The romance of discovery; a thousand years of exploration and the unveiling of continents

Front matter

THE NORSEMEN AND THEIR RAVEN PILOT.

A Thousand Years of Exploration and the Unveiling of Continents

BY

Preface

In this four hundredth anniversary year of John Cabot's landfall in North America, I have written, at the request of my publishers, this book entitled " The Romance of Discovery." It is intended to be the first of a series of three works in illustration of American history. The second volume will deal with the romance of colonization. The third will tell the story of American victories in war and diplomacy.

Strictly speaking, the discovery and exploration of America form but one of many phases in an ever-continuing movement of the Aryan race ; yet I have tried to show how America was reached and populated from the West, as well as from the East. I have not treated the achievement of Columbus as though it were a strange and unconnected episode, but rather as a link in a chain of events which issued in a knowledge to mankind of the Old as well as of the New World. I have tried to do justice to the various nationalities of Europe that took part in making known the continent between Europe and Asia. If I have given to Portugal, Holland, and Japan more credit than is usually bestowed by American authors, I have no other apology to make than the love of truth and fair play. Neither in this volume nor in any other history of the discovery of America, do our English ances-

8 PREFACE.

tors figure very largely. Providence seems to have ordained that the Latin races should be pioneers, and that the English should enter into the labors of their southern brethren, in order that the best part of this continent might be won for the ideals of Christianized Germanic civilization. In the next volume, when the story of the colonies will be told, I trust that our English forefathers may receive the honors due them.

While following the best authorities, sincerely endeavoring to give true history and to exclude what is doubtful and unauthenticated, I have tried to show the powerful influence of romantic ideas, of myths and of fairy tales, upon human action, — in a word, the power of the world of imagination and fancy upon this world of toil, and especially upon the discovery and exploration of America. I trust that not a little personal familiarity, through travel, with our own and some of the other countries and the routes referred to, will but add to the value of this work.

My best thanks are due to my friend, William Nelson Noble, Esq., of Ithaca, whose criticisms and suggestions have been of service to me in the preparation of this work.

May this humble contribution to the history of the noblest of all lands nourish American patriotism, while hastening — though perhaps only as the raindrop hastens the harvest — that federation of the nations of the earth which is implied in our common Christianity.

W. E. G.

Ithaca on Cayuga Lake, March 15, 1897.

Table Of Contents

I. The Oldest Route to Our Continent

II. The First Families of America ....

III. The Blond Sailors and their Raven Pilots .

Chapter I. The Oldest Route To Our Continent

IN geology, America Is the old world ; but in human history It is the new one. Before the other continents were shaped by the hand of God, He had already lifted up out of the waters the northern portion of America. Before ever a road was made by man, great natural highways had been trodden by animals whose existence preceded his own. Lonor before His creatures had found them out, the paths of God were in the sea, and His ways were upon the waters.

When first placed upon this globe, man was only a little child, who, as he grew up, but very gradually began to perceive the wisdom, love, and care of his Heavenly Father. Many thousands of years passed before he knew that there was one "gulf stream " in the Atlantic Ocean and another in the Pacific. Heat, light, and electricity are forces which, ever since the creation, have been at ail times ready for the use of man ; but it is only in our own ao^e that he has tamed and harnessed them, even as he has tamed and harnessed the animals that serve him, and it is but recently that he has begun to do this.

The great prophet tells us that God did not create the earth in vain ; He formed it to be inhabited. But the question arises. Did men spread over the earth like plants and animals '^. We have been taught that the race originated in what is called the " old world," — Asia. On that continent written history began ; and so Asia must be considered as being the old home of civilization. Even so late as the fifteenth century, Europeans had never dreamed of a " new world." It is true that the Norweo'ians discovered Iceland in the ninth century, and Greenland in the tenth ; but these islands were believed to be a part of the old world, — Europe, Asia, and Africa. Indeed, neither the suggestion of a " new world," nor the idea of reaching Asia by sailing westward, could possibly have entered the mind of man, until he had first thought of the earth as being a globe, instead of being flat like a table.

There had long been two natural passageways from Asia to the " new world," both of which were well used for many centuries before Europe had

THE OLDEST ROUTE TO OUR CONTINENT. 1 5

acquired any knowledge of America. Let us consider them.

Glancing along the line of the Arctic Circle, either on a globe or a Mercator's chart, we perceive that there is a region of ice extending through Norway, Russia, Siberia, Alaska, British America, Greenland, and Iceland, over which one might make a journey around the top of the world. Travellers going eastward from Lapland could have reached Lapland again by land journeys, except where, in their skin boats, they were compelled to encounter the perils of the sea, crossing the narrow Behring Strait and the three water passages to Greenland, Iceland, and Norway. Along this route the " new world " was accessible to the inhabitants of the old one, who might reach it, going either east or west.

We are certain that in prehistoric times, journeys must have been made over this thoroughfare ; for the Eskimo people, who lived in snow huts among the walrus and the polar bears, are found both in Asia and America.

There is another road to America which God made, most probably, before there was a man on the earth. This is a water-route along which one might easily have journeyed, even in the childhood days of the race, when the boatman had no compass, chart, or sextant. Although there were no lighthouses to guide his course, there were great landmarks pointing the directions of going and coming. We shall also find that both the winds and currents were most favorable for a trip eastward to America. Very curiously, this ocean pathway is along a line of earthquakes, and of volcanoes which often furnish light at night and smoke by day, so that pillars of fire and of cloud have guided wanderers in the wilderness ocean, from the old seats of nations to the lonely continent, America. Man's first need is for food, then for clothing and shelter. Along this route the traveller can find plenty to eat, since nature has established, as it were, restaurants at stations along the way. Moreover, shelter has been provided for him ; while all sorts of material for clothing, both that which grows out of the ground and that which grows on the backs of animals, have been ever at hand.

Thus the Power, or the Providence, that made and furnished this great and wonderful highway was ever inviting the peoples of the old world to discover the new lands toward the sunrise. He not only made the ocean canal, but He beckoned onward. Let us look at this remarkable sea-road.

In the Pacific Ocean, between the Tropic of Cancer and Micronesia, there is a great current which flows up from the equator (where, under the

THE OLDEST ROUTE TO OUR CONTINENT. 1/

vertical rays of the sun, the water almost boils), and which, moving for the most part westward, meets the great hot drifts coming up past Borneo and the Philippines. Thus both streams form a great, deep blue river in the sea, which, rushing like a mill race, scours the front of Formosa and the long chain of Japanese Islands. It then crosses eastward toward the Aleutian Islands, and, flowing down to Vancouver, passes along the whole western front of the United States, Mexico, and Central America. It is a curious fact that in this warm and indigo-blue stream anything that can float will move over a great circle of the earth.

Moreover, all the way from the Malay Archipelago to Vancouver, the water is comparatively shallow. Consequently it is a great feeding ground for fish and other marine creatures which supply nourishment to man, and attract from the interior highlands down to the coast, such other animals as also prey upon this sea-food. Even a savage boy, without much trouble, might easily make a journey along this ocean canal, because he would always have landmarks to guide his course ; for all along there are thousands of islands full of inlets and harbors, which are like stepping-stones and may be used for resting-places. The many-colored waters indicate, like a barometer, the condition of the weather and furnish daily probabilities. Even the fishes and the birds are good pilots, and one need rarely be troubled with any terrors of the lonely deep.

Thus, along a great circle of the earth, there is a well-marked ocean pathway, illumined by lightgiving volcanoes, provided with the proper winds to bend the sail and furnish motor power, having a temperature substantially uniform along the whole route, and abundantly supplied with food. This great, warm stream, the " Nile of the Pacific," deposits over the beds of landlocked areas, tropical silt and lower forms of marine creatures which feed fish and animals, thus contributing to the life of man. The best fishing-grounds of the world are in this ocean river, along which, as we shall see, America received most of its inhabitants who came from Asia.

There is this great difference between the North Atlantic and the North Pacific. To navigate the ocean between America and Europe, one must sail boldly out from sight of land without mountain peaks or islands to guide his course. In the far north, there is only the little Faroe Island group between Iceland and Norway. Further south there is nothing ; and the route from continent to continent shows only unbroken water. What wonder that on the ancient maps the Atlantic Ocean was indicated as being a great "Sea of Darkness".?

THE OLDEST ROUTE TO OUR CONTINENT. 1 9

What wonder that no American Indian ever drifted away to Europe ?

It is otherwise in the Pacific Ocean, which is spotted all over with islands, especially in the north and south. Above and below the Equator is a great archipelago. Along the Tropic of Cancer are the Hawaiian and other islands in mid-ocean, and the Japanese and Philippine islands are nearer the continent. In the northern Pacific are the Kuriles, — well called " the smokers," — with the Aleutian Islands not far off, and then Alaska.

Let us now look at these Asians who became the first Americans, whom the sailors from Norway called " Skralligs," and the discoverer from Italy named " Indians."

Chapter II. The First Families Of America

THERE are many ways of learning history. We read it not only from written documents, monuments, and coins, but also from the science of ethnology, from geological relics, from language, and from what is written on the body of man. We know that civilization always springs up along the water, in warm river valleys, such as those of the Nile, Euphrates, Tigris, Ganges, and Yang-tse. While the people having writing and books — the Egyptians, Assyrians, Hindoos, and Chinese — were growing into nations, there was a human stream of the dark-skinned races, reddish, brown, and yellow, moving along natures oldest highway from Asia into America. One set of peoples was of the northern or Eskimo type, like their cousins in Siberia. Another set had red skins, like the copper-colored Formosan head-hunters of to-day.

When southern Europeans first reached the West Indies in the fifteenth century, the Eskimos occupied the region just below and inside the Arctic Circle. The various Indian tribes roaming over what is now the United States, north and east, seemed to have developed in and migrated from the valley of the Columbia River. In the Mississippi valley were the buffalo hunters, who lived and migrated with these animals. In the east, the Iroquois and Algonquins lived on fish and deer, and had maize lands. In what is now the southwest of the United States and Mexico, there was a great group of tribes living in the dry regions. In South America, the home of mighty forests as large as Europe, were many tribes of Indians. In Peru they had developed something like civilization.

Although the inhabitants of the whole continent of America seem, on first view, so different, and although there were one hundred and twenty separate families of languages, yet all the tribes in America except the Eskimos were much alike in one great social principle. Marriage must be inside the tribe and descent remain in the female line. There were many handicrafts and cunning devices of hunter, fisherman, warrior, farmer, or weaver; but nothing absolutely new was invented on this continent. Every one of the aboriginal American arts — of industry, of war, and of ornament — can be matched in Asia, Oceanica, or Europe. All the myths and folklore of the Indians point to their origin in the northwest and to Asia beyond.

How numerous the inhabitants of America were in 1492, we do not know, but we are certain that the population was densest where food was plentiful and readily obtained, and in regions of country where paths and communications were easy and natural. Great areas of the continent, some of them larger than Europe, were almost wholly uninhabited by man. In British America there is a forest seventeen hundred miles long from east to west, and a thousand miles wide from north to south. This was not used or traversed by the red men until game grew scarce in the Hudson's Bay region, when trappers were compelled to go farther afield for flesh or furs. Another stretch of timber land covers a large part of the state of Washington and British Columbia. In the valley of the Amazon River, we are in darkest South America. The thicket, covering much of northern Brazil and the eastern portions of those countries between Brazil and the Pacific, is twenty-one hundred miles long by thirteen hundred miles wide. Very few people dwelt in these regions.

So also in the desert of Nevada, and in the great dry and thirsty lands of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, but few human beings could exist away from the river valleys. As a rule, the mountains, the thick forests, and the waterless regions were but slightly used or occupied. We may say at once.

that over a large portion of the Americas, the only human habitations were those of hunters and occasional wanderers. The mass of the aborigines o:athered alons^ the watercourses, at the river mouths on the seacoast, and in fertile valleys; in a word, where they could get food, find good trails on land, and secure water-ways for their canoes.

SeekinQ- food and makino^ war were the chief occupations of the first Americans, who were mostly of the stone age. Their land journeys were on foot. The Eskimos and Canadian Indians had dogs to pull their sleds. Down in Peru they used a little camel, the llama, but the chief means of transportation were the human back and legs. Even in their savage state, men and women had many wants. The fishermen living near the seashore needed what the hunters dwelling in the interior could furnish. Thus barter grew up. The seacoast tribes furnished salt, dried clams, oysters, and fish, shells for wampum and ornament ; while the interior tribes supplied meat, skins, flint arrow-heads, pipe-stone, and tobacco. The women did the drudgery of tilling the fields, cooking, and housekeeping, besides rearing the children ; while the men made weapons and tools, hunted, fished, and fought.

Who built the mounds, we do not know, nor can we tell whether the mound-builders were a race separate from and previous to the red Indians ; or, whether, as is most probable, they were the same people. But centuries before any white man from Europe saw America, there was a lively commerce between these mound-builders ; for among their remains we find obsidian knives from Mexico and the Yellow Stone Park, mica from North Carolina, gold, silver, meteoric iron, and shells, from the Gulf of Mexico. Indian commerce in its total bulk was enormous. In many old quarries we find the abandoned workshops of these ancient artificers, and hard by the unnoticed relics along old streams, once dammed by beavers, we see their trapping grounds. The industries of the Americans were varied and remarkable. The introduction of new weapons from Europe, like firearms, axes, and iron arrow-heads, destroyed the old Indian trades and workshops, just as steam and improved machinery, applied to weaving in England, have left the ruins of many water-power mills along the inland streams. European tools, clothing, money, and hundreds of other things which the red men wanted, threw out of employment thousands of expert native workmen and left the old workshops, in the quarries, the forest, and the seashore, deserted and useless. In prehistoric times, before white men destroyed the old native crafts, some of the Indian specialists were expert bow-makers ; others chipped arrow-heads. One man made spear-points or chisels, another scrapers, and still others dishes or jewellery. The fingers of some squaws were nimble in moulding earthen vessels, others were expert in weaving and embroidering, while still others gathered up shells in summer and strung them into wampum during the winter. The younger and stronger men became famous as warriors or hunters and rose to be chiefs. There was almost as much division of labor and consequent expertness in some tribes as there is in modern civilized life.

Wherever groups of Indians who were able to do something more than hunt or fish, could plant and raise crops and store food away and engage in traffic, there a higher state of civilization was reached. In the long run, the farmer is always able to excel the mere hunter. In Peru the Indians knew how to make hard metal tools and build stone fortresses, and possessed well-laid-out cities. They wove cloth, made wonderful gold ornaments, cut statues, and had a powerful military organization. In Mexico and in Peru, also, they irrigated their lands. They were expert in digging canals, in making dikes, and in chiselling and polishing hard stone. In Arizona they had towns and fortresses on the tops of rocks, with dwellings hollowed out in the cliffs, and they had made some progress in the arts. In New

York, between the Niagara and the Hudson, the five Iroquois tribes had great farms of corn, beans, squashes, and pumpkins, and could store up large quantities of food. They built long houses of timber and bark, each of which held a number of families. They had well-situated and fortified towns, while their commerce was highly developed. Their confederacy was a remarkable political structure, and there were among them not only thousands of fierce warriors, but many leaders skilled in statecraft and diplomacy.

So it was not an empty wilderness which the Norsemen or Columbus were to discover, but a land populated with millions of human beings, whose social life, languages, political and military methods, arms and architecture, commerce and trade, were well worth the study of the new-comers from Europe. They even had some art in communicating ideas and various methods of handing down tradition. The native Americans were probably as religious in their way as the Europeans who conquered them were in theirs. The men of the stone age had already discovered and occupied this continent lonQ[ before the invaders from across the Atlantic appeared with iron, agriculture, writing, and a superior religion.

As had already happened on a smaller scale in India, China, Japan, and other countries, so here in

America the same thing took place and the same story may be told again. It was one of discovery, exploration, colonization, conquest, with much cruelty on the side of the conquerors and some improvement of the aborigines. In most portions the amalgamation of conqueror and conquered followed. In others the ancient inhabitants were first enslaved and then, partially or wholly, converted to the imported faith. It was a mutual discovery which the Americans and Europeans made of each other; and it is more than probable that they who had more light did not act with any more reason or righteousness. How the different nations who discovered the aborigines treated them, — the one for the most part preserving and the other destroying, — we shall learn in the course of our three separate narratives, "The Romance of Discovery," "The Romance of Colonization," and " The Romance of Conquest."

The first of these North American people ever seen by Europeans were called " Skralligs," as we shall see.

Chapter III. The Blond Sailors And Their Raven Pilots

UP in the far north of Europe, in the high latitudes where the summer days are very long, often with eighteen or twenty hours of sun or twilight, but where the winter days are very short, live the hardy Scandinavians. They fill all the region between the Baltic and the North Seas, and between the Gulf of Bothnia and the Atlantic Ocean. Theirs is a great mountain land full of dark and gloomy forests, with uncounted lakes and streams which never dry up, because fed by the endless snows and ice.

Along the shore of Norway, from the North Cape, where one can see the summer sun at midnight, down to " the naze," or nose, runs a coast which is walled with mountains, but pierced all along with fiords. These are deep narrow cracks in the earth's crust, full of water, with many a cove and beach, where boats can be built and launched, and where hardy men and women are reared. Together with the fiords are numberless islands, rich in meat and eggs, and birds and fish. Here is situated one of

THE BLOND SAILORS AND THEIR RAVEN PILOTS. 29

nature's great schools for the training of brave and hardy sailors.

In this great region of the Norsemen, which includes Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, has long lived a fair-haired, blue-eyed race ; hardy, vigorous, and daring, fond of the sea, and not afraid of its waves or storms. How long these blond folks have lived here, cannot be reckoned. Asfes acjo their ancestors dwelt among these same rocks and waters. They did not become Christians until about the time of Christianity's millennial year. While in the warm and rich region of the Mediterranean, great cathedrals and splendid edifices in stone rose to the glory of God in Christ, and the stories of Bethlehem, of Nazareth, of Jerusalem, and of Calvary were familiar in every household, these people in the far north were still mostly pagans. Some tribes of them, marching overland, but oftener rowing out in their barges, and sailing in their ships, had reached the shores of Netherlands, Great Britain, France, and Germany. Besides war and slaughter, battle and burning, they had made settlements. Some had even gone to the Mediterranean Sea and sailed as far as Constantinople. Coming back, they told of the wonders of the warm lands where oranges, lemons, and olives grew.

Fierce and bloody were these pagan Norsemen who enjoyed nothing more than a raid upon French

THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY.

or Dutch market towns, many a one of which they left in ashes. They also liked to go into Christian churches and defile or burn the sacred emblems, of whose meaning they knew nothing. For centuries. Christian people kneeling on their church floors prayed every Sunday in their litany, " From the fury of the Norsemen, good Lord, deliver us." When the English caught the robbers, Dane or Norse, they used to skin them alive and nail their hides to the church doors. In the Netherlands they cut off their heads on the wet sea-beach.

Yes, these men, ancestors of many of us, were pagans. They had a mythology which explained to them the world and creation. It did not tell of a garden of Eden, so warm that a man and his wife could live without clothing and not feel cold, but of an original northern chaos, or rather of two worlds. In one, there were ice-cold streams, icebergs, and snow crystals. In the other, which was bright and hot, sat a guardian deity with a flaming sword. When the two worlds met in conflict, and the sparks and the frost vapor came together, large drops trickled down. These took the form of an immense giant named Ymer, and of a great cow^ named Audhumbla. The cow nourished the mighty giant and fed herself by licking the salty frost crystals on the rocks. After three days a man named Bure was produced, and there being a giantess named Bestla,

THE BLOND SAILORS AND THEIR RAVEN PILOTS. 31

three sons were born. These, when they grew up, slew the giant Ymer, and out of his dead body they made the present world.

So, to the boys and girls who grew up in the old Norse world, the earth was the giant's flesh, the ocean was his blood, the rocks were his bones, the trees of the forest were his hairs, the great, round, vaulted sky was his skull, and the clouds were his brains. However, the giants had not all died, and there were wars between them and the men.

Dwarfs and elves lived on the earth, while beneath it were the inhabitants of the lower world. The gods and the men were friends, but the giants and the underworld people were the enemies of both gods and men.

Wonderful is the Norse mythology, which these first discoverers of the Faroe Islands and Iceland believed. Curiously enough, showing how mythology is true to nature, of all the giants, ^gir, the ruler of the sea, is the wealthiest. So rich indeed is he, that he once entertained all the sfods in his magnificent hall in grand style. It was over the seas of ^gir that the hardy Norseman rowed and sailed to reach the rich lands of the South, and seize the wealth of towns and churches. The giant's blood, as they called the ocean, gave them food, and ever tempted them to adventure and booty.

THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY.

One of these Northmen discovered Greenland, but did not name it. Later, in the year 982, Erik the Red, who had been banished there from Iceland, gave an example to all land agents and speculators, who wish to sell lands, whether valuable or worthless, by writing an attractive advertisement. Erik named this gray and white country of rock, ice, and polar bears, Greenland, in order to attract colonists.

The Norwegians were the first Europeans to see and dwell in America. In their days there was no compass, chart, sextant, or chronometer. The splendid equipments of modern ships and the science of navigation based on mathematics, were unknown ; but there were bold hearts, iron-like muscles, hardy bodies, and strong wills. God's lights in the skies were theirs. The sun, rising and setting every day, gave them true direction east and west, — a path of golden light, — as they thought, over the blood of Ymer. At night the glorious stars, set into the round skull of the world-giant, shed their mild radiance. How easy to sail straight westward !

No wonder that Iceland was early discovered, colonized, and made one of the homes of these blond and blue-eyed people. No wonder, either, that Greenland was so early known and visited that when the South Europeans learned geography from the Arabs and began to think of the matter, they considered Greenland to be a part

THE BLOND SAILORS AND THEIR RAVEN PILOTS. 33

of the old world, because it belonged to European people.

But what happened, when clouds hid sun and star, when mist and fog covered the surface of the ocean, when adverse winds blew and terrible currents drove the ships out of their courses, and storms howled and roared, sending rain, sleet, and ice into the faces and over the bodies of the hardy mariners? Then, to the Norsemen's fancy, the brains of Ymer were blowing about, hiding the light and the land. Without chart or compass, what could these vikings — men of the viks or bays, yet true kings of the sea — do.^

In the earlier world, as among the Indians of the forest to-day, the average man lived nearer to the beasts and birds. The creatures of fin, fur, feather, and hoof were like companions. The man often lived under the same roof with his horses, cows, and pet birds, and when he died, he wanted them buried with him. He understood the language, motions, and powers of the brutes better than does the civilized man in our time. So, when the Norseman sailed far from land, he took a pilot with him. This pilot was black and feathered. It was a raven. Before ever he had heard of Father Noah and his ark, he took this ancient friend of man, yet so much feared, in his ship with him. Far out at sea, beyond the roar of breakers, or the scent of smoke or trees, or even amid wintry gales and cloud-covered skies, or in fog or mist, the raven was set free. While in sight, its course was watched with intense straining eyes. If the bird came back, then land was not near. If it did not return, the men rowed with all speed in the direction of its flight, and soon they landed on some shore.