The Discovery of America Part 29

[Sidenote: His voyage into the Arctic ocean, 1477.]

The years between 1474 and 1480 were not favourable for new maritime ventures on the part of the Portuguese government. The war with Castile absorbed the energies of Alfonso V. as well as his money, and he was badly beaten into the bargain. About this time Columbus was writing a treatise on "the five habitable zones," intended to refute the old notions about regions so fiery or so frozen as to be inaccessible to man. As this book is lost we know little or nothing of its views and speculations, but it appears that in writing it Columbus utilized sundry observations made by himself in long voyages into the torrid and arctic zones. He spent some time at the fortress of San Jorge de la Mina, on the Gold Coast, and made a study of that equinoctial climate.[466] This could not have been earlier than 1482, the year in which the fortress was built. Five years before this he seems to have gone far in the opposite direction. In a fragment of a letter or diary, preserved by his son and by Las Casas, he says:--"In the month of February, 1477, I sailed a hundred leagues beyond the island of Thule, [to?] an island of which the south part is in lat.i.tude 73, not 63, as some say; and it [i. e. Thule] does not lie within Ptolemy's western boundary, but much farther west. And to this island, which is as big as England, the English go with their wares, especially from Bristol. When I was there the sea was not frozen. In some places the tide rose and fell twenty-six fathoms. It is true that the Thule mentioned by Ptolemy lies where he says it does, and this by the moderns is called Frislanda."[467]

[Footnote 466: _Vita dell' Ammiraglio_, cap. iv.; Las Casas, _Historia_, tom. i. p. 49.]

[Footnote 467: "Io navigai l' anno M CCCC LXXVII nel mese di Febraio oltra Tile isola cento leghe, la cui parte Australe e lontana dall' Equinottiale settantatre gradi, e non sessantatre, come alcuni vogliono; ne giace dentro della linea, che include l' Occidente di Tolomeo, ma e molto piu Occidentale. Et a questa isola, che e tanto grande, come l'Inghilterra, vanno gl' Inglesi con le loro mercatantie, specialmente quelli di Bristol. Et al tempo che io vi andai, non era congelato il mare, quantunque vi fossero si grosse maree, che in alcuni luoghi ascendeva ventisei braccia, e discendeva altretanti in altezza. e bene il vero, che Tile, quella, di cui Tolomeo fa mentione, giace dove egli dice; & questa da' moderni e chiamata Frislanda." _Vita dell'

Ammiraglio_, cap. iv. In the original edition of 1571, there are no quotation-marks; and in some modern editions, where these are supplied, the quotation is wrongly made to end just before the last sentence, so as to make it appear like a gloss of Ferdinand's. This is, however, impossible. Ferdinand died in 1539, and the Zeno narrative of Frislanda was not published till 1558, so that the only source from which that name could have come into his book was his father's doc.u.ment. The genuineness of the pa.s.sage is proved by its recurrence, almost word for word, in Las Casas, _Historia_, tom. i. p. 48.]

[Sidenote: He may have reached Jan Mayen island,]

[Sidenote: and stopped at Iceland.]

Taken as it stands this pa.s.sage is so bewildering that we can hardly suppose it to have come in just this shape from the pen of Columbus. It looks as if it had been abridged from some diary of his by some person unfamiliar with the Arctic seas; and I have ventured to insert in brackets a little preposition which may perhaps help to straighten out the meaning. By Thule Columbus doubtless means Iceland, which lies between lat.i.tudes 64 and 67, and it looks as if he meant to say that he ran beyond it as far as the little island, just a hundred leagues from Iceland and in lat.i.tude 71, since discovered by Jan Mayen in 1611.

The rest of the paragraph is more intelligible. It is true that Iceland lies thirty degrees farther west than Ptolemy placed Thule; and that for a century before the discovery of the Newfoundland fisheries the English did much fishing in the waters about Iceland, and carried wares thither, especially from Bristol.[468] There can be no doubt that by Frislanda Columbus means the Faeroe islands,[469] which do lie in the lat.i.tude though not in the longitude mentioned by Ptolemy. As for the voyage into the Jan Mayen waters in February, it would be dangerous but by no means impossible.[470] In another letter Columbus mentions visiting England, apparently in connection with this voyage,[471] and it is highly probable that he went in an English ship from Bristol.

[Footnote 468: See Thorold Rogers, _The Economic Interpretation of History_, London, 1888, pp. 103, 319.]

[Footnote 469: See above, p. 236.]

[Footnote 470: See the graphic description of a voyage in these waters in March, 1882, in Nansen's _The First Crossing of Greenland_, London, 1890, vol. i. pp. 149-152.]

[Footnote 471: "E vidi tutto il Levante, e tutto il Ponente, che si dice per andare verso il Settentrione, cioe l'Inghilterra, e ho camminato per la Guinea." _Vita dell'

Ammiraglio_, cap. iv.]

[Sidenote: The hypothesis that Columbus "must have" heard and understood the story of the Vinland voyages.]

The object of Columbus in making these long voyages to the equator and into the polar circle was, as he tells us, to gather observations upon climate. From the circ.u.mstance of his having made a stop at some point in Iceland, it was conjectured by Finn Magnusson that Columbus might have learned something about Vinland which served to guide him to his own enterprise or to encourage him in it. Starting from this suggestion, it has been argued[472] that Columbus must have read the geographical appendix to Adam of Bremen's "Ecclesiastical History;" that he must have understood, as we now do, the reference therein made to Vinland; that he made his voyage to Iceland in order to obtain further information; that he there not only heard about Vinland and other localities mentioned in the sagas, but also mentally placed them about where they were placed in 1837 by Professor Rafn; that, among other things, he thus obtained a correct knowledge of the width of the Atlantic ocean in lat.i.tude 28 N.; and that during fifteen subsequent years of weary endeavour to obtain ships and men for his westward voyage, he sedulously refrained from using the most convincing argument at his command,--namely that land of continental dimensions had actually been found (though by a very different route) in the direction which he indicated.

[Footnote 472: See Anderson's _America not discovered by Columbus_, Chicago, 1874; 3d ed. enlarged, Chicago, 1883.]

[Sidenote: That hypothesis has no evidence in its favour.]

I have already given an explanation of the process by which Columbus arrived at the firm belief that by sailing not more than about 2,500 geographical miles due west from the Canaries he should reach the coast of j.a.pan. Every step of that explanation is sustained by doc.u.mentary evidence, and as his belief is thus completely accounted for, the hypothesis that he may have based it upon information obtained in Iceland is, to say the least, superfluous. We do not need it in order to explain his actions, and accordingly his actions do not afford a presumption in favour of it. There is otherwise no reason, of course, for refusing to admit that he might have obtained information in Iceland, were there any evidence that he did. But not a sc.r.a.p of such evidence has ever been produced. Every step in the Scandinavian hypothesis is a pure a.s.sumption.

[Sidenote: It is not probable that Columbus knew of Adam of Bremen's allusion to Vinland,]

[Sidenote: or that he would have understood it if he had read it.]

First it is a.s.sumed that Columbus _must_ have read the appendix to Adam of Bremen's history. But really, while it is not impossible that he should have read that doc.u.ment, it is, on the whole, improbable. The appendix was first printed in Lindenbrog's edition, published at Leyden, in 1595. The eminent Norwegian historian, Gustav Storm, finds that in the sixteenth century just six MSS. of Adam's works can now be traced.

Of these, two were preserved in Denmark, two in Hamburg, one had _perhaps_ already wandered southward to Leyden, and one as far as Vienna. Dr. Storm, therefore, feels sure that Columbus never saw Adam's mention of Vinland, and pithily adds that "had Columbus known it, it would not have been able to show him the way to the West Indies, but perhaps to the North Pole."[473] From the account of this mention and its context, which I have already given,[474] it is in the highest degree improbable that if Columbus had read the pa.s.sage he could have understood it as bearing upon his own problem. There is, therefore, no ground for the a.s.sumption that Columbus went to Iceland in order to make inquiries about Vinland.

[Footnote 473: "Det er derfor sikkert, at Columbus ikke, som nogle har formodet, kan have kjendt Adam af Bremens Beretning on Vinland; vi kan gjerne tilfie, at havde Columbus kjendt den, vilde den ikke have kunnet vise ham Vei til Vesten (Indien), men kanske til Nordpolen." _Aarbger for Nordisk Oldkyndighed_, 1887, ii. 2, p. 301.]

[Footnote 474: See above, p. 210.]

[Sidenote: It is doubtful if Columbus would have stumbled upon the story in Iceland.]

It may be argued that even if he did not go for such a purpose, nevertheless when once there he could hardly have failed incidentally to get the information. This, however, is not at all clear. Observe that our sole authority for the journey to Iceland is the pa.s.sage above quoted at second-hand from Columbus himself; and there is nothing in it to show whether he staid a few hours or several weeks ash.o.r.e, or met with any one likely to be possessed of the knowledge in question. The absence of any reference to Vinland in the Zeno narrative is an indication that the memory of it had faded away before 1400, and it was not distinctly and generally revived until the time of Torfaeus in 1705.[475]

[Footnote 475: In 1689 the Swedish writer, Ole Rudbeck, could not understand Adam of Bremen's allusion to Vinland. The pa.s.sage is instructive. Rudbeck declares that in speaking of a wine-growing country near to the Arctic ocean, Adam must have been misled by some poetical or figurative phrase; he was deceived either by his trust in the Danes, or by his own credulity, for he manifestly refers to _Finland_, for which the form _Vinland_ does not once occur in Sturleson, etc.:--"Ne tamen poetis solis hoc loquendi genus in suis regionum laudationibus familiare fuisse quis existimet, sacras adeat literas quae Palaestinae faecunditatem appellatione _fluentorum lactis & mellis_ designant. Tale aliquid, sine omne dubio, Adamo Bremensi quondam persuaserat insulam esse in ultimo septentrione sitam, mari glaciali vicinam, vini feracem, & ea propter fide tamen Danorum, _Vinlandiam_ dictam prout ipse ...

fateri non dubitat. Sed deceptum eum hae sive Danorum fide, sive credulitate sua planum facit affine isti vocabulum _Finlandiae_ provinciae ad Regnum nostrum pertinentis, pro quo apud Snorronem & in Hist. Regum non semel occurrit _Vinlandiae_ nomen, cujus promontorium ad ultimum septentrionem & usque ad mare glaciale sese extendit." Rudbeck, _Atland eller Manheim_, Upsala, cir. 1689, p. 291.]

[Sidenote: If he had heard it, he would probably have cla.s.sed it with such tales as that of St. Brandan's isle.]

But to hear about Vinland was one thing, to be guided by it to j.a.pan was quite another affair. It was not the mention of timber and peltries and Skraelings that would fire the imagination of Columbus; his dreams were of stately cities with busy wharves where ships were laden with silks and jewels, and of Oriental magnates decked out with "barbaric pearl and gold," dwelling in pavilions of marble and jasper amid flowery gardens in "a summer fanned with spice." The mention of Vinland was no more likely to excite Columbus's attention than that of St. Brandan's isle or other places supposed to lie in the western ocean. He was after higher game.

[Sidenote: He could not have obtained from such a source his opinion of the width of the ocean.]

To suppose that Columbus, even had he got hold of the Saga of Eric the Red and conned it from beginning to end, with a learned interpreter at his elbow, could have gained from it a knowledge of the width of the Atlantic ocean, is simply preposterous. It would be impossible to extract any such knowledge from that doc.u.ment to-day without the aid of our modern maps. The most diligent critical study of all the Icelandic sources of information, with all the resources of modern scholarship, enables us with some confidence to place Vinland somewhere between Cape Breton and Point Judith, that is to say, somewhere between two points distant from each other more than four degrees in lat.i.tude and more than eleven degrees in longitude! When we have got thus far, knowing as we do that the coast in question belongs to the same continental system as the West Indies, we can look at our map and pick up our pair of compa.s.ses and measure the width of the ocean at the twenty-eighth parallel. But it is not the mediaeval doc.u.ment, but our modern map that guides us to this knowledge. And yet it is innocently a.s.sumed that Columbus, without any knowledge or suspicion of the existence of America, and from such vague data concerning voyages made five hundred years before his time, by men who had no means of reckoning lat.i.tude and longitude, could have obtained his figure of 2,500 miles for the voyage from the Canaries to j.a.pan![476] The fallacy here is that which underlies the whole Scandinavian hypothesis and many other fanciful geographical speculations. It is the fallacy of projecting our present knowledge into the past.

[Footnote 476: The source of such a confusion of ideas is probably the ridiculous map in Rafn's _Antiquitates Americanae_, upon which North America is represented in all the accuracy of outline attainable by modern maps, and then the Icelandic names are put on where Rafn thought they ought to go, i. e. Markland upon Nova Scotia, Vinland upon New England, etc. Any person using such a map is liable to forget that it cannot possibly represent the crude notions of locality to which the reports of the Norse voyages must have given rise in an ignorant age. (The reader will find the map reproduced in Winsor, _Narr. and Crit.

Hist._, i. 95.) Rafn's fault was, however, no greater than that committed by the modern makers of so-called "ancient atlases"--still current and in use in schools--when, for example, they take a correct modern map of Europe, with parts of Africa and Asia, and upon countries so dimly known to the ancients as Scandinavia and Hindustan, but now drawn with perfect accuracy, they simply print the ancient names!! Nothing but confusion can come from using such wretched maps. The only safe way to study the history of geography is to reproduce the ancient maps themselves, as I have done in the present work.

Many of the maps given below in the second volume will ill.u.s.trate the slow and painful growth of the knowledge of the North American coast during the two centuries after Columbus.]

[Sidenote: If he had known and understood the Vinland story, he had the strongest motives for proclaiming it and no motive for concealing it.]

We have next to inquire, if Columbus had heard of Vinland and comprehended its relation to his own theory about land at the west, why in the world should he have concealed this valuable knowledge? The notion seems to be that he must have kept it secret through an unworthy desire to claim a priority in discovery to which he knew that he was not ent.i.tled.[477] This is projecting our present knowledge into the past with a vengeance. Columbus never professed to have discovered America; he died in the belief that what he had done was to reach the eastern sh.o.r.es of Asia by a shorter route than the Portuguese. If he had reason to suppose that the Northmen had once come down from the Arctic seas to some unknown part of the Asiatic coast, he had no motive for concealing such a fact, but the strongest of motives for proclaiming it, inasmuch as it would have given him the kind of inductive argument which he sorely needed. The chief obstacle for Columbus was that for want of tangible evidence he was obliged to appeal to men's reason with scientific arguments. When you show things to young children they are not content with looking; they crave a more intimate acquaintance than the eyes alone can give, and so they reach out and handle the things.

So when ideas are presented to grown-up men, they are apt to be unwilling to trust to the eye of reason until it has been supplemented by the eye of sense; and indeed in most affairs of life such caution is wholesome. The difference between Columbus and many of the "practical"

men whom he sought to convince was that he could see with his mind's eye solid land beyond the Sea of Darkness while they could not. To them the ocean, like the sky, had nothing beyond, unless it might be the supernatural world.[478] For while the argument from the earth's rotundity was intelligible enough, there were few to whom, as to Toscanelli, it was a living truth. Even of those who admitted, in theory, that Cathay lay to the west of Europe, most deemed the distance untraversable. Inductive proof of the existence of accessible land to the west was thus what Columbus chiefly needed, and what he sought every opportunity to find and produce; but it was not easy to find anything more substantial than sailors' vague mention of driftwood of foreign aspect or other outlandish jetsam washed up on the Portuguese strand.[479] What a G.o.dsend it would have been for Columbus if he could have had the Vinland business to hurl at the heads of his adversaries!

If he could have said, "Five hundred years ago some Icelanders coasted westward in the polar regions, and then coasted southward until they reached a country beyond the ocean and about opposite to France or Portugal; therefore that country must be Asia, and I can reach it by striking boldly across the ocean, which will obviously be shorter than going down by Guinea,"--if he could have said this, he would have had precisely the unanswerable argument for lack of which his case was waiting and suffering. In persuading men to furnish hard cash, for his commercial enterprise, as Colonel Higginson so neatly says, "an ounce of Vinland would have been worth a pound of cosmography."[480] We may be sure that the silence of Columbus about the Norse voyages proves that he knew nothing about them or quite failed to see their bearings upon his own undertaking. It seems to me absolutely decisive.

[Footnote 477: "The fault that we find with Columbus is, that he was not honest and frank enough to tell where and how he had obtained his previous information about the lands which he pretended to discover." Anderson, _America not discovered by Columbus_, p. 90.]

[Footnote 478: See below, p. 398, note.]

[Footnote 479: For example, the pilot Martin Vicenti told Columbus that 1,200 miles west of Cape St. Vincent he had picked up from the sea a piece of carved wood evidently not carved with iron tools. Pedro Correa, who had married Columbus's wife's sister, had seen upon Porto Santo a similar piece of carving that had drifted from the west. Huge reeds sometimes floated ash.o.r.e upon those islands, and had not Ptolemy mentioned enormous reeds as growing in eastern Asia?

Pine-trees of strange species were driven by west winds upon the coast of Fayal, and two corpses of men of an unknown race had been washed ash.o.r.e upon the neighbouring island of Flores.

Certain sailors, on a voyage from the Azores to Ireland, had caught glimpses of land on the west, and believed it to be the coast of "Tartary;" etc., etc. See _Vita dell' Ammiraglio_, cap. ix. Since he cited these sailors, why did he not cite the Northmen also, if he knew what they had done?]

[Footnote 480: _Larger History of the United States_, p. 54.]

[Sidenote: No trace of a thought of Vinland appears in the voyages of Columbus.]

Furthermore, this silence is in harmony with the fact that in none of his four voyages across the Atlantic did Columbus betray any consciousness that there was anything for him to gain by steering toward the northwest. If he could correctly have conceived the position of Vinland he surely would not have conceived it as south of the fortieth parallel. On his first voyage he steered due west in lat.i.tude 28 because Toscanelli placed j.a.pan opposite the Canaries. When at length some doubts began to arise and he altered his course, as we shall hereafter see, the change was toward the southwest. His first two voyages did not reveal to him the golden cities for which he was looking, and when on his third and fourth voyages he tried a different course it was farther toward the equator, not farther away from it, that he turned his prows. Not the slightest trace of a thought of Vinland appears in anything that he did.

[Sidenote: Why did not Norway or Iceland utter a protest in 1493?]

Finally it may be asked, if the memory of Vinland was such a living thing in Iceland in 1477 that a visitor would be likely to be told about it, why was it not sufficiently alive in 1493 to call forth a protest from the North? When the pope, as we shall presently see, was proclaiming to the world that the Spanish crown was ent.i.tled to all heathen lands and islands already discovered or to be discovered in the ocean west of the Azores, why did not some zealous Scandinavian at once jump up and cry out, "Look here, old Columbus, _we_ discovered that western route, you know! Stop thief!" Why was it necessary to wait more than a hundred years longer before the affair of Vinland was mentioned in this connection?

[Sidenote: The idea of Vinland was not a.s.sociated with the idea of America until the seventeenth century.]

Simply because it was not until the seventeenth century that the knowledge of North American geography had reached such a stage of completeness as to suggest to anybody the true significance of the old voyages from Greenland. That significance could not have been understood by Leif and Thorfinn themselves, or by the compilers of Hauks-bok and Flateyar-bok, or by any human being, until about the time of Henry Hudson. Not earlier than that time should we expect to find it mentioned, and it is just then, in 1610, that we do find it mentioned by Arngrim Jonsson, who calls Vinland "an island of _America_, in the region of Greenland, perhaps the modern Estotilandia."[481] This is the earliest glimmering of an a.s.sociation of the idea of Vinland with that of America.

[Footnote 481: "Terram vero Landa Rolfoni quaesitam existimarem esse Vinlandiam olim Islandis sic dictam; de qua alibi insulam nempe Americae e regione Gronlandiae, quae forte hodie Estotilandia," etc. _Crymogoea_, Hamburg, 1610, p. 120.

Abraham Ortelius in 1606 speaks of the Northmen coming to America, but bases his opinion upon the Zeno narrative (published in 1558) and upon the sound of the name _Norumbega_, and apparently knows nothing of Vinland:--"Iosephus Acosta in his book _De Natura noui orbis_ indeuors by many reasons to proue, that this part of _America_ was originally inhabited by certaine Indians, forced thither by tempestuous weather ouer the South sea which now they call Mare del Zur. But to me it seemes more probable, out of the historie of the two Zeni, gentlemen of Venice, ... that this New World many ages past was entred upon by some islanders of _Europe_, as namely of _Groenland_, Island, and Frisland; being much neerer thereunto than the Indians, nor disioyned thence ... by an Ocean so huge, and to the Indians so vnnauigable. Also, what else may we coniecture to be signified by this _Norumbega_ [the name of a North region of _America_] but that from _Norway_, signifying a North land, some Colonie in times past hath hither beene transplanted?" _Theatre of the Whole World_, London, 1606, p.

5. These pa.s.sages are quoted and discussed by Reeves, _The Finding of Wineland the Good_, pp. 95, 96. The supposed connection of _Norumbega_ with _Norway_ is very doubtful.

Possibly Stephanius, in his map of 1570 (Torfaeus, _Gronlandia antiqua_, 1706), may have had reference to Labrador or the north of Newfoundland.]