Exploration, discovery and conquest of the New world

Front matter

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Preface

F all studies, that of History is one of the most important and interesting. It satisfies a natural and laudable curiosity as to what has taken place in the world, and makes some amends for the shortness of life by enabling us to live over, in thought, the days and scenes of the past, and to know, as by a second experience, the life and labors of those who have gone before us.

So strong and universal is the desire to know about the times that are gone, as to their persons, events and progressive changes, that it may almost be called an instinct of the soul. And as Cicero says : " Not to know what has taken place in former times is to be always a child, for if no use is made of the labors of by-gone ages, the world must always remain in the infancy of knowledge."

In the following pages it has been the aim of the writer to give a history of the discovery and earliest explorations of the New World. In these biographies, as found in the original form, there is much that is of little interest to the general reader ; and much of scientific importance, that is difficult to understand by those who have not a close acquaintance with the mysteries of seamanship and astronomical observation. All these points have been condensed and written in such familiar language that no difficulty will be experienced, even by boys and girls who might otherwise be repelled by the appearance of difficulty.

The original authorities have been consulted wherever practicable. A constant effort has been made to retain as much individual interest as possible ; and reference to the authorities from which this work has been gathered would only encumber the book without adding to its value ; for in many cases the materials for a single chapter have been collected from many and various sources, and woven laboriously into a single whole.

Introduction

HE first chapter of this volume is a charming compilation of the legends of the discoveries of North America before the famous voyage of Columbus, in which the trade winds wafted his ships to the West Indies. The testimony seems so clear that it would be eccentric to declare strenuously against the conclusion upon circumstancial evidence, that the Northmen repeatedly visited Greenland and were acquainted with Newfoundland, Nantucket, Long Island, and perhaps Rhode Island.

There are traditions in Iceland that corroborate the legendary stories of the adventurous Northmen, and they add that Columbus visited Iceland fourteen years before he immortalized himself as the discoverer of the "new world." It is a part of the story of Columbus in Iceland that he became intimately acquainted with the antique lore of that American island. It is worth while to remember that the westward capes of Iceland are less than three hundred miles from Greenland, while the eastern capes are between nine hundred and a thousand miles from Norway.

It is a plain proposition that in the course of the centuries the capital of Iceland was settled in 874. The writer visited that island one thousand years later, with Cyrus Field, Dr. I. I. Hayes, Bayard Taylor, Professors Magnusson and Kneeland and Mr. Henry Gladstone, who imported a pony to Hawarden. The founding of the city was five hundred and eighteen years before the Columbus discovery. If it be true that Colum^ as visited Iceland fourteen years before he found the West Indies —the year of his visit was 1478 and Rej^kjaveek had then bee' . founded more than five hundred years, within easy sail in three or four days of Greenland. The people were largely competent navigators with sea-going craft, and the land westward could not have been unfamiliar to them.

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X INTRODUCTION.

There was nothing strange or doubtful in using a fact made known freely that there was land in the West. It does not reduce the splendor of the achievement of Columbus that he heard the story. He made use of it. He found in the presence of land in the West a corroboration of his dreams, that gave a footing to his fancy.

The Icelandic tradition is that a Bishop was maintained for a long time in Iceland, and that a gorge of ice massed on the coast that lasted forty years, and then there was only desolate silence.

After the " Decline and Fall " of the Roman Empire, Northern Italy was celebrated for commercial supremacy, glories in art and cities of special splendors and power ; and for immortal authors, artists in literature, sculpture, architecture and painting. Rome remained when the Empire crumbled into mighty fragments, " The Eternal City ; " and though there was an Eastern Empire and a rival capital — Constantinople — to divide the immense inheritance, the swarms of Asiatic conquerors came after the capture of the Oriental metropolis and converted the magnificent dominant church, St. Sophia, into a veritable and memorable mosque — a citadel of Mohammed in Christendom ; and the m3^riads of Mohammedans seeking Paradise swept over Southern Spain, first bafiled at Vienna and av last beaten on the central plains of France, at Chalons.

Unlike Alexander, when his legions marched to India and he grew weary of conquest and carousal, Rome encountered other unconquered worlds, and found material occupation in crusades and cathedrals and the marvelous organizations of the then new, now old Church of Rome.

Naples survived the eruptions of Vesuvius, and the irruption of the barbarians from the heart of Europe, remained the Queen City of the Italian South, when Carthage, like T3^re, was buried in her own ruins. Rome and Greece, however, taught the new nations rising on the wiugs of stately ships, over the antiquities of Egypt, to open the road to India ; and opulent tradesmen, guided b}- those who lived in the shadows of the Alps, the lagoons of the Adriatic, the pleasant river Arno and the shores of the bright central waters of the Mediterranean, gave the sunny historic lands a larger life.

When Rome was no longer the imperial throne of the world, the

INTRODUCTION. xi

camels, called cleverly the " ships of the deserts " in Africa, gave way to the fleets that represented world-wide sea powers, and gathered the golden harvest between the ends of the earth.

The representative and commanding cities of the revival of civilization, when the sword of old Rome ceased to devour, and the later and fairer forms of progress became manifest, were four — Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Florence. Venice, the bride of the sea, was first in the illustrious capitals that became nations. Florence lacked the embrace of the sea to inspire her to be the home of wide dominion, and became the glorious city of the Beautiful, the star of the Appenines.

Pisa was the rival of Genoa, as Genoa of Venice ; but was long lived and strong enough to be of the leaders of the Crusaders, and carried home from Palestine forty ship loads of the precious hills around Jerusalem, to heap her Campo Santo with sacred soil, and to this end disfigured, with the scars of excavation the landscapes overlooking Solomon's temple, the scene of the Cross of Christ ; and the sepulchre from the door of which the stone rolled away.

When we remember the fleet of Pisa, laden with soil touched by the Saviour's feet to make holy a graveyard in Italy, we meet the thought that after all a higher intelligence could declare that skepticism of the " relics " ridiculed by unbelievers in mysteries, might reasonably be relaxed, in view of the stranger things we know have happened ; and that, as we see in these days, miracles of science we need not deny the existence of memorials of Christianity though obscured in detail by savagery in the gloom of the desolation that overtook the conquests, won in the sign of the cross, when the sword and torch of Mohammed prevailed and gave the memorials of Christians to graves and dust heaps. The Crusaders, the Greek Emperors, and the stately Italian cities, gathered a harvest with their armies of historical relics in the Holy Lands.

Christopher Columbus is not believed by the people of Genoa to have been born in that city. The testimony, so far as we may use the word, where enlightenment compels the existence of uncertainty, is that the great navigator was born in a village on the shores of the Gulf of Genoa, north of the city and near the sea, in the midst of quarries that yielded red stone.

xii INTRODUCTION.

The exact location of the house that is loosel}- called the birthplace of Columbus, is uot known, but there is interesting truth. There is evidence that a house identified with the Columbus famil}^ was the propert}^ of his father, and the home of the child who gave the name distinction. The house bears marks, not recent, that it has been changed since the boy Christopher was of the humble home household. It has been dul}- photographed, after the examination of records, proving it the habitation of the Columbus family. It is on the south side of a steep and narrow street, running from the harbor to the hills. On one side, when the writer found it, was a wine shop, and on the other a tobacco shop.

The present appearances are that the original house has been reconstructed, so far as the front is concerned, into two houses. The one the father of Columbus, the discoverer, lived in, is that on the left of the building as presented in engravings. The form of the windows, and the narrowness of each of the structures as they stand invite this theory. Legal documents exist proving the Columbus folk lived in this place for several generations, including the time of the birth of the man child of high destin3\

There is a photograph of the house taken by an iVmerican consul, who investigated the neighborhood and also the official pigeon holes that seemed to speak of the receptacles of man}^ secrets ; but the only fact discovered was that the '* house of Columbus " was the property and home of the people of which, in that place, Christopher Columbus was one of the children, and that it was for several generations the dwelling place of those who derived title from the navigator's father. There was not, in or near the grim place, a good pla}^ ground for the 3'oungsters, and it has the appearance of a promise that it will remain unchanged for the centuries to come, as during like periods in the past.

When Columbus made the discovery identified with his name, the spirit of adventure was abroad in the world, and the art of navigation improving so rapidly that evidentl}' the appointed time was close at hand, for the revelation of the gigantic continents connected b}- a narrow but rugged isthmus, awaiting explorers to be announced as the new world.

INTRODUCTION. xiii

Clearly, Columbus was a man of extraordinary breadth of information and strength of character. He had deep convictions that there was land in the West. He knew substantially the shape of the world, the fact that it sloped off toward the poles, and that the farther North one sailed, the narrower were the seas measured East and West, and the longer and colder the winters grew. He knew the Atlantic ocean broadened southward, and had read of the far East of Asia. Cipango and Cathay were Japan and China.

The travels and writings of them by Marco Polo, kindled the imagination of the hardy Genoese sailor, destined to the delivery of the stroke of an enchanter's wand, that prepared the way for other and broader discoveries, among them the realization of the magnitude of the globe.

Dreamer that he was, Columbus never dreamed that the earth was great as appeared when the impulse given by his voyages led in a few years comparatively to the completion of circumnavigation of the globe. The first ship that sailed around the earth was that carrying the flag of Magellan's squadron. The ship returned, the last of the fleet, with its captain, but the commander in chief of the squadron was slain in attempting to conquer a beautiful island of the subsequentl}^ named Phillippine archipelago. He fought to force the inhabitants to become the subjects of a Christian king, and was killed in the fight.

When the flag ship arrived on the return to Africa, through the straits of Magellan, a day had been lost in the reckoning, but the demonstration was made that the world was round.

Columbus had letters for the Mikado of the age, the Great Kahn imperial house of Japan had then been in power more than two thousand years. The enormous error had been made by the Genoese navigator that the island of Cuba was Cipango. He sent forth messengers with letters of introduction to the sovereign of Japan, and they discovered a people of nakedness and innocence, smoking a strange herb they called " tabac."

The discoverer followed the coast of Cuba in two of his voyages, until convinced he had struck the mainland of Asia. On his last voyage^ he saw the coast of South America, but did not land. In xiv INTRODUCTION.

his calculations, believing the globe was round like an egg, he had omitted the Americas and the Pacific ocean. If he had lived to ascertain the bulk of the world, he would have been amazed at the prodigality of nature, in manufacturing worlds made of meteors.

The West Indies, as the islands were named, Columbus actually discovered, turned out richer in natural resources than those of the East. It was the fortune of the navigator to have a spell of fair weather assigned him in the discovery of a far greater land than India, an island surpassing Cipango, in extent, fruitfulness and beauty, if we may count the unlimited ages, to find a bigger and more bountiful Cathay in Asia.

The letters of the discoverer in describing his islands are poems in fact, and glow with the rapture of a wonderful achievement. They are beautiful in poetry and piety, penetrated with a deep sense of duty to Christianity, with devotion to his Church, and he was radiant in his writings about the incouJparable loveliness that environed him — the colors of the fish in the rivers rivaling the bloom of the wilderness that was a majestic and opulent orchard of fruit trees. There was waiting for him, as he beheld the dazzling landscapes disclosed, an awful enemy native to the voluptuous airs, destined to destroy navies, compared with which his caravels were as fishing boats, built to keep within view of hospitable shores.

Columbus arrived in the West Indies in the cyclone season. The month of October in that clime especially experiences the terrible tempests that wreck the forests and rend the cities. It is the month of " the hurricane's eclipse of the sun." The discoverer lingered in the enchanted air, hurricane haunted, hoping to find Cipango, until he reluctantly departed from his own Paradise. There was peace while he waited. Everj^where he found surpassing beauties of sea and sky and shore.

All the blandishments of the tropics were spread to banquet his senses to indulge the fascination of suspense and the fancies he painted of the coming time. The mighty whirlwinds that begin as bubbles of the languid atmosphere of the American Mediterranean and send forth their tornadoes like thunderbolts northward and northwestward, were stilled that sober October ; but storms overtook and

INTRODUCTION. xv

nearly overwhelmed the Conquering Hero, when, on the waters the trade winds had beguiled him westward. Despairing at last of escaping from the aroused Atlantic, he wrote a brief story of his " find " in the West, placed the parchment in a cake of wax, and the wax in a keg, and so fixed the scroll to float when his ship went down.

There was a change from stormy to fair, and he returned to Spain to receive great honors, and slights, jealousies and treacheries, through which he endured labor and sorrow to the end of his life, and died to be four times buried — in San Domingo once, Cuba once, and Spain first and last. Counting his crossing the Atlantic living and dead, his voyages over that stormy sea, from side to side, were ten. His longest repose was in the cathedral of Havana, where he had an unfinished monument, like " an empty glass turned down," as Spain lost her last island that Colon found for Isabella and Ferdinand.

Contents

AMERICA BEFORE COLUMBUS.

Plan of Work— Divisions of History— Egyptian Knowledge of America— Other Legends — Carthagenian Discoveries — Records Found — A Grecian Tomb in America — Similarity of Picture Writing — Chinese Discoveries — Difficulties of Maritime Enterprises — Invention of the Compass — Irish Claims — The Welsh Discovery — Welsh-Speaking Indians — The Norsemen — Erik the E.ed — Discovery of Greenland — The Mainland — Leifs Voyage — The Round Tower — Vinland — The First Fight with the Indians — The First White Native American — The Dighton Rock — The Skeleton in Armor 25

COLUMBUS' LIFE BEFORE THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA.

Chapter I. America Before Columbus

Plan of the Work — Divisions of History — Egyptian Knowledge of America — Other Legends -Carthagenian Discoveries — Records Found — A Grecian Tomb in America — Similarity of Picture Writing — Chinese Discoveries— Difficulties of Maritime Enterprises — invention of the Compass — Welsh-Speaking Indians — The Norsemen — Erik the Red — Discovery of Greenland — Leif's Voyage — The Round Tower— The First Fight with the Indians.

IT is our purpose in this volume to trace the history of the great discoveries beginning in the memorable year 1492; to show how not only Columbus labored and waited until his great opportunity came, but the adventures and hardships through wliich his contemporaries and successors sought out the mysteries surrounding that New World.

Before entering upon this task, however, it will be well to consider the stories told of various seamen who had sought and found the far-off continent, before Columbus. We shall also see what dim knowledge of a land beyond the great western ocean was current among the peoples of antiquity.

History is usually divided into three parts. Ancient history ends with the fall of Rome, in 476 A. D.; the History of the Middle Ages then begins, and extends over a period of about ten centuries ; since the end of which, the record is called Modern History. During the first period, there were certain traditions regarding a country which was probably America ; during the " second period there may have been some daring sailors who reached the New World ; the third period begins with the story of exploration, discovery and settlement in America.

Solon, one of the seven wise men of Greece, who lived in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., traveled into far countries, to learn all that the sages of other nations had to teach. When he reached Egypt, he thought to astonish the priests — the learned men of the country — by telling them of the history of Greece, and particularly of Athens, of which city he was a native.

"Solon, Solon!" exclaimed one of the oldest of them; "the Greeks are nothing but children, and an aged Greek there is none."

Much surprised at this, the traveler asked the priest what he meant ; and received in reply such an account of the knowledge which the Egyptians possessed of other peoples, as to make him accept for truth what had seemed but an idle boast.

Among other things, the old priest told him of a vast island, or rather continent, which once lay in the great ocean, to the west of Europe, and which was reached by a short voyage after the sailor had passed the Pillars of Hercules, as the Strait of Gibraltar was then called. The people of this continent had often made war upon those of Europe, and had been much dreaded by them; but a series of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and similar calami^ ties, had caused this great island to sink into the waters of the ocean, with all its vast hordes of inhabitants; and the peoples of Europe had thus been saved from these terrible enemies. The sinking of this island, the priest added, had so blocked up the ocean with mud as to make it forever afterward impassable. The date of its destruction he iixed at a point about nine thousand years before his own time.

Solon returned to Greece, bearing this information with him; but it does not seem to have been made public until the time of his descendant Plato, who lived about two hundred 3'ears later; and we have no means of knowing how much Plato added to the original story from the treasury of his own mind. It is from this source that Ave derive the classic fables of the Lost Atlantis.

There were legends, too, of the Gardens of the Hesperides, and of the Fortunate Islands, and, later, of St. Brandan's Island and other favored places, far in the west ; but whether these had any connection with a belief in land beyond the Atlantic, or whether this was simply considered a convenient situation for the scene of such stories, since nobody knew enough of this region to say the islands were not there, we cannot pretend to say.

It is possible that America was reached by the Phoenician and Carthaginian sailors, the most adventurous of antiquity. But the Phoenicians were early reduced to insignificance among the nations of the world, while the Carthaginians, whose city they had founded, rose into importance. But Carthage engaged in wars with Rome, and was finally wholly destroyed by the armies of that great city; and all record of her colonies and discoveries was thus lost. It is certain that Carthaginian sailors discovered the Canary Islands, which were then uninhabited ; and these islands were peopled from Carthage; yet, when they were re-discovered, the inhabitants had lost all tradition of their ancestors having come from another country, and thought themselves the only people in the world.

Traditions which have survived the destruction of Carthage tell us that a vessel on the Mediterranean, which was sailing towards the Straits of Gibraltar, the ancient Calpe, was driven by storms beyond it, and was heard of

AMERICA BEFORE COLUMBUS.

no more. Did it reach America? At a meeting of the Mexican Geographical Society, some few j^ears since, it was stated that some brass tablets had been discovered in the northern part of Brazil, covered with Phoenician inscriptions, w^hich tell of the discovery of America five centuries before the beginning of the Christian era. These are now in the museum at Rio Janeiro. They state that a Sidonian fleet sailed from a harbor in the Red Sea, and rounding the Cape of Good Hope, was driven by the south-east trade-winds, and then by the north-east, across the Atlantic. The number of the vessels, the number of seamen, and many other particulars are there given.

A Phceniciax Vessel.

In 1827, a farmer near Montevideo, in Uruguay, South America, is said to have discovered a flat stone which bore an inscription in a language unknown to him. Beneath it was a vault of masonry, in which was deposited two ancient swords, a helmet, and a shield. The stone which had covered the vault was taken to ]\Iontevideo, where it was found that the inscription was in most parts sufficiently legible to be deciphered. According to those learned men who examined it, it was in Greek, and read as follows: —

" During the dominion of Alexander, the son of Philip, King of Macedon, in the sixtythird Olympiad, Ptolemais."

On the handle of one of the swords was a man's portrait, supposed to be that of Alexander; the helmet was decorated with a fine sculpture representing Achilles dragging the body of Hector around the walls of Troy. If this is indeed a relic of times before Columbus, it would indicate that during the reign of Alexander the Great, about 330 B. C, a party of Greeks had crossed the Atlantic. Why the arms should have been deposited in this vault we do not know ; it may have been that one of their number, Ptolemais, possibly their leader, died ; it may be that they found it impossible to carry out the customs of their nation, and reduce the body to ashes ; and hence entombed it

AMERICA BEFORE COLUMBUS.

in this vault, with the arms which their leader had used during his lifetime. More than two thousand 3'ears had passed before it was opened; and in that time every trace of the body and its softer clothing had been destroyed, leaving only the imperishable metals.

A Fleet of Roman Galleys in the Mediterkankan.

These are the stories of ancient times in regard to America. It will be noticed that while there are accounts of men who reached the western shores of the Atlantic, it would seem that there are none of whom it is said that they returned. Yet the fables of Atlantis shows that at some time the people of the eastern continent must have known something of the western. It is a curious fact, in this connection, that recent investigations have shown that the monuments of Mexico and Central America are surprisingly similar to those of Egypt; and there is a still greater degree of similarity between the picture-writing of these two far-distant parts of the world. How much of the civilization of Mexico and Peru, which has long been the wonder of white men, came originally from Egypt, the mother of the arts and sciences known to Europe?

At the very beginning of the Middle Ages, we find a claim of another discovery of America; but this time from the other coast. In 1761, Deguignes, a French scholar whose name is now almost unknown, announced to the world that the Chinese discovered America in the fifth century, A. D. He derived this information from the official annals of the Chinese Empire, to which, he claimed, he had gained access. He tells us that he found that in the year 499 A. D., a Chinese Buddhist priest returned to Siugan, the capital of China, from Tahan, or Khamschatka, saying that he had been to a country twenty thousand li, or about seven thousand miles, beyond Tahan. It is supposed by Deguignes from this statement of the distance, that he had crossed Behring's Strait and journeyed southward to California, or perhaps as far as Mexico. The explorer called this country Fusang, from the fact that the maguey, or American aloe, so plentiful in that part of North America, resembles the plant which the Chinese call fusang.

Before considering at more length the stories of those navigators who are said to have preceded Columbus in the discovery of America, let us see what difficulties were in the way. In the first place, the vessels which served for coasting voyages were, in very many cases, small and ill-fitted for buffeting with the storms of the Atlantic. We shall see hereafter, however, that an experienced sailor did not consider certain ships as unfitted for his purpose because they were smaller than many of his day; and, perhaps, in comparing the ships of the two periods, we are apt to place too much stress on the fact that the vessels of to-day are large, and conclude that because of their size they are safer. Possibly the small craft in which the early navigators crossed the Atlantic were far safer and more manageable than larger vessels would have been, without the aid of steam to speed them on their way.

A far greater difficulty lay in the ignorance of the sailors. Do we realize what it means to have no newspapers, no books except costly manuscripts, no schools except for those of high rank or who intended to enter the priesthood? Can a modern sailor imagine what it would be to drift upon an unknown sea, without chart or compass? Yet that is what these early seamen did, when they ventured far to the west, in search of land of whose very existence they were not sure.

The mariner's compass was not known in Europe until about the twelfth century; although it had been in use much earlier than this in China. A learned Florentine, who visited England in 1258, wrote home a letter describing one wonderful thing which he had seen. He had been to the great University of Oxford, which had had a European renown for hundreds of years even then, and had been admitted to the study of Friar Roger Bacon, a man so wise that most persons thought he must have sold himself to the devil to learn all that he knew. One of the wonderful things which he saw was the power which a piece of magnetic iron ore possessed over iron and steel ; and the great friar, putting a long, slender bit of such ore on a piece of light wood, and letting it float on some water, showed the astonished traveler how

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AMERICA BEFORE COLUMBUS.

coDstantly one end of the rude needle pointed to the North Star. It was too strange a power to be wholly right, thought the people of that time; it could only be by Satanic direction that such powers could be given to a bit of senseless iron; how could a piece of metal know more than a Christian? And good, devout Catholics, in stormy weather, were often puzzled to know in what direction to look for the North Star. So the sailors refused to go in any vessel whose master was known to carry this magical contrivance; and it was only when they found that exorcisms and blessings and signs of the cross did not take away this power of the magnet, that they began to believe it did not come from the devil after all. This foolish prejudice against the mariner's compass once removed, a great ditficulty in the way of oceanic exploration was smoothed away.