over the five ladies, though it admits that once, when the Norsemen were in full retreat, one of them, a natural daughter of Eric the Red, seized a sword, and, confronting the foe, dropped her shift down to her waist. The Skrælings, finding that it was a woman by whom they were so unexpectedly opposed, fled amain.

Karlsefne's expedition is the last serious one of the kind of which we have any certain knowledge; for, though Freydis, the same lady who had behaved so gallantly on the occasion above mentioned, embarked on a fresh attempt, it only ended in disaster. Helge and Finnboge, two brothers, whom she had induced to accompany her, were murdered, with her connivance, soon after reaching their destination, while Freydis herself and the remnant of her ship's company came back 'to Greenland. But, even if we reject, as it is to be feared we must, the subsequent tale told by Rafn, "the Limerick trader," and by Are Frode, of Gudleif and Gudlangson's voyage to Great Ireland, it is possible that other adventurers, with varying fortunes, may have endeavored to establish themselves on the shores of Wineland, for in the Icelandic Sagas there are to be found traces of voyages having been undertaken during the next two hundred years in the same direction as the earlier

ones-traces which receive some confirmation from lists still extant of successive Greenland bishops, as well as from hints in other Sagas of missionary visits to these western lands.

Considerable difficulty has been found. in determining how far south these Norsemen made their way. The generally received opinion is that they got down as far as Boston and the New England States; but from the length of the day, which has been carefully recorded by the explorers, it is doubtful if they even reached Nova Scotia. Probably the north coast of Newfoundland was the farthest limit of their descent southward. That such hardy adventurers should have been arrested on the threshold of what would have proved so momentous a discovery is easily accounted for. In spite of their courage, their want of firearms forced them to yield to numbers. The Esquimaux, or the Indians, or whatever was the race which confronted them, engaged with the invaders upon far more equal terms than the inhabitants of Cuba with the Spaniards, or the Mexicans and Peruvians with Cortez and Pizarro. As a consequence, not only did this Viking colonization of Wineland cease, but the memory of it almost perished, and the Sagas recalling it, of which only later and discordant copies have been preserved,

came to be regarded as myths and inventions scarcely worthy of attention.

Rumors, nevertheless, of these voyages were probably current among such persons in Europe as were interested in the geographical problems which had begun to attract attention under the stimulating influence of Prince Henry of Portugal, and of his explorations along the coasts of Africa. An echo of these may have reached the ears of Columbus, for we know that he went to Iceland some years before he started on his first expedition. It has been sought on this account to belittle the merits of his great achievement, as though the success of his voyage had thus been rendered a foregone conclusion, and that he were little better than an impostor in taking credit for his discoveries. But this is an ungenerous judgment. In the first place, it is evident from his letter to the Florentine geographer Toscanelli, dated three years anterior to his visit to Iceland, that in his own mind he had long since set his egg upon its end. In other words, he had convinced himself that, by traversing the Atlantic, he would reach land. It is true the lands he expected to find were not the American continents, but the east coast of China as described by Marco Polo and depicted on Ptolemy's map, which, though at fault in many respects, such as in making Ceylon twice as big as India, and in joining the south of Africa with an Antarctic continent, thus separating the Indian from the Atlantic Ocean, was wonderfully correct within its hypothetical limits. Columbus was strongly supported in his views by his Italian correspondent, then seventyseven years old, who, in a letter from Florence, dated June 25, 1474, transmits to Alphonso the Fifth, King of Portugal, a plan for reaching India based on the foregoing theory: "I am sending you a map," he says, " on which you will see I have placed opposite to Ireland and Africa, due west, the commencement of the Indies, with the islands and coasts where you might land. You will not be surprised if I call the West the land of spices, known to us as the Levant, for those who continue to sail westward will arrive at exactly the same places as those who travel eastward by land." He further designates the provinces and kingdoms referred to as dependencies of the Grand Khan, who lives generally in

Cathay. And yet, shrewd as were the guesses of Columbus and of his friend Toscanelli, our own Roger Bacon, as well as Albertus Magnus, two hundred years earlier, had come nearer the real truth than either of them; for both these thirteenthcentury sages were of opinion that what the Greeks called "the Oikoumené,” i.e., the inhabited earth as then known, which included Cathay, by no means comprised the total of the habitable globe, and that there remained a fourth, or at all events a fifth, part still to be discovered. "The great portion of this fourth," says Roger Bacon, "is in the antipodes."

Columbus was still further strengthened in his convictions by other indications, more significant even than the theories of his learned contemporary. For instance, Martin Vicente, a pilot, had told him that, having sailed four hundred leagues to the west of Cape St. Vincent, he had found in the water a piece of carved wood which had evidently been labored, but not with an iron instrument. His own brother-inlaw, Pedro Correo, had also seen a similar piece of wood, which had drifted onto the island of Porto Santo, and he had heard from the King of Portugal that reeds of immense size had floated to the south of those islands from the West. tants of the Azores, too, spoke of the trunk of huge pine-trees, such as did not grow upon any of their own islands, having been wafted to their coast by westerly winds, and especially of two dead bodies cast upon the island of Flores, whose appearance was different from that of any other known race of people. Moreover, Las Casas states that among Columbus's papers was one in his own hand which said that a "cock-eyed sailor" had told him that, having been driven out of his course in a northwest direction, he had seen land probably Greenland.

Far, however, from diminishing the credit of Columbus, the foregoing facts only increase his claim to be regarded as a man of genius; for, though these conceptions of a transatlantic land may have been germinating in the minds of a few individuals, they were entirely opposed to the general beliefs and prejudices of the day, nor had any human being dreamt of giving practical effect to them. On the contrary, the difficulties which Columbus

experienced in convincing the Courts of Portugal and Spain, and the learned and vigorous minds which surrounded King John and Ferdinand and Isabella, of the possibility of accomplishing an enterprise which, if successful, would have been so greatly to the advantage of either crown, is in itself a proof of the extraordinary merit attaching to his initiative. An experienced seaman, a man obviously entitled to attention, comes to the king, promising in a few weeks to put him in possession of golden realms, and of the priceless pearls, gems, and spices of the East, and it takes seventeen years of persistent solicitation before any real attention is paid to his proposals, and a few hundred pounds can be spared for fitting out the miserable little cockle-shells which constituted his first squadron. The fact was that almost everybody looked upon the whole thing as a mad dream. The notions of the philosopher who swore he heard the sun hiss as

it dropped into the ocean, still dominated even fairly intelligent minds. To them the world was flat, and the torrid zone a flaming barrier, where the waters boiled and bubbled, and which cut off all communication with whatever lay beyond. The belief in the antipodes was a blasphemous conception, and that the earth was possessed of four corners, an article necessary to salvation. Even Dante's tutor, Brunetto Latini, when he first saw a magnetic needle in Roger Bacon's study, could not help remarking that no mariner would dare to use so diabolical an instrument. For anyone, in the face of such a discouraging mass of popular belief, laughed at by the Court, almost excommunicated by the Church, to plunge with undaunted spirit into the unknown, and to hold to his own opinion against the world, implies a fortitude of mind which may be justly termed heroic.

Columbus set sail from Huelva on Au

get 3. 1492. and entered the Tagus on La return voyage, on March 4. 1493

It was on March 5, 1496, that is to say. three years later, that a patent was granted by Henry the seventh to John Cabot, citizen of Venice, and to Lewis, Sebastian, and Sanctes, "vonnes of the said John." empowering them to seek out, subdue, and occopy at their own charges any regions which before had been unknown to all Christians. They were further authorized to set up the royal banner and to possess the territories discovered by them as the King's vassals. On the other hand, a fifth part of the gains of the voyage was reserved to the Crown. The above arrangement was probably facilitated by the fact of Cabot having already successfully negotiated for King Henry an agreement with the King of Denmark in reference to matters affecting the English trade with Iceland, which was at this time the principal source of our supplies of fish. A whole year, however, elapsed before the Cabots were in a position to act upon the authority given to them by their pat

ent.

Jean, or Giovanne, Cabotto, or rather Gavotta, though called in his patent a citizen of Venice, was not a Venetian born, but a provincial Genoese who was granted the freedom of Venice after a residence there of fifteen years. Nor do we know what brought him to England. That he at once took up his permanent abode at Bristol seems pretty certain, for his son Sebastian was born there, and it was to that city he returned after a visit to Venice when his boy was four years old, as Sebastian himself tells Peter Martyr, but of the

details of John Cabot's He as a British citizen no particulars survive.

Although Cabot's first voyage of discovery did not take place until four years after Columbus returned, the one mariner need not be regarded as a servile imitator of the other. Before his arrival in Bristol, John Cabot's reputation as an experienced seaman and navigator had been fully recognized. He was also a considerable traveller by land, having visited Mecca and other Eastern countries. The talk that was in the air of lucrative expeditions to regions south of the Canaries, and the conjectures as to what a voyage across the Atlantic might give birth, must have long afforded him food for speculation. He was already in England when Bartholomew Columbus left London to deliver to his brother Christopher an invitation from the English king to enter his service and accept his patronage; and Bristol was a port from which, during the previous years, many ships had sailed in the vain search for those phantom islands which had never ceased to haunt the imagination of the dwellers on the western coasts of Britain and Ireland. As soon as the startling news of Columbus's return and of the roseate accounts he gave of his discoveries spread abroad, the maritime world of Europe naturally caught fire. But the peculiarity of Cabot's proposals consisted in the idea of enabling Henry the Seventh to outstrip his rival, the Spanish king, in the acquisition of fresh territories, and to reach the shores of India and China before him (for the conception of an intermediate continent was as absent from the mind of Cabot as it was from that of Columbus)

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