s
spherical form to be heterodox; and declared a belief in antipodes
incompatible with the historical traditions of the Christian faith:
since to assert that there were inhabited lands on the opposite side of
the globe would be to maintain that there were nations not descended
from Adam, it being impossible for them to have passed the intervening
ocean.
It may naturally excite a smile to thus find the very ethnological
problem of this nineteenth century thus dogmatically produced four
centuries earlier to prove that America was an impossibility. But in
reality this ethnological problem long continued in all ways to affect
the question. Among the various evidences which Columbus adduced in
confirmation of his belief in the existence of a continent beyond the
Atlantic, was the report brought to him by his own brother-in-law, Pedro
Correa, that the bodies of two dead men had been cast ashore on the
island of Flores, differing essentially from any known race, “very
broad-faced, and diverse in aspect from Christians”; and, in truth, the
more widely they differed from all familiar Christian humanity, the more
probable did their existence appear to the men of that fifteenth
century. Hence Shakespeare’s marvellous creation of his Caliban. Upwards
of a century and half had then elapsed since Columbus returned with the
news of a world beyond the Western Ocean; yet still to the men of
Shakespeare’s day, the strange regions of which Columbus, Amerigo
Vespucci, Gomara, Lane, Harriot, and Raleigh wrote, seemed more fitly
occupied by Calibans, and the like rude approximations to humanity, than
by men and women in any degree akin to ourselves. Othello indeed only
literally reproduces Raleigh’s account of a strange people on the Caoro,
in Guiana. He had not, indeed, himself got sight of those marvellous
Ewaipanoma, though anxious enough to do so. Their eyes, as reported,
were in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their
breasts. But the truth could not be doubted, since every child in the
provinces of Arromaia and Canuri affirmed the same. The founder of
Virginia, assuredly one of the most sagacious men of that wise
Elizabethan era, and with all the experience which travel supplies,
reverts again and again to this strange new-world race, as to a thing of
which he entertained no doubt. The designation of Shakespeare’s Caliban,
is but an anagram of the epithet which Raleigh couples with the specific
designation of those monstrous dwellers on the Caoro. “To the west of
Caroli,” he says, “are divers nations of Cannibals, and of those
Ewaipanoma without heads.” Of “such men, whose head stood in their
breasts,” Gonsalo, in _The Tempest_, reminds his companions, as a tale
which every voyager brings back “good warrant of”; and so it was in all
honesty that Othello entertained Desdemona with the story of his
adventures:—
Of moving accidents by flood and field . . .
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.
The idea of an island-world lying in some unexplored ocean, apart from
the influences which affect humanity at large, with beings,
institutions, and a civilisation of its own, had been the dream of very
diverse minds. When indeed we recall what the rude Norse galley of Eric
the Red must have been; and what the little “Pinta” and the “Nina” of
Columbus—the latter with a crew of only twenty-four men,—actually
were; and remember, moreover, that the pole-star was the sole compass of
the earlier explorer; there seems nothing improbable in the assumption
that the more ancient voyagers from the Mediterranean, who claimed to
have circumnavigated Africa, and were familiar with the islands of the
Atlantic, may have found their way to the great continent which lay
beyond. Vague intimations, derived seemingly from Egypt, encouraged the
belief in a submerged island or continent, once the seat of arts and
learning, afar on the Atlantic main. The most definite narrative of this
vanished continent is that already referred to as recorded in the
_Timæus_ of Plato, on the authority of an account which Solon had
received from an Egyptian priest. According to the latter the
temple-records of the Nile preserved the traditions of times reaching
back far beyond the infantile fables of the Greeks. Yet, even these
preserved some memory of deluges and convulsions by which the earth had
been revolutionised. In one of them the vast Island of Atlantis—a
continent larger than Libya and Asia conjoined,—had been engulfed in
the ocean which bears its name. This ocean-world of fancy or tradition,
Plato revived as the seat of his imaginary commonwealth; and it had not
long become a world of fact when Sir Thomas More made it anew the seat
of his famous Utopia, the exemplar of “the best state and form of a
public weale.” “Unfortunately,” as the author quaintly puts it, “neither
we remembered to inquire of Raphael, the companion of Amerike Vespuce on
his third voyage, nor he to tell us in what part of the new world Utopia
is situate”: and so there is no reason why we should not locate the seat
of this perfect commonwealth within the young Canadian Dominion, so soon
as it shall have merited this by the attainment of such Utopian
perfectibility in its polity.
But it is not less curious to note the tardiness with which, after the
discovery of the New World had been placed beyond question, its true
significance was comprehended even by men of culture, and abreast of the
general knowledge of their time. Peter Giles, indeed, citizen of
Antwerp, and assumed confidant of “Master More,” writes with
well-simulated grief to the Right Hon. Counsellor Hierome Buslyde, “as
touching the situation of the island, that is to say, in what part of
the world Utopia standeth, the ignorance and lack whereof not a little
troubleth and grieveth Master More”; but as he had allowed the
opportunity of ascertaining this important fact to slip by, so the like
uncertainty long after mystified current ideas regarding the new-found
world. Ere the “Flowers of the Forest” had been weeded away on Flodden
Hill, the philosophers and poets of the liberal court of James IV. of
Scotland had learned in some vague way of the recent discovery; and so
the Scottish poet, Dunbar, reflecting on the King’s promise of a
benefice still unfulfilled, hints in his poem “Of the world’s
instabilitie,” that even had it come “fra Calicut and the new-found
Isle” that lies beyond “the great sea-ocean, it might have comen in
shorter while.” Upwards of twenty years had passed since the return of
the great discoverer from his adventurous voyage; but the _Novus Orbis_
was then, and long afterwards continued to be, an insubstantial fancy;
for after nearly another twenty years had elapsed, Sir David Lindsay, in
his _Dreme_, represents Dame Remembrance as his guide and instructor in
all heavenly and earthly knowledge; and among the rest, he says:—
She gart me clearly understand
How that the Earth tripartite was in three;
In Afric, Europe, and Asie;
the latter being in the Orient, while Africa and Europe still
constituted the Occident, or western world. Many famous isles situated
in “the ocean-sea” also attract his notice; but “the new-found isle” of
the elder poet had obviously faded from the memory of that younger
generation.
Another century had nearly run its course since the eye of Columbus
beheld the long-expected land, when, in 1590, Edmund Spenser crossed the
Irish Channel, bringing with him the first three books of his _Faerie
Queen_; in the introduction to the second of which he thus defends the
verisimilitude of that land of fancy in which the scenes of his “famous
antique history” are laid:—
Who ever heard of th’ Indian Peru?
Or who in venturous vessel measured
The Amazon, huge river, now found true?
Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever view?
Yet all these were, when no man did them know,
Yet have from wisest ages hidden been;
And later times things more unknowne shall show.
Why then should witless man so much misween
That nothing is but that which he hath seen?
What if within the moon’s fair shining sphere;
What if in every other star unseen,
Of other worlds he happily should hear?
He wonder would much more; yet such to some appear.
Raleigh, the discoverer of Virginia, was Spenser’s special friend, his
“Shepherd of the Ocean,” the patron under whose advice the poet visited
England with the first instalment of the Epic, which he dedicated to
Queen Elizabeth, “to live with the eternity of her Fame.” Yet it is
obvious that to Spenser’s fancy this western continent was then scarcely
more substantial than his own Faerie land. In truth it was still almost
as much a world apart as if Raleigh and his adventurous crew had sailed
up the blue vault of heaven, and brought back the story of another
planet on which it had been their fortune to alight.
Nor had such fancies wholly vanished long after the voyage across the
Atlantic had become a familiar thing. It was in 1723 that the
philosophical idealist, Berkeley,—afterwards Bishop of
Cloyne,—formulated a more definite and yet not less visionary Utopia
than that of Sir Thomas More. He was about to organise “among the
English in our Western plantations” a seminary which was designed to
train the young American savages, make them Masters of Arts, and fit
instruments for the regeneration of their own people; while the new
Academy was to accomplish no less for the reformation of manners and
morals among his own race. In his fancy’s choice he gave a preference,
at first for Bermuda, or the Summer Islands, as the site of his college;
and “presents the bright vision of an academic home in those fair lands
of the West, whose idyllic bliss poets had sung, from which Christian
civilisation might be made to radiate over this vast continent with its
magnificent possibilities in the future history of the race of man.” It
was while his mind was preoccupied with this fine ideal “of planting
Arts and Learning in America” that he wrote the well-known lines:—
There shall be sung another golden age,
The rise of empire and of arts;
The good and great inspiring epic rage,
The wisest heads and noblest hearts.
Not such as Europe breeds in her decay:
Such as she bred when fresh and young,
When heavenly flame did animate her clay,
By future poets shall be sung.
Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The four first acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
Time’s noblest offspring is the last.
The visionary philosopher followed up his project so far as to transport
himself—not to the Summer Islands of which Waller had sung,—but to
that same Rhode Island which Danish and New England antiquaries were at
a later date to identify, whether rightly or not, as the Vinland of the
Icelandic Sagas. One of these ancient chroniclers had chanced to note
that, on the shortest day of the year in Vinland, they had the sun above
the horizon at _eykt_ and _dagmat_; that is at their regular evening and
morning meal. Like our own term breakfast, the names were significant
and allusive. The old Icelandic poet, Snorro Sturluson, author of the
Edda and the Sagas of the Norwegian Kings, has left on record that at
his Icelandic home eykt occurred at sunset on the first day of winter.
Professor Rafn hailed this old record as the key to the latitude of
Vinland. The Danish King, Frederick VI., sympathising in researches that
reflected back honour on their Norse ancestry, called in the aid of the
Astronomer Royal; and Professor Rafn felt authorised forthwith to
instruct the Rhode Island antiquaries that the latitude of the long-lost
Vinland was near Newport, in Narragansett Bay. Their response, with the
authenticating engravings of the world-famous Newport stone mill, and
the runes of Thorfinn on Dighton Rock, in Rafn’s learned quarto volume,
have been the source of many a later comment, both in prose and rhyme.
But all this lay in a still remote future when, in 1728, Berkeley landed
at Rhode Island with projects not unsuited to the dream of a Vinland the
Good, where a university was to be reared as a centre of culture and
regeneration for the aborigines of the New World. The indispensable
prerequisite of needful funds had been promised him by the English
Government; but the promised grant was never realised. Meanwhile he
bought a farm, the purposed site perhaps of his beneficent centre of
intellectual life for the Island state, and sojourned there for three
years in pleasant seclusion, leaving behind him kindly memories that
endeared him to many friends. He planned, if he did not realise many
goodly Utopias; speculated on space and time, and objective idealism;
and then bade farewell to Rhode Island, and to his romantic dream of
regenerated savages and a renovated world. Soon after his return home
the practical fruits of his quiet sojourn beyond the Atlantic appeared
in the form of his _Alciphron: or the Minute Philosopher_; in which, in
the form of a dialogue, he discusses the varied forms of speculative
scepticism, at the very period when Pope was embodying in his _Essay on
Man_ the brilliant, but superficial philosophy which constituted the
essence of thought for men of the world in his age. It is in antithesis
to such speculations that Berkeley there advances his own theory,
designed to show that all nature is the language of God, everywhere
giving expressive utterance to the Divine thought.
So long as the American continent lay half revealed in its vague
obscurity, as a new world lying beyond the Atlantic, and wholly apart
from the old, it seemed the fitting site for imaginary Vinlands,
Utopias, Summer Islands, and earthly paradises of all sorts: the scenes
of a realised perfectibility beyond the reach of Europe “in her decay.”
Nor was the refined metaphysical idealist the latest dreamer of such
dreams. In our own century, Southey, Coleridge, and the little band of
Bristol enthusiasts who planned their grand pantisocratic scheme of
intellectual communism, created for themselves, with like fertile fancy,
a Utopia of their own, “where Susquehana pours his untamed stream”; and
many a later dreamer has striven after like ideal perfectibility in
“peaceful Freedom’s undivided dale.”
-----
[4] Montgomery, James, _Greenland_, Canto IV.
[5] _Mem. des Antiq. du Nord_, N.S., 1888, p. 341.
[6] _The Finding of Wineland the Good_, p. 6.
[7] _The Finding of Wineland the Good: the History of the Icelandic
Discovery of America_, edited and translated from the earliest records,
by Arthur Middleton Reeves.
[8] _Vide_ Dr. Brinton, _Races and Peoples_, p. 215 note.
[9] Arthur Middleton Reeves, _Finding of Wineland the Good_, p. 28.
III
TRADE AND COMMERCE IN THE STONE AGE
THE term “Stone Period” or “Stone Age” was suggested in the early years
of the present century by the antiquaries of Denmark as the fitting
designation of that primitive era in western Europe—with its
corresponding stage among diverse peoples in widely severed regions and
ages,—when the use of metals was unknown. That there was a period in
the history of the human race, before its Tubal-cains, Vulcans, Vœlands,
or other Smith-gods appeared, when man depended on stone, bone, ivory,
shells, and wood, for the raw material out of which to manufacture his
implements and weapons, is now universally admitted; and is confirmed by
the abundant disclosures of the drift and the caves. The simple, yet
highly suggestive classification, due to Thomsen of Copenhagen, was the
first scientific recognition of the fact, now established by evidence
derived from periods of vastly greater antiquity than the Neolithic age
of Denmark. The accumulated experience of many generations was required
before men mastered the useful service of fire in the smelting of ores
and the casting of metals. Nevertheless it seems probable that the
knowledge of fire, and its useful service on the domestic hearth, are
coeval with the existence of man as a rational being. The evidence of
its practical application to the requirements for warmth and cooking
carry us back to the age of cave implements, including some among the
earliest known examples of man’s tool-making industry. In connection
with this subject, Sir John Evans draws attention to some curious
indications of the antiquity of the use of flint by the
fire-producer.[10] He refers to the ingenious derivation of the word
_silex_ as given by Vincent of Beauvais, in the _Speculum Naturæ_,
“Silex est lapis durus, sic dictus eo quod ex eo ignis exsiliat,” and he
recalls a more remarkable reminiscence of the evoking of fire in the
Neolithic if not in the Palæolithic period. Pliny informs us (lib. vii.
cap. 56), that it was Pyrodes, the son of Cilix, who first devised the
way to strike fire out of flint; “A myth,” says Sir John Evans, “which
seems to point to the use of silex and pyrites (from πῦρ) rather than of
steel.” In reality the flint and pyrites lie together in the same lower
strata of the chalk. As the ancient flint-miners sunk their pits in
search of the levels where the flint abounds they would meet with
frequent nodules of pyrites. The first grand discovery of the
fire-producer may have resulted from the use of the pyrites as a mere
hammer-stone to break up the larger flints.
But whatever was the source of this all-important discovery, it dates
among the earliest manifestations of human intelligence. Nodules of iron
pyrites have been found in the caves of France and Belgium, among
remains pertaining to the Palæolithic age, and are among the most
interesting disclosures of the greatly more modern, though still
prehistoric age of the barrows and cairns of the Allophylian period of
Britain, and of Western Europe generally. Sir R. C. Hoare records the
finding, among the contents of a cinerary urn, in a Wiltshire barrow,
“chipped flints prepared for arrow heads, a long piece of flint, and a
_pyrites_, both evidently smoothed by usage.”[11] More recent explorers,
apprised of the significance of such discoveries, have noted the
presence of nodules of pyrites, accompanying the personal ornaments and
weapons occurring in graves of the same age: deposited there either as
tokens of regard, or more probably with a vague idea of their utility to
the dead in the life beyond the grave. In a communication to the Society
of Antiquaries of Scotland on a group of stone cists disclosed, in 1879,
on the farm of Teinside, Teviotdale, Lord Rosehill thus describes part
of the contents of one of them. “It was filled with dark-coloured earth,
mixed with charcoal; and closely intermingled in every part with
fragments of bones which had been exposed to the action of fire.” A
broken urn lay about ten inches from the top. “Close to the urn was a
rounded piece of metallic-looking substance, which appears to be
‘radiated iron pyrites,’ and which,” adds Lord Rosehill, “I have myself
discovered in several interments.”[12] More recently, in 1883, Major
Colin Mackenzie reported to the same Society the discovery of a cist and
urn in the Black Isle, Ross-shire.[13] He thus proceeds: “Whilst
gathering together the broken pieces of the urn, a round-nosed
flint-flake or scraper, chipped at the edges, was found amongst the
debris, and proved to have a bluish tinge, as if it had been subjected
to the action of fire. Close beside it there was found a round piece of
iron pyrites, flat on one side, in shape somewhat like the half of an
egg, divided lengthways, only smaller. Dr. Joseph Anderson at once
recognised this as forming, along with the solitary flint, nothing less
than a prehistoric ‘strike-light’ apparatus.”[14] No flint is procurable
in the locality; and after the closest search, no other flint implement
or flake was found on the site. In communicating this interesting
discovery to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Major Mackenzie
reviewed the disclosures of this class in Great Britain, so far as they
had been noted by Hoare, Borlase, Bateman, Greenwell and Evans,
furnishing a tabulated statement of eleven examples, chiefly found in
barrows, and ranging over an area extending from Cornwall to Ross-shire;
and to those additions have since been made. He draws attention to their
occurrence in localities which produce neither pyrites nor flint. But
with the former, at least, this need not surprise us. The prized and
easily transported pyrites may be looked for in any ancient barrow or
sepulchral deposit, and has probably in many cases passed unnoted before
its significance was understood. Now that this is fully appreciated, it
is seen to have been in use from the early stages of primitive art: the
very dawn of science; and doubtless the pyrites and flint found in
localities remote from those where they occur as natural products are in
most cases due to primitive barter.