Thirteen Chapters of American History Part 2

The foothold thus gained by the Nors.e.m.e.n in Greenland led to voyages southward. Some years after the establishment of these colonies one Bjarne Herjulfson was on one of these voyages driven by a storm far south of Greenland and saw the coast of the main continent of North America, somewhere, it is supposed from his description, between Newfoundland and Nantucket. Without landing, he returned to Greenland, whence soon thereafter, induced by his accounts, Leif, the son of Eirek the Red, undertook the same journey with a single ship and about thirty-five men, for the purpose of obtaining possession of the newly discovered country. He landed probably at Nantucket Island, and settled in the vicinity of the present Fall River, and called the country Vinland on account of the grape-vines which grew there in profusion.

In confirmation of the claim that it was in this locality that Leif Erickson first set foot, the Norse records are relied upon, which state that, at the season when this discovery was made, the sun rose at 7:30 A.M. and set at 4:30 P.M. This astronomical observation would locate the place of landing on the southern coast of New England in the vicinity mentioned. That the Nors.e.m.e.n made a settlement in this country, though only of brief duration, is a fact in support of which many learned treatises have been written, dealing, among other things, with what are supposed to be Icelandic inscriptions discovered in that section of the country, and the like, a consideration of which, however, would be beyond the scope of this writing.

Leif, the son of Eirek, or to preserve the nomenclature of the artist, Lief Erickson, is described in the Sagas and other records as a large, strong man, of imposing appearance. The ships in which voyages were made by the Nors.e.m.e.n in those days were called drakkars, which were propelled both by oar and sail; at the ends rose wooden apartments called kastals.

All the parts out of water were fashioned after the manner of monsters or drakkars (dragons, _Drachen_). The prow of the ship represented the terrible head, the sides, a continuation of the body, and the rear, the tail of the monster bent upward; they bore a single sail covered with warlike paintings, and to the mast were also frequently hoisted the coats of arms of various chiefs. It was in ships of this character that these bold seamen braved the perils of the ocean, and it was in similar ships that William, the Conqueror, came to England; and yet even these vessels, frail as they were, were superior, both in seaworthiness and size, to the ships of Columbus.

The costumes of the Nors.e.m.e.n consisted of trousers, belt, shirt, and often a coat of mail, and over the shoulders they sometimes wore a cloak with a fringe or border at the sides. They carried swords with most elaborately carved and embossed hilts and scabbards of gilt bronze and silver.

To depict the first landing of Lief Erickson amid these surroundings was the object of the painter. How well he has succeeded, a mere inspection of this canvas will at once reveal. The heroic figure of Lief, himself, dreamily and yet with wonderment, looking out upon the newly discovered sh.o.r.e, while with uplifted sword his men are apparently consecrating the new world with a solemn vow of loyalty, some standing on a small boat which is being pushed towards the sh.o.r.e, while others stand knee-deep in the shoal water--the form of the ship or drakkar in the background, the costumes, swords and all the other accessories--const.i.tute a striking and fascinating group. It portrays vividly the solemnity of the occasion when the first white men were about to set foot on the American continent.

The discovery of Vinland and its subsequent colonization by Thorfinn are referred to in the beautiful verses of Bayard Taylor, written on the occasion of his visit to Iceland to attend its millennial celebration, in August, 1874.

"We come, the children of thy Vinland, The youngest of the world's high peers, O land of steel, and song, and saga, To greet thy glorious thousand years.

"Across that sea the son of Erik Dared with his venturous dragon's prow; From sh.o.r.es where Thorfinn set thy banner Their latest children seek thee now.

"What though thy native harps be silent?

The chord they struck shall ours prolong; We claim thee kindred, call thee mother, O land of saga, steel and song!"

THE SANTA MARIA, NInA AND PINTA

(_Evening of October 11, 1492_)

[Decoration]

THE DEBARKATION OF COLUMBUS

(_Morning of October 12, 1492_)

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright, 1898, by Edward Moran.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright, 1898, by Edward Moran.]

III.

THE SANTA MARIA, NInA AND PINTA (EVENING OF OCTOBER 11, 1492)[E]

AND

IV.

THE DEBARKATION OF COLUMBUS (MORNING OF OCTOBER 12, 1492).[F]

The landing of Columbus was an historical event of such importance in its consequences that the artist wisely celebrates it in both of these pictures.

We little realize what it meant to brave the perils of the unexplored ocean in the year 1492. We marvel when some adventurous navigator, even now, when every current and wind of the ocean have been observed for five hundred years, and are accurately known and precisely charted, undertakes to cross it in a somewhat diminutive vessel. What, then, must have been the courage of Columbus, when, at the advanced age of fifty-seven, he ventured with his crew upon this perilous undertaking in three frail barks or caravels, the largest of them equipped with a single deck and a single bridge, with an awkward one-story compartment at the prow and a two-story compartment at the stern, and the two others without any deck at all, with their little masts carrying awkward, unwieldy, partly square and partly lateen sails!

The three crews consisted of only one hundred and four men combined, of which fifty were on the little "Santa Maria," which was only about sixty-three feet over all in length, with a fifty-one foot keel, twenty foot beam, and a depth of ten and one-half feet, under the command of the "Admiral" himself, as he was pompously called, and thirty on the still smaller "Pinta," under the command of "Captain" Martin Alonso Pinzon, while the still more diminutive c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.l "Nina" contained the formidable crew of twenty-four under the command of the brother of Martin Alonso, the redoubtable "Captain" Vincente Yanez Pinzon. And then to think that, instead of being encouraged and lauded for his enterprise, the prelude consisted of discouragement, derision and persecution of the foolhardy seaman who dared to brave the superst.i.tions of the age and the unknown ocean which was supposed to be peopled with demons and monsters, in quest of what was believed to be an absolutely impossible pathway to China and the East Indies, and from which there could not be any hope of return. A model of these caravels was exhibited in the Columbian Exposition at Chicago, in 1893, at the sight of which wonder grew to incredulity that, under such circ.u.mstances as surrounded this first voyage of Columbus, any one should have risked his life in such a craft.

Even a.s.suming with John Fiske that the spherical form of the earth was known long before Columbus, and that he derived his knowledge of the existence of the westernmost sh.o.r.e of the Atlantic Ocean through information which he received of the voyages of the Nors.e.m.e.n, on his visit to Iceland in 1477, his opinion that the same sh.o.r.e might be reached by crossing the Atlantic, where it had never been traversed before, was based upon mere surmise. No wonder that his crew were disheartened and on the verge of open mutiny when, under such circ.u.mstances, after about sixty-nine days had elapsed since they had sailed from Palos on August 3, 1492, they had still not reached the longed-for land. What faith, almost inspired, must have been his, that he should succeed in persuading his men to hold out only a few days more, and how strange that on the very next day, the seventieth of his voyage, on the evening of October 11, 1492, the long-wished-for goal should be descried in the dim distance, and that on the following day they should actually disembark from their floating prisons to stand once more upon solid ground!

The artist has chosen the inspiring moments of these two events to immortalize them in these two pictures: in the one, the three tiny barks in the shadow of the evening, still in the gloom and uncertainty of what the morrow would bring forth--and then, in the other, the brilliant spectacle of Columbus with cross uplifted, in magnificent regalia of scarlet and gold and purple, and his officers with the standards of Castile and Leon, and the white and green colors of the expedition, disembarking with his men when his hopes had become a reality, for the purpose of claiming the newly discovered land.

I quote from Emilio Castelar the following description of the events ill.u.s.trated by these pictures:

"Land! land! the cry fell as a joyous peal upon the ears of these mariners who had given themselves up as lost and doomed to die in the fathomless vast.

"When Columbus heard the glad cry he knelt in rapture on the deck and with clasped hands lifted his joy-filled eyes to Heaven and intoned the 'Gloria in Excelsis' to the Author of all things.

"The signs of land now made it high time to prepare for the debarkation for which all measures had been wisely planned by the admiral, who had never doubted the realization of his predictions.

"Each moment brought a revelation. A solitary, half-tamed turtle-dove flew near them and was followed by a floating, leafy reed.

"About two in the morning of October 12th, amid the sheen of the stars and phosph.o.r.escence of the sea, one of the crew, with eyes accustomed, like some nocturnal creature, to the darkness, cried 'Land! land!'

"Columbus donned his richest apparel, upon his shoulders a cloak of rosy purple, and grasped in one hand the sword of combat and in the other the Redeemer's cross; then, disembarking, he knelt upon the land, and, with uplifted arms, joined with his followers in the Te Deum."

In these paintings much is left to the imagination, which renders them all the more beautiful and poetical, although also in them the artist has accurately portrayed the caravels, costumes, figures and indications of the nearby sh.o.r.e, so that the scenes are vividly brought to mind as actually described in the journals of the great navigator himself and his first biographer, his own son Ferdinand.

It is not the purpose of the author to write history, and yet how tempting, in the study of these pictures, is it to reflect upon and recall the romance which surrounds the whole life of Columbus and his period: the honors which he received on his return to Spain, his subsequent two additional voyages of discovery, when, to those of the first, consisting of San Salvador, Cuba, and the other islands, he added that of the continent of South America; how he returned from his third voyage in chains and afterwards died in poverty and forgotten at Valladolid, on May 20, 1506, his name scarcely mentioned at the time in the records of that town; how still stranger that Columbus never knew that he had discovered a new continent, but believed that, as he had originally intended, he had reached the sh.o.r.es of the Indies and China or Cathay by a new route, and therefore gave them the name which has ever since attached to the islands where he first landed, of the West Indies, and called the natives, Indians; and, strangest of all, that four hundred and six years after he first landed at San Salvador, the remains of the great discoverer should have been transferred from the cathedral at Havana to Spain, the scene of all his triumphs and all his sorrows, on September 24, 1898, just about the close of the Spanish-American war, which is celebrated in the last or thirteenth of this remarkable series of paintings.

The courage, faith and fort.i.tude of Columbus in persisting in his westward journey, in full confidence that he would eventually reach the sh.o.r.e which must ever have been pictured in his mind, in spite of the doubts and fears and protestations of his weary crew, are beautifully and concisely expressed in the stanzas of Friedrich Schiller:[G]

"Brave sailor, steer onward! Though the jester deride And the hand of the pilot the helm drops in fear; Sail on to the West, till that sh.o.r.e is descried Which so clearly defined to thy mind doth appear.

"Follow G.o.d's guiding hand and the great silent ocean!

For the sh.o.r.e, were it not, from the waves it would rise.

With genius is nature linked in such bonds of devotion That what genius presages, nature never denies."

MIDNIGHT Ma.s.s ON THE MISSISSIPPI Over the Body of Ferdinand de Soto

1542

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright, 1898, by Edward Moran.]