The Discovery of America Part 19

[Sidenote: The pre-Columbian voyages made no real contributions to geographical knowledge;]

[Sidenote: and were in no true sense a Discovery of America.]

Nothing can be clearer, however, from a survey of the whole subject, than that these pre-Columbian voyages were quite barren of results of historic importance. In point of colonization they produced the two ill-fated settlements on the Greenland coast, and nothing more.

Otherwise they made no real addition to the stock of geographical knowledge, they wrought no effect whatever upon the European mind outside of Scandinavia, and even in Iceland itself the mention of coasts beyond Greenland awakened no definite ideas, and, except for a brief season, excited no interest. The Zeno narrative indicates that the Vinland voyages had practically lapsed from memory before the end of the fourteenth century.[308] Scholars familiar with saga literature of course knew the story; it was just at this time that Jon Thordharson wrote out the version of it which is preserved in the Flateyar-bok. But by the general public it must have been forgotten, or else the Fisherman's tale of Estotiland and Drogio would surely have awakened reminiscences of Markland and Vinland, and some traces of this would have appeared in Antonio's narrative or upon his map. The princ.i.p.al naval officer of the Faeroes, and personal friend of the sovereign, after dwelling several years among these Northmen, whose intercourse with their brethren in Iceland was frequent, apparently knew nothing of Leif or Thorfinn, or the mere names of the coasts which they had visited.

Nothing had been accomplished by those voyages which could properly be called a contribution to geographical knowledge. To speak of them as const.i.tuting, in any legitimate sense of the phrase, a Discovery of America is simply absurd. Except for Greenland, which was supposed to be a part of the European world, America remained as much undiscovered after the eleventh century as before. In the midsummer of 1492 it needed to be discovered as much as if Leif Ericsson or the whole race of Northmen had never existed.

[Footnote 308: Practically, but not entirely, for we have seen Markland mentioned in the "Elder Skalholt Annals," about 1362.

See above, p. 223.]

As these pre-Columbian voyages produced no effect in the eastern hemisphere, except to leave in Icelandic literature a scanty but interesting record, so in the western hemisphere they seem to have produced no effect beyond cutting down a few trees and killing a few Indians. In the outlying world of Greenland it is not improbable that the blood of the Eskimos may have received some slight Scandinavian infusion. But upon the aboriginal world of the red men, from Davis strait to Cape Horn, it is not likely that any impression of any sort was ever made. It is in the highest degree probable that Leif Ericsson and his friends made a few voyages to _what we now know to have been_ the coast of America; but it is an abuse of language to say that they "discovered" America. In no sense was any real contact established between the eastern and the western halves of our planet until the great voyage of Columbus in 1492.

CHAPTER III.

EUROPE AND CATHAY.

[Sidenote: Why the voyages of the Northmen were not followed up.]

The question has sometimes been asked, Why did the knowledge of the voyages to Vinland so long remain confined to the Scandinavian people or a portion of them, and then lapse into oblivion, insomuch that it did not become a matter of notoriety in Europe until after the publication of the celebrated book of Thormodus Torfaeus in 1705? Why did not the news of the voyages of Leif and Thorfinn spread rapidly over Europe, like the news of the voyage of Columbus? and why was it not presently followed, like the latter, by a rush of conquerors and colonizers across the Atlantic?

Such questions arise from a failure to see historical events in their true perspective, and to make the proper allowances for the manifold differences in knowledge and in social and economic conditions which characterize different periods of history. In the present case, the answer is to be found, first, in the geographical ignorance which prevented the Northmen from realizing in the smallest degree what such voyages really signified or were going to signify to posterity; and, secondly, in the political and commercial condition of Europe at the close of the tenth century.

[Sidenote: Ignorance of geography.]

In the first place the route which the Norse voyagers pursued, from Iceland to Greenland and thence to Vinland, was not such as to give them, in their ignorance of the shape of the earth, and with their imperfect knowledge of lat.i.tude and longitude, any adequate gauge wherewith to measure their achievement. The modern reader, who has in his mind a general picture of the shape of the northern Atlantic ocean with its coasts, must carefully expel that picture before he can begin to realize how things must have seemed to the Northmen. None of the Icelandic references to Markland and Vinland betray a consciousness that these countries belong to a geographical world outside of Europe. There was not enough organized geographical knowledge for that. They were simply conceived as remote places beyond Greenland, inhabited by inferior but dangerous people. The accidental finding of such places served neither to solve any great commercial problem nor to gratify and provoke scientific curiosity. It was, therefore, not at all strange that it bore no fruit.

[Sidenote: Lack of instruments for ocean navigation.]

Secondly, even if it had been realized, and could have been duly proclaimed throughout Europe, that across the broad Atlantic a new world lay open for colonization, Europe could not have taken advantage of the fact. Now and then a ship might make its way, or be blown, across the waste of waters without compa.s.s or astrolabe; but until these instruments were at hand anything like systematic ocean navigation was out of the question; and from a colonization which could only begin by creeping up into the Arctic seas and taking Greenland on the way, not much was to be expected, after all.

[Sidenote: Europe in the year 1000.]

But even if the compa.s.s and other facilities for oceanic navigation had been at hand, the state of Europe in the days of Eric the Red was not such as to afford surplus energy for distant enterprise of this sort.

Let us for a moment recall what was going on in Europe in the year of grace 1000, just enough to get a suggestive picture of the time. In England the Danish invader, fork-bearded Swend, father of the great c.n.u.t, was wresting the kingship from the feeble grasp of Ethelred the Redeless. In Gaul the little duchy of France, between the Somme and the Loire, had lately become the kingdom of France, and its sovereign, Hugh Capet, had succeeded to feudal rights of lordship over the great dukes and counts whose territories surrounded him on every side; and now Hugh's son, Robert the Debonair, better hymn-writer than warrior, was waging a doubtful struggle with these unruly va.s.sals. It was not yet in any wise apparent what the kingdoms of England and France were going to be. In Germany the youthful Otto III., the "wonder of the world," had just made his weird visit to the tomb of his mighty predecessor at Aachen, before starting on that last journey to Rome which was so soon to cost him his life. Otto's teacher, Gerbert, most erudite of popes,--too learned not to have had dealings with the Devil,--was beginning to raise the papacy out of the abyss of infamy into which the preceding age had seen it sink, and so to prepare the way for the far-reaching reforms of Hildebrand. The boundaries of Christendom were as yet narrow and insecure. With the overthrow of Olaf Tryggvesson in this year 1000, and the temporary part.i.tion of Norway between Swedes and Danes, the work of Christianizing the North seemed, for the moment, to languish. Upon the eastern frontier the wild Hungarians had scarcely ceased to be a terror to Europe, and in this year Stephen, their first Christian king, began to reign. At the same time the power of heretical Bulgaria, which had threatened to overwhelm the Eastern Empire, was broken down by the st.u.r.dy blows of the Macedonian emperor Basil. In this year the Christians of Spain met woful defeat at the hands of Almansor, and there seemed no reason why the Mussulman rule over the greater part of that peninsula should not endure forever.

Thus, from end to end, Europe was a scene of direst confusion, and though, as we now look back upon it, the time seems by no means devoid of promise, there was no such cheering outlook then. Nowhere were the outlines of kingdoms or the ownership of crowns definitely settled.

Private war was both incessant and universal; the Truce of G.o.d had not yet been proclaimed.[309] As for the common people, their hardships were well-nigh incredible. Amid all this anarchy and misery, at the close of the thousandth year from the birth of Christ, the belief was quite common throughout Europe that the Day of Judgment was at hand for a world grown old in wickedness and ripe for its doom.

[Footnote 309: The "Truce of G.o.d" (_Treuga Dei_) was introduced by the clergy in Guienne about 1032; it was adopted in Spain before 1050, and in England by 1080. See Datt, _De pace imperii publica_, lib. i. cap. ii. A cessation of all violent quarrels was enjoined, under ecclesiastical penalties, during church festivals, and from every Wednesday evening until the following Monday morning. This left only about eighty days in the year available for shooting and stabbing one's neighbours. The truce seems to have accomplished much good, though it was very imperfectly observed.]

[Sidenote: The condition of things was not such as to favour colonial enterprise.]

It hardly need be argued that a period like this, in which all the vital energy in Europe was consumed in the adjustment of affairs at home, was not fitted for colonial enterprises. Before a people can send forth colonies it must have solved the problem of political life so far as to ensure stability of trade. It is the mercantile spirit that has supported modern colonization, aided by the spirit of intellectual curiosity and the thirst for romantic adventure. In the eleventh century there was no intellectual curiosity outside the monastery walls, nor had such a feeling become enlisted in the service of commerce. Of trade there was indeed, even in western Europe, a considerable amount, but the commercial marine was in its infancy, and on land the trader suffered sorely at the hands of the robber baron. In those days the fashionable method of compounding with your creditors was, not to offer them fifty cents on the dollar, but to inveigle them into your castle and broil them over a slow fire.

[Sidenote: The outlook of Europe was toward Asia.]

In so far as the attention of people in Europe was called to any quarter of the globe outside of the seething turbulence in which they dwelt, it was directed toward Asia. Until after 1492, Europe stood with her back toward the Atlantic. What there might be out beyond that "Sea of Darkness" (_Mare Tenebrosum_), as it used commonly to be called, was a question of little interest and seems to have excited no speculation.

In the view of mediaeval Europe the inhabited world was cut off on the west by this mysterious ocean, and on the south by the burning sands of Sahara; but eastward it stretched out no one knew how far, and in that direction dwelt tribes and nations which Europe, from time immemorial, had reason to fear. As early as the time of Herodotus, the secular antagonism between Europe and Asia had become a topic of reflection among the Greeks, and was wrought with dramatic effect by that great writer into the structure of his history, culminating in the grand and stirring scenes of the Persian war. A century and a half later the conquests of Alexander the Great added a still more impressive climax to the story. The struggle was afterward long maintained between Roman and Parthian, but from the fifth century after Christ onward through the Middle Ages, it seemed as if the Oriental world would never rest until it had inflicted the extremities of retaliation upon Europe. Whether it was the heathen of the steppes who were in question, from Attila in the fifth century to Batu Khan in the thirteenth, or the followers of the Prophet, who tore away from Christendom the southern sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean, and held Spain in their iron grasp, while from age to age they exhausted their strength in vain against the Eastern Empire, the threatening danger was always coming with the morning sun; whatever might be the shock that took the attention of Europe away from herself, it directed it upon Asia. This is a fact of cardinal importance for us, inasmuch as it was directly through the interest, more and more absorbing, which Europe felt in Asia that the discovery of the western hemisphere was at last effected.

[Sidenote: Routes of trade between Europe and Asia.]

[Sidenote: Claudius Ptolemy.]

[Sidenote: Early mention of China.]

It was not only in war, but in commerce, that the fortunes of Europe were dependent upon her relations with Asia. Since prehistoric times there has always been some commercial intercourse between the eastern sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean and the peninsula of Hindustan. Tyre and Sidon carried on such trade by way of the Red Sea.[310] After Alexander had led his army to Samarcand and to the river Hyphasis, the acquaintance of the Greeks with Asia was very considerably increased, and important routes of trade were established. One was practically the old Phoenician route, with its western terminus moved from Tyre to Alexandria. Another was by way of the Caspian sea, up the river Oxus, and thence with camels to the banks of the Indus.[311] An intermediate route was through Syria and by way of the Euphrates and the Persian gulf; the route which at one time made the greatness of Palmyra. After the extension of Roman sway to the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Euxine, these same routes continued to be used. The European commodities carried to India were light woollen cloths, linens, coral, black lead, various kinds of gla.s.s vessels, and wine. In exchange for these the traders brought back to Europe divers aromatic spices, black pepper, ivory, cotton fabrics, diamonds, sapphires, and pearls, silk thread and silk stuffs.[312] Detailed accounts of these commercial transactions, and of the wealth of personal experiences that must have been connected with them, are excessively scant. Of the Europeans who, during all the centuries between Alexander and Justinian, made their way to Hindustan or beyond, we know very few by name. The amount of geographical information that was gathered during the first half of this period is shown in the map representing Claudius Ptolemy's knowledge of the earth, about the middle of the second century after Christ. Except for the Scandinavian world, and some very important additions made to the knowledge of Asia by Marco Polo, this map fairly represents the maximum of acquaintance with the earth's surface possessed by Europeans previous to the great voyages of the fifteenth century. It shows a dim knowledge of the mouths of the Ganges, of the island of Ceylon, and of what we sometimes call Farther India. A very dim knowledge, indeed; for the huge peninsula of Hindustan is shrunk into insignificance, while Taprobane, or Ceylon, unduly magnified, usurps the place belonging to the Deccan.

At the same time we see that some hearsay knowledge of China had made its way into the Roman world before the days of Ptolemy. The two names by which China was first known to Europeans were "Seres" or "Serica,"

and "Sinae" or "Thin." These two differing names are the records of two different methods of approach to different parts of a vast country, very much as the Northmen called their part of eastern North America "Vinland," while the Spaniards called their part "Florida." The name "Seres" was given to northwestern China by traders who approached it through the highlands of central Asia from Samarcand, while "Sinae" was the name given to southeastern China by traders who approached it by way of the Indian ocean, and heard of it in India, but never reached it.

Apparently no European ships ever reached China before the Portuguese, in 1517.[313] The name "Sinae" or "Thin" seems to mean the country of the "Tchin" dynasty, which ruled over the whole of China in the second century before Christ, and over a portion of it for a much longer time.

The name "Seres," on the other hand, was always a.s.sociated with the trade in silks, and was known to the Romans in the time of the Emperor Claudius,[314] and somewhat earlier. The Romans in Virgil's time set a high value upon silk, and every sc.r.a.p of it they had came from China.

They knew nothing about the silk-worm, and supposed that the fibres or threads of this beautiful stuff grew upon trees. Of actual intercourse between the Roman and Chinese empires there was no more than is implied in this current of trade, pa.s.sing through many hands. But that each knew, in a vague way, of the existence of the other, there is no doubt.[315]

[Footnote 310: Diodorus Siculus, i. 70.]

[Footnote 311: Strabo, xi. 7, - 3.]

[Footnote 312: Robertson, _Historical Disquisition concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India_, Dublin, 1791, p. 55. I never have occasion to consult Dr. Robertson without being impressed anew with his scientific habit of thought and the solidity of his scholarship; and in none of his works are these qualities better ill.u.s.trated than in this n.o.ble essay.]

[Footnote 313: The Polos sailed back from China to the Persian gulf in 1292-94; see below, p. 282.]

[Footnote 314: The name "Seres" appears on the map of Pomponius Mela (cir. A. D. 50), while "Sinae" does not. See below, p. 304.

Jam Tartessiaco quos solverat aequore t.i.tan In noctem diffusus equos, jungebat Eos Littoribus, primique novo Phaethonte retecti Seres lanigeris repetebant vellera lucis.

Silius Italicus, lib. vi. _ad init._]

[Footnote 315: For this whole subject see Colonel Sir Henry Yule's _Cathay and the Way Thither_, London, 1866, 2 vols.,--a work of profound learning and more delightful than a novel.]

[Sidenote: Cosmas Indicopleustes.]

[Sidenote: Shape of the earth, according to Cosmas.]

In the course of the reign of Justinian, we get references at first hand to India, and coupled withal to a general theory of cosmography. This curious information we have in the book of the monk Cosmas Indicopleustes, written somewhere between A. D. 530 and 550. A pleasant book it is, after its kind. In his younger days Cosmas had been a merchant, and in divers voyages had become familiar with the coasts of Ethiopia and the Persian gulf, and had visited India and Ceylon. After becoming a monk at Alexandria, Cosmas wrote his book of Christian geography,[316] maintaining, in opposition to Ptolemy, that the earth is not a sphere, but a rectangular plane forming the floor of the universe; the heavens rise on all four sides about this rectangle, like the four walls of a room, and, at an indefinite height above the floor, these blue walls support a vaulted roof or firmament, in which G.o.d dwells with the angels. In the centre of the floor are the inhabited lands of the earth, surrounded on all sides by a great ocean, beyond which, somewhere out in a corner, is the Paradise from which Adam and Eve were expelled. In its general shape, therefore, the universe somewhat resembles the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, or a modern "Saratoga trunk." On the northern part of the floor, under the firmament, is a lofty conical mountain, around which the sun, moon, and planets perform their daily revolutions. In the summer the sun takes a turn around the apex of the cone, and is, therefore, hidden only for a short night; but in the winter he travels around the base, which takes longer, and, accordingly, the nights are long. Such is the doctrine drawn from Holy Scripture, says Cosmas, and as for the vain blasphemers who pretend that the earth is a round ball, the Lord hath stultified them for their sins until they impudently prate of Antipodes, where trees grow downward and rain falls upward. As for such nonsense, the worthy Cosmas cannot abide it.

[Footnote 316: Its t.i.tle is [Greek: Christianon biblos, hermeneia eis ten Oktateuchon], i. e. against Ptolemy's Geography in eight books. The name Cosmas Indicopleustes seems merely to mean "the cosmographer who has sailed to India." He begins his book in a tone of extreme and somewhat unsavory humility: [Greek: Anoigo ta mogilala kai bradyglossa cheile ho hamartolos kai talas ego]--"I, the sinner and wretch, open my stammering, stuttering lips," etc.--The book has been the occasion of some injudicious excitement within the last half century. Cosmas gave a description of some comparatively recent inscriptions on the peninsula of Sinai, and because he could not find anybody able to read them, he inferred that they must be records of the Israelites on their pa.s.sage through the desert. (Compare the Dighton rock, above, p. 214.) Whether in the sixth century of grace or in the nineteenth, your unregenerate and unchastened antiquary snaps at conclusions as a drowsy dog does at flies. Some years ago an English clergyman, Charles Forster, started up the nonsense again, and argued that these inscriptions might afford a clue to man's primeval speech! Cf. Bunsen, _Christianity and Mankind_, vol.

iii. p. 231; Muller and Donaldson, _History of Greek Literature_, vol. iii. p. 353; Bury, _History of the Later Roman Empire from Arcadius to Irene_, vol. ii. p. 177.]

I cite these views of Cosmas because there can be no doubt that they represent beliefs current among the general public until after the time of Columbus,[317] in spite of the deference paid to Ptolemy's views by the learned. Along with these cosmographical speculations, Cosmas shows a wider geographical knowledge of Asia than any earlier writer. He gives a good deal of interesting information about India and Ceylon, and has a fairly correct idea of the position of China, which he calls Tzinista or Chinistan. This land of silk is the remotest of all the Indies, and beyond it "there is neither navigation nor inhabited country.... And the Indian philosophers, called Brachmans, tell you that if you were to stretch a straight cord from Tzinista through Persia to the Roman territory, you would just divide the world in halves. And mayhap they are right."[318]

[Footnote 317: Such views have their advocates even now. There still lives, I believe, in England, a certain John Hampden, who with dauntless breast maintains that the earth is a circular plane with centre at the north pole and a circ.u.mference of nearly 30,000 miles where poor misguided astronomers suppose the south pole to be. The sun moves across the sky at a distance of about 800 miles. From the boundless abyss beyond the southern circ.u.mference, with its barrier of icy mountains, came the waters which drowned the antediluvian world; for, as this author quite reasonably observes, "on a globular earth such a deluge would have been physically Impossible." Hampden's t.i.tle is somewhat like that of Cosmas,--_The New Manual of Biblical Cosmography_, London, 1877; and he began in 1876 to publish a periodical called _The Truth-Seeker's Oracle and Scriptural Science Review_. Similar views have been set forth by one Samuel Rowbotham, under the pseudonym of "Parallax,"

_Zetetic Astronomy. Earth not a Globe. An experimental inquiry into the true figure of the earth, proving it a plane without orbital or axial motion_, etc., London, 1873; and by a William Carpenter, _One Hundred Proofs that the Earth is not a Globe_, Baltimore, 1885. There is a very considerable quant.i.ty of such literature afloat, the product of a kind of mental aberration that thrives upon paradox. When I was superintendent of the catalogue of Harvard University library, I made the cla.s.s "Eccentric Literature" under which to group such books,--the lucubrations of circle-squarers, angle-trisectors, inventors of perpetual motion, devisers of recipes for living forever without dying, crazy interpreters of Daniel and the Apocalypse, upsetters of the undulatory theory of light, the Bacon-Shakespeare lunatics, etc.; a dismal procession of long-eared bipeds, with very raucous bray. The late Professor De Morgan devoted a bulky and instructive volume to an account of such people and their crotchets. See his _Budget of Paradoxes_, London, 1872.]

[Footnote 318: Cosmas, ii. 138. Further mention of China was made early in the seventh century by Theophylactus Samocatta, vii. 7. See Yule's _Cathay_, vol. i. pp. xlix., clxviii.]