The Discovery of America Part 1

The Discovery of America.

by John Fiske.

PREFACE.

The present work is the outcome of two lines of study pursued, with more or less interruption from other studies, for about thirty years. It will be observed that the book has two themes, as different in character as the themes for voice and piano in Schubert's "Fruhlingsglaube," and yet so closely related that the one is needful for an adequate comprehension of the other. In order to view in their true perspective the series of events comprised in the Discovery of America, one needs to form a mental picture of that strange world of savagery and barbarism to which civilized Europeans were for the first time introduced in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in their voyages along the African coast, into the Indian and Pacific oceans, and across the Atlantic. Nothing that Europeans discovered during that stirring period was so remarkable as these antique phases of human society, the mere existence of which had scarcely been suspected, and the real character of which it has been left for the present generation to begin to understand. Nowhere was this ancient society so full of instructive lessons as in aboriginal America, which had pursued its own course of development, cut off and isolated from the Old World, for probably more than fifty thousand years. The imperishable interest of those episodes in the Discovery of America known as the conquests of Mexico and Peru consists chiefly in the glimpses they afford us of this primitive world.

It was not an uninhabited continent that the Spaniards found, and in order to comprehend the course of events it is necessary to know something about those social features that formed a large part of the burden of the letters of Columbus and Vespucius, and excited even more intense and general interest in Europe than the purely geographical questions suggested by the voyages of those great sailors. The descriptions of ancient America, therefore, which form a kind of background to the present work, need no apology.

It was the study of prehistoric Europe and of early Aryan inst.i.tutions that led me by a natural sequence to the study of aboriginal America. In 1869, after sketching the plan of a book on our Aryan forefathers, I was turned aside for five years by writing "Cosmic Philosophy." During that interval I also wrote "Myths and Myth-Makers" as a side-work to the projected book on the Aryans, and as soon as the excursion into the field of general philosophy was ended, in 1874, the work on that book was resumed. Fortunately it was not then carried to completion, for it would have been sadly antiquated by this time. The revolution in theory concerning the Aryans has been as remarkable as the revolution in chemical theory which some years ago introduced the New Chemistry. It is becoming eminently probable that the centre of diffusion of Aryan speech was much nearer to Lithuania than to any part of Central Asia, and it has for some time been quite clear that the state of society revealed in Homer and the Vedas is not at all like primitive society, but very far from it. By 1876 I had become convinced that there was no use in going on without widening the field of study. The conclusions of the Aryan school needed to be supplemented, and often seriously modified, by the study of the barbaric world, and it soon became manifest that for the study of barbarism there is no other field that for fruitfulness can be compared with aboriginal America.

This is because the progress of society was much slower in the western hemisphere than in the eastern, and in the days of Columbus and Cortes it had nowhere "caught up" to the points reached by the Egyptians of the Old Empire or by the builders of Mycenae and Tiryns. In aboriginal America we therefore find states of society preserved in stages of development similar to those of our ancestral societies in the Old World long ages before Homer and the Vedas. Many of the social phenomena of ancient Europe are also found in aboriginal America, but always in a more primitive condition. The clan, phratry, and tribe among the Iroquois help us in many respects to get back to the original conceptions of the gens, curia, and tribe among the Romans. We can better understand the growth of kingship of the Agamemnon type when we have studied the less developed type in Montezuma. The house-communities of the southern Slavs are full of interest for the student of the early phases of social evolution, but the Mandan round-house and the Zuni pueblo carry us much deeper into the past. Aboriginal American inst.i.tutions thus afford one of the richest fields in the world for the application of the comparative method, and the red Indian, viewed in this light, becomes one of the most interesting of men; for in studying him intelligently, one gets down into the stone age of human thought. No time should be lost in gathering whatever can be learned of his ideas and inst.i.tutions, before their character has been wholly lost under the influence of white men. Under that influence many Indians have been quite transformed, while others have been as yet but little affected.

Some extremely ancient types of society, still preserved on this continent in something like purity, are among the most instructive monuments of the past that can now be found in the world. Such a type is that of the Moquis of northeastern Arizona. I have heard a rumour, which it is to be hoped is ill-founded, that there are persons who wish the United States government to interfere with this peaceful and self-respecting people, break up their pueblo life, scatter them in farmsteads, and otherwise compel them, against their own wishes, to change their habits and customs. If such a cruel and stupid thing were ever to be done, we might justly be said to have equalled or surpa.s.sed the folly of those Spaniards who used to make bonfires of Mexican hieroglyphics. It is hoped that the present book, in which of course it is impossible to do more than sketch the outlines and indicate the bearings of so vast a subject, will serve to awaken readers to the interest and importance of American archaeology for the general study of the evolution of human society.

So much for the first and subsidiary theme. As for my princ.i.p.al theme, the Discovery of America, I was first drawn to it through its close relations with a subject which for some time chiefly occupied my mind, the history of the contact between the Aryan and Semitic worlds, and more particularly between Christians and Mussulmans about the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean. It is also interesting as part of the history of science, and furthermore as connected with the beginnings of one of the most momentous events in the career of mankind, the colonization of the barbaric world by Europeans. Moreover, the discovery of America has its full share of the romantic fascination that belongs to most of the work of the Renaissance period. I have sought to exhibit these different aspects of the subject.

The present book is in all its parts written from the original sources of information. The work of modern scholars has of course been freely used, but never without full acknowledgment in text or notes, and seldom without independent verification from the original sources.

Acknowledgments are chiefly due to Humboldt, Morgan, Bandelier, Major, Varnhagen, Markham, Helps, and Harrisse. To the last-named scholar I owe an especial debt of grat.i.tude, in common with all who have studied this subject since his arduous researches were begun. Some of the most valuable parts of his work have consisted in the discovery, reproduction, and collation of doc.u.ments; and to some extent his pages are practically equivalent to the original sources inspected by him in the course of years of search through European archives, public and private. In the present book I must have expressed dissent from his conclusions at least as often as agreement with them, but whether one agrees with him or not, one always finds him helpful and stimulating.

Though he has in some sort made himself a Frenchman in the course of his labours, it is pleasant to recall the fact that M. Harrisse is by birth our fellow-countryman; and there are surely few Americans of our time whom students of history have more reason for holding in honour.

I have not seen Mr. Winsor's "Christopher Columbus" in time to make any use of it. Within the last few days, while my final chapter is going to press, I have received the sheets of it, a few days in advance of publication. I do not find in it any references to sources of information which I have not already fully considered, so that our differences of opinion on sundry points may serve to show what diverse conclusions may be drawn from the same data. The most conspicuous difference is that which concerns the personal character of Columbus.

Mr. Winsor writes in a spirit of energetic (not to say violent) reaction against the absurdities of Roselly de Lorgues and others who have tried to make a saint of Columbus; and under the influence of this reaction he offers us a picture of the great navigator that serves to raise a pertinent question. No one can deny that Las Casas was a keen judge of men, or that his standard of right and wrong was quite as lofty as any one has reached in our own time. He had a much more intimate knowledge of Columbus than any modern historian can ever hope to acquire, and he always speaks of him with warm admiration and respect. But how could Las Casas ever have respected the feeble, mean-spirited driveller whose portrait Mr. Winsor asks us to accept as that of the Discoverer of America?

If, however, instead of his biographical estimate of Columbus, we consider Mr. Winsor's contributions toward a correct statement of the difficult geographical questions connected with the subject, we recognize at once the work of an acknowledged master in his chosen field. It is work, too, of the first order of importance. It would be hard to mention a subject on which so many reams of direful nonsense have been written as on the discovery of America; and the prolific source of so much folly has generally been what Mr. Freeman fitly calls "bondage to the modern map." In order to understand what the great mariners of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were trying to do, and what people supposed them to have done, one must begin by resolutely banishing the modern map from one's mind. The ancient map must take its place, but this must not be the ridiculous "Orbis Veteribus Notus," to be found in the ordinary cla.s.sical atlas, _which simply copies the outlines of countries with modern accuracy from the modern map, and then scatters ancient names over them!_ Such maps are worse than useless. In dealing with the discovery of America one must steadily keep before one's mind the quaint notions of ancient geographers, especially Ptolemy and Mela, as portrayed upon such maps as are reproduced in the present volume. It was just these distorted and hazy notions that swayed the minds and guided the movements of the great discoverers, and went on reproducing themselves upon newly-made maps for a century or more after the time of Columbus. Without constant reference to these old maps one cannot begin to understand the circ.u.mstances of the discovery of America.

In no way can one get at the heart of the matter more completely than by threading the labyrinth of causes and effects through which the western hemisphere came slowly and gradually to be known by the name AMERICA.

The reader will not fail to observe the pains which I have taken to elucidate this subject, not from any peculiar regard for Americus Vespucius, but because the quintessence of the whole geographical problem of the discovery of the New World is in one way or another involved in the discussion. I can think of no finer instance of the queer complications that can come to surround and mystify an increase of knowledge too great and rapid to be comprehended by a single generation of men.

In the solution of the problem as to the first Vespucius voyage I follow the lead of Varnhagen, but always independently and with the doc.u.mentary evidence fully in sight. For some years I vainly tried to pursue Humboldt's clues to some intelligible conclusion, and felt inhospitably inclined toward Varnhagen's views as altogether too plausible; he seemed to settle too many difficulties at once. But after becoming convinced of the spuriousness of the Bandini letter (see below, vol. ii. p. 94); and observing how the air at once was cleared in some directions, it seemed that further work in textual criticism would be well bestowed. I made a careful study of the diction of the letter from Vespucius to Soderini in its two princ.i.p.al texts:--1. the Latin version of 1507, the original of which is in the library of Harvard University, appended to Waldseemuller's "Cosmographiae Introductio"; 2. the Italian text reproduced severally by Bandini, Canovai, and Varnhagen, from the excessively rare original, of which only five copies are now known to be in existence. It is this text that Varnhagen regards as the original from which the Latin version of 1507 was made, through an intermediate French version now lost. In this opinion Varnhagen does not stand alone, as Mr. Winsor seems to think ("Christopher Columbus," p. 540, line 5 from bottom), for Harrisse and Avezac have expressed themselves plainly to the same effect (see below, vol. ii. p. 42). A minute study of this text, with all its quaint interpolations of Spanish and Portuguese idioms and seafaring phrases into the Italian ground-work of its diction, long ago convinced me that it never was a _translation_ from anything in heaven or earth or the waters under the earth. n.o.body would ever have translated a doc.u.ment _into_ such an extremely peculiar and individual jargon. It is most a.s.suredly an original text, and its author was either Vespucius or the Old Nick. It was by starting from this text as primitive that Varnhagen started correctly in his interpretation of the statements in the letter, and it was for that reason that he was able to dispose of so many difficulties at one blow. When he showed that the landfall of Vespucius on his first voyage was near Cape Honduras and had nothing whatever to do with the Pearl Coast, he began to follow the right trail, and so the facts which had puzzled everybody began at once to fall into the right places. This is all made clear in the seventh chapter of the present work, where the general argument of Varnhagen is in many points strongly reinforced. The evidence here set forth in connection with the Cantino map is especially significant.

It is interesting on many accounts to see the first voyage of Vespucius thus elucidated, though it had no connection with the application of his name by Waldseemuller to an entirely different region from any that was visited upon that voyage. The real significance of the third voyage of Vespucius, in connection with the naming of America, is now set forth, I believe, for the first time in the light thrown upon the subject by the opinions of Ptolemy and Mela. Neither Humboldt nor Major nor Harrisse nor Varnhagen seems to have had a firm grasp of what was in Waldseemuller's mind when he wrote the pa.s.sage photographed below in vol. ii. p. 136 of this work. It is only when we keep the Greek and Roman theories in the foreground and unflinchingly bar out that intrusive modern atlas, that we realize what the Freiburg geographer meant and why Ferdinand Columbus was not in the least shocked or surprised.

I have at various times given lectures on the discovery of America and questions connected therewith, more especially at University College, London, in 1879, at the Philosophical Inst.i.tution in Edinburgh, in 1880, at the Lowell Inst.i.tute in Boston, in 1890, and in the course of my work as professor in the Washington University at St. Louis; but the present work is in no sense whatever a reproduction of such lectures.

Acknowledgments are due to Mr. Winsor for his cordial permission to make use of a number of reproductions of old maps and facsimiles already used by him in the "Narrative and Critical History of America;" they are mentioned in the lists of ill.u.s.trations. I have also to thank Dr.

Brinton for allowing me to reproduce a page of old Mexican music, and the Hakluyt Society for permission to use the Zeno and Catalan maps and the view of Kakortok church. Dr. Fewkes has very kindly favoured me with a sight of proof-sheets of some recent monographs by Bandelier. And for courteous a.s.sistance at various libraries I have most particularly to thank Mr. Kiernan of Harvard University, Mr. Appleton Griffin of the Boston Public Library, and Mr. Uhler of the Peabody Inst.i.tute in Baltimore.

There is one thing which I feel obliged, though with extreme hesitation and reluctance, to say to my readers in this place, because the time has come when something ought to be said, and there seems to be no other place available for saying it. For many years letters--often in a high degree interesting and pleasant to receive--have been coming to me from persons with whom I am not acquainted, and I have always done my best to answer them. It is a long time since such letters came to form the larger part of a voluminous ma.s.s of correspondence. The physical fact has a.s.sumed dimensions with which it is no longer possible to cope. If I were to answer all the letters which arrive by every mail, I should never be able to do another day's work. It is becoming impossible even to _read_ them all; and there is scarcely time for giving due attention to one in ten. Kind friends and readers will thus understand that if their queries seem to be neglected, it is by no means from any want of good will, but simply from the lamentable fact that the day contains only four-and-twenty hours.

CAMBRIDGE, _October 25, 1891._

THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA.

CHAPTER I.

ANCIENT AMERICA.

[Sidenote: The American aborigines.]

When the civilized people of Europe first became acquainted with the continents of North and South America, they found them inhabited by a race of men quite unlike any of the races with which they were familiar in the Old World. Between the various tribes of this aboriginal American race, except in the sub-arctic region, there is now seen to be a general physical likeness, such as to const.i.tute an American type of mankind as clearly recognizable as those types which we call Mongolian and Malay, though far less p.r.o.nounced than such types as the Australian or the negro. The most obvious characteristics possessed in common by the American aborigines are the copper-coloured or rather the cinnamon-coloured complexion, along with the high cheek-bones and small deep-set eyes, the straight black hair and absence or scantiness of beard. With regard to stature, length of limbs, ma.s.siveness of frame, and shape of skull, considerable divergencies may be noticed among the various American tribes, as indeed is also the case among the members of the white race in Europe, and of other races. With regard to culture the differences have been considerable, although, with two or three apparent but not real exceptions, there was nothing in pre-Columbian America that could properly be called civilization; the general condition of the people ranged all the way from savagery to barbarism of a high type.

[Sidenote: Question as to their origin.]

[Sidenote: Antiquity of man in America.]

Soon after America was proved not to be part of Asia, a puzzling question arose. Whence came these "Indians," and in what manner did they find their way to the western hemisphere. Since the beginning of the present century discoveries in geology have entirely altered our mental att.i.tude toward this question. It was formerly argued upon the two a.s.sumptions that the geographical relations of land and water had been always pretty much the same as we now find them, and that all the racial differences among men have arisen since the date of the "Noachian Deluge," which was generally placed somewhere between two and three thousand years before the Christian era. Hence inasmuch as European tradition knows nothing of any such race as the Indians, it was supposed that at some time within the historic period they must have moved eastward from Asia into America; and thus "there was felt to be a sort of speculative necessity for discovering points of resemblance between American languages, myths, and social observances and those of the Oriental world. Now the aborigines of this Continent were made out to be Kamtchatkans, and now Chinamen, and again they were shown, with quaint erudition, to be remnants of the ten tribes of Israel. Perhaps none of these theories have been exactly disproved, but they have all been superseded and laid on the shelf."[1] The tendency of modern discovery is indeed toward agreement with the time-honoured tradition which makes the Old World, and perhaps Asia, the earliest dwelling-place of mankind. Compet.i.tion has been far more active in the fauna of the eastern hemisphere than in that of the western, natural selection has accordingly resulted in the evolution of higher forms, and it is there that we find both extinct and surviving species of man's nearest collateral relatives, those tailless half-human apes, the gorilla, chimpanzee, orang, and gibbon. It is altogether probable that the people whom the Spaniards found in America came by migration from the Old World. But it is by no means probable that their migration occurred within so short a period as five or six thousand years. A series of observations and discoveries kept up for the last half-century seem to show that North America has been continuously inhabited by human beings since the earliest Pleistocene times, if not earlier.

[Footnote 1: See my _Excursions of an Evolutionist_, p. 148. A good succinct account of these various theories, monuments of wasted ingenuity, is given in Short's _North Americans of Antiquity_, chap. iii. The most elaborate statement of the theory of an Israelite colonization of America is to be found in the ponderous tomes of Lord Kingsborough, _Mexican Antiquities_, London, 1831-48, 9 vols. elephant-folio. Such a theory was entertained by the author of that curious piece of literary imposture, _The Book of Mormon_. In this book we are told that, when the tongues were confounded at Babel, the Lord selected a certain Jared, with his family and friends, and instructed them to build eight ships, in which, after a voyage of 344 days, they were brought to America, where they "did build many mighty cities," and "prosper exceedingly." But after some centuries they perished because of their iniquities. In the reign of Zedekiah, when calamity was impending over Judah, two brothers, Nephi and Laman, under divine guidance led a colony to America. There, says the veracious chronicler, their descendants became great nations, and worked in _iron_, and had stuffs of _silk_, besides keeping plenty of _oxen_ and _sheep_.

(_Ether_, ix. 18, 19; x. 23, 24.) Christ appeared and wrought many wonderful works; people spake with tongues, and the dead were raised. (3 _Nephi_, xxvi. 14, 15.) But about the close of the fourth century of our era, a terrible war between Lamanites and Nephites ended in the destruction of the latter. Some two million warriors, with their wives and children, having been slaughtered, the prophet Mormon escaped, with his son Moroni, to the "hill c.u.morah," hard by the "waters of Riplianc.u.m," or Lake Ontario. (_Ether_, xv. 2, 8, 11.) There they hid the sacred tablets, which remained concealed until they were miraculously discovered and translated by Joseph Smith in 1827.

There is, of course, no element of tradition in this story. It is all pure fiction, and of a very clumsy sort, such as might easily be devised by an ignorant man accustomed to the language of the Bible; and of course it was suggested by the old notion of the Israelitish origin of the red men. The references are to _The Book of Mormon_, Salt Lake City: Deseret News Co., 1885.]

[Sidenote: Sh.e.l.l-mounds.]

The first group of these observations and discoveries relate to "middens" or sh.e.l.l-heaps. On the banks of the Damariscotta river in Maine are some of the most remarkable sh.e.l.l-heaps in the world. With an average thickness of six or seven feet, they rise in places to a height of twenty-five feet. They consist almost entirely of huge oyster-sh.e.l.ls often ten inches in length and sometimes much longer. The sh.e.l.ls belong to a salt-water species. In some places "there is an appearance of stratification covered by an alternation of sh.e.l.ls and earth, as if the deposition of sh.e.l.ls had been from time to time interrupted, and a vegetable mould had covered the surface." In these heaps have been found fragments of pottery and of the bones of such edible animals as the moose and deer. "At the very foundation of one of the highest heaps," in a situation which must for long ages have been undisturbed, Mr. Edward Morse "found the remains of an ancient fire-place, where he exhumed charcoal, bones, and pottery."[2] The significant circ.u.mstance is that "at the present time oysters are only found in very small numbers, too small to make it an object to gather them," and so far as memory and tradition can reach, such seems to have been the case. The great size of the heap, coupled with the notable change in the distribution of this mollusk since the heap was abandoned, implies a very considerable lapse of time since the vestiges of human occupation were first left here.

Similar conclusions have been drawn from the banks or mounds of sh.e.l.ls on the St. John's river in Florida,[3] on the Alabama river, at Grand Lake on the lower Mississippi, and at San Pablo in the bay of San Francisco. Thus at various points from Maine to California, and in connection with one particular kind of memorial, we find records of the presence of man at a period undoubtedly prehistoric, but not necessarily many thousands of years old.

[Footnote 2: _Second Annual Report of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology_, etc., p. 18.]

[Footnote 3: Visited in 1866-74 by Professor Jeffries Wyman, and described in his _Fresh-Water Sh.e.l.l Mounds of the St.

John's River_, Cambridge, 1875.]

[Sidenote: The Glacial Period.]

The second group of discoveries carries us back much farther, even into the earlier stages of that widespread glaciation which was the most remarkable feature of the Pleistocene period. At the periods of greatest cold "the continent of North America was deeply swathed in ice as far south as the lat.i.tude of Philadelphia, while glaciers descended into North Carolina."[4] The valleys of the Rocky Mountains also supported enormous glaciers, and a similar state of things existed at the same time in Europe. These periods of intense cold were alternated with long interglacial periods during which the climate was warmer than it is to-day. Concerning the antiquity of the Pleistocene age, which was characterized by such extraordinary vicissitudes of heat and cold, there has been, as in all questions relating to geological time, much conflict of opinion. Twenty years ago geologists often argued as if there were an unlimited fund of past time upon which to draw; but since Sir William Thomson and other physicists emphasized the point that in an antiquity very far from infinite this earth must have been a molten ma.s.s, there has been a reaction. In many instances further study has shown that less time was needed in order to effect a given change than had formerly been supposed; and so there has grown up a tendency to shorten the time a.s.signed to geological periods. Here, as in so many other cases, the truth is doubtless to be sought within the extremes. If we adopt the magnificent argument of Dr. Croll, which seems to me still to hold its ground against all adverse criticism,[5] and regard the Glacial epoch as coincident with the last period of high eccentricity of the earth's...o...b..t, we obtain a result that is moderate and probable. That astronomical period began about 240,000 years ago and came to an end about 80,000 years ago. During this period the eccentricity was seldom less than .04, and at one time rose to .0569. At the present time the eccentricity is .0168, and nearly 800,000 years will pa.s.s before it attains such a point as it reached during the Glacial epoch. For the last 50,000 years the departure of the earth's...o...b..t from a circular form has been exceptionally small.

[Footnote 4: _Excursions of an Evolutionist_, p. 39.]

[Footnote 5: Croll, _Climate and Time in their Geological Relations_, New York, 1875; _Discussions on Climate and Cosmology_, New York, 1886; Archibald Geikie, _Text Book of Geology_, pp. 23-29, 883-909, London, 1882; James Geikie, _The Great Ice Age_, pp. 94-136, New York, 1874; _Prehistoric Europe_, pp. 558-562, London, 1881; Wallace, _Island Life_, pp.

101-225, New York, 1881. Some objections to Croll's theory may be found in Wright's _Ice Age in North America_, pp. 405-505, 585-595, New York, 1889. I have given a brief account of the theory in my _Excursions of an Evolutionist_, pp. 57-76.]

Now the traces of the existence of men in North America during the Glacial epoch have in recent years been discovered in abundance, as for example, the palaeolithic quartzite implements found in the drift near the city of St. Paul, which date from toward the close of the Glacial epoch[6]; the fragment of a human jaw found in the red clay deposited in Minnesota during an earlier part of that epoch;[7] the n.o.ble collection of palaeoliths found by Dr. C. C. Abbott in the Trenton gravels in New Jersey; and the more recent discoveries of Dr. Metz and Mr. H. T.

Cresson.

[Footnote 6: See Miss F. E. Babbitt, "Vestiges of Glacial Man in Minnesota," in _Proceedings of the American a.s.sociation_, vol. x.x.xii., 1883.]

[Footnote 7: See N. H. Winch.e.l.l, _Annual Report of the State Geologist of Minnesota_, 1877, p. 60.]

[Sidenote: Discoveries in the Trenton gravel.]