Puslapio vaizdai
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the earth is overlaid or distorted by the introduction of mermaids, men without heads, or wearing their faces in their stomachs, unicorns, centaurs, and griffins, until its configuration assumes the appearance of a nightmare or a zoological garden. It is true that the geographical lore of the ancients, as summarized by Ptolemy, happily continued to survive, more or less intact, in the literature of the Arabs; but the speculations of the Mohammedan world, whose loadstone was Mecca, were naturally attracted to the regions of the south and east, and the travels and adventures of Sindbad the Sailor embalm the stories told by many a vagrant Syrian or Egyptian merchant on his return from Persia, India, and China, in the one direction, or from Zanzibar and Madagascar in the other. At a later period, indeed, the western Arabs made excellent pirates, and terrorized the shores of both Europe and Africa, nay, even of America and England, but for many hundred years the whole Arab race had the deepest horror of the Atlantic, and calumniated its blue loveliness by calling it "the green sea of darkness," while their learned doctors declared that a man mad enough to tempt its dangers ought to be deprived of his civil rights. The conjectures, consequently, of the classic philosophers, and the hints scattered up and down Greek poetry of mysterious coasts and islands beyond the setting sun, failed to engage their attention, and as at this time their supremacy in Spain and Portugal, as well as in Morocco, barred the way of the maritime states of Christendom to the coast, the expanse of waters that rolled and tumbled beyond the pillars of Hercules remained a "Mare Clausum" long after a considerable knowledge had been gained not only of the Arabian and Indian Seas, but even of the hithermost tracts of the Pacific. Still it is from the writings of Edrisi, their greatest geographer, who, about 1150, was residing at the Court of the Norman Princes of Palermo, that we get the first account of a landfall made on the shores of the fabled Atlantis.

The adventurers consisted of eight near relations, who, some time in the year 1100, provisioned a ship for several months, and sailed one fine morning from Lisbon, then an Arab town, into the pathless west. After eleven days they reached a brown and

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fetid sea. Turning south, they came to an island where sheep were feeding, but the bitterness of the mutton unfitted them for food. Continuing their voyage in the same direction for another twelve days, they light upon a city full of beautiful men and womHere, after a term of imprisonment, the ruler of the island put them blindfolded into a boat, and eventually they found themselves cast upon the coast of Africa, whence they made their way back to Lisbon, and gave their names to the street of "The Wanderers" in that city.

Whether in the foregoing story we are entertained with a premature discovery of Madeira, the Canaries, or the Cape Verd Islands, or with a myth, nobody can now tell.

While, however, the doctors and the divines of the Middle Ages persisted in regarding the earth as a plane surface, on the ground of such texts of Scripture as "Thou hast made all men to dwell on the 'face' of the earth," and denied its rotundity because the Psalmist says, "In his hands are all the 'corners' of the earth," or argued that "men at the supposed antipodes could not walk with their heads downward," and that ships could not sail, nor rain fall," upward," there existed all the time in the writings of Aristotle and of his heathen successors conceptions of the nature of the globe which came wonderfully near the truth. For instance, in his treatise on the heavens, Aristotle asserts that "the earth is not only round, but not so very large, and the sea which washes the shores outside the Pillars of Hercules, bathes also the neighboring coasts of India." Again, in another work, he says, "It is probable that at the side of the earth, opposite our own, there are other continents, some large, some small, bearing the same proportion to the Atlantic as our islands to the seas which surround them." Strabo, also, following Eratosthenes, observed that, if it were not for the intervening Atlantic, we could pass from Spain to India along the same parallel of latitude, and quotes Poseidonius as saying that one only wanted a good easterly wind to reach India. Seneca goes a step farther in the same direction, and enforces this conclusion in the following prophetic passage in his "Medea: ""There will come a time when ocean will unbar his gates, and, as Tethys lifts the veil, new continents will

rise in view, nor will Thule be the limit of the world." Lastly, Macrobius, in his comment on the "Dream of Scipio," prophesies that if you go far enough west, you will reach the antipodes.

Side by side with the conjectures of these serious men of science, dreams and fancies as to a blessed region bathed in golden sunshine, far down the foamfringed ridges of the Western Sea, were already floating about the world, even in pre-historic times. With Homer, it was the garden of the Hesperides, the abode of the noble dead, where there was neither snow nor winter-he had wellnigh added "where there are no more tears." With Solon and the early Greeks, if we are to believe Plato's lovely story, half myth, half allegory, and perhaps not wholly untrue, it was the island of Atlantis. Aristotle also speaks of a blissful island in the west discovered by the Carthaginians, as does Diodorus, who gives a vivid description of its fruits, its flowers, its singing birds, and crystal streams; and Plutarch asserts that Sertorius having been defeated both by land and by sea, had half a mind

impertinence to present themselves before Prince Henry the Navigator * to announce that they had just arrived from this blessed country, and that the descendants of its episcopal founders were anxious to know whether the Moors still reigned in Portugal. Though the Prince doubted, others believed, and a noble Portuguese, Ferdinand Ulmo, in 1487-that is to say, a year after the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope-entered into an agreement with the Government of Portugal, in a document which is still extant, to take possession of the "seven cities," on condition that they should be placed under the jurisdiction of himself and his heirs. Even Prince Henry was much preoccupied by a desire to reach the Court of Prester John, an elusive

Arms of the Company of Merchant Venturers of Bristol, of which Cabot was Governor in 1553.

to find consolation from his sorrows in certain far-away regions of which he had heard from some adventurous mariners just come back from them.

With the advent of the Middle Ages, analogous traditions become rife, and take even a firmer hold upon the receptive imagination of the early Christian world. St. Brandan sails from Ireland in search of the earthly Paradise, and, with the assistance of a friendly giant, reaches, in midocean, an isle surrounded by shining walls of gold; and so authentic was this discovery considered, that the island of St. Brandan remained extant on the maps until the end of the sixteenth century. Thanks to Tennyson, we all know about the voyage of Maeldune and the enchanted archipelago he visited. Again, as soon as the Moors invade the Spanish Peninsula, seven bishops with their disciples sail forth upon the mare tenebrosum, and land on a beatific shore, where they build seven great cities. Many hundred years later a handful of ship-men have the

Christian potentate ruling an impalpable Eastern realm, whose name was probably a corruption of the Persian "Ferishta-i-Jehán," i.e., Angel of the World, and not synonymous with Priest or Presbyter John, as is generally thought.

In the same way, too, as the inhabitants of Kerry and Galway fancied that now and then they could descry, just before sunset, the glistening tops of the island of St. Brandan, so the people of the Canaries, as well as those of Madeira, were firmly convinced that, at what some conjectured to be a distance of one hundred leagues, and others fifty, they had seen on many a clear day the dim bastions of a faroff land, which, nevertheless, had always escaped their search as often as they had sailed in pursuit of it.

Passing from the guesses after truth of the Old World philosophers, and the fantasies of the medieval dreamers, we stand upon surer ground on reaching the unpromising realm of Thule, as Iceland still continued to be called. The first visitors to its inhospitable shores were undoubtedly some Irish anchorites; for the bells and crosses found by the early Norse emigrants bear witness to their whilom presence. It seems to have been re-discovered by a jarl of the Faroe Islands in 860, though the

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*See Mr. Beazley's "Life of Prince Henry the Navigator," an admirable book treating of this period, and illustrated by an interesting collection of mediaval maps.

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Sebastian Cabot at about Eighty Years of Age. Reproduced from the engraving in Seyer's History of Bristol published in 1823. The original painting was attributed to Holbein and was destroyed by fire in 1845.

Viking Raven Floke, with Ingolf and Leif, his fellow-islanders, are regarded as the founders of the colony. Ten years later Gunniborn sights Greenland, and calls it "White Shirt." But more than a century passes before the first settlement of Greenland is effected under the guidance of Eric the Red, who, with the genuine spirit of a "promoter," christens the country by the deceptive appellation it now bears, because, as he himself confesses, "it is a good name to attract emigrants." It has been contended that the designation Greenland VOL. XXII.-6

proves that in former days the climate was different from what it is at present, and that some accumulation of permanent ice on its eastern seaboard converted what were in those days verdant fields into their present icy aspect; but Dr. Nansen, whom we consulted on the point, does not subscribe to this opinion. There is no doubt, however, that for several hundred years the eastern shore of what we now call Davis Strait was the seat of several Icelandic settlements, for recent explorers have laid bare the ruins of houses, churches, and sepul

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chres, with many a Runic stone memorial. One of these is dated 1133, being inscribed with the name of Erling, the son of Sigvat. Once established in their new homes, these hardy Norse rovers were pretty sure to continue their seafaring westward, though, as so often happens, this result was precipitated by an accident. A man named Bjarni Herjulfson, sailing, in company with his father, from Iceland to Eric's Fiord in Greenland, was driven through unknown seas to the coast of a wooded shore, on which, however, he did not stop to land. On returning home, he was much blamed for his want of enterprise, and Leif, the son of Eric the Red, in the year 1000 buys his ship, and, putting five and twenty men on board, starts upon what proves a momentous voyage, since it culminated in their coming to a country so inviting and temperate, so rich in vines and self-grown wheat, that they called it "Wineland the Good," while Leif himself, on returning in the following spring to Greenland, became known as Leif the Lucky. Leif's expedition was followed by that of his brother Thorwald, who was determined to be talked about." He put to sea with thirty men, and wintered in his brother's booths. It must have been wild rice.

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But in the following spring he was set upon by a stunted race of men, who used skin canoes, and whom the Norsemen called Skrælings, or Esquimaux. In a fight which. ensued, Thorwald received a mortal wound from an arrow, and his settlement came to an end.†

Nothing daunted by this untoward issue, Thorfinn Karlsefne shortly afterward organizes an adventure upon a far larger scale than the small expedition of his predecessors, and in the year 1006 embarks with one hundred and sixty men and five women in three ships, laden with all the apparatus necessary for founding a permanent colony. But the Skrælings descended upon him in still greater numbers than upon Thorwald, and Thorfinn, seeing the hopelessness of his endeavor, makes up his mind to go back to Greenland, carrying with him not only his wife Gudrid but his baby Snorre, the first modern "American" known to history. At a later period Gudrid, we are told, went on a pilgrimage to Rome. The Saga takes especial care to explain that the discomfiture of Thorfinn was accelerated by the quarrels of the men

There seems some doubt as to this independent voyage of Thorwald. According to another account he was killed when accompanying Thorfinn Karlsefne.

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A Section of Sebastian Cabot's Map of the World, 1544.
From the photograph (full-size of original) in the Lenox Library.

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