According to the Icelandic sagas, Lief and Bjorn reached Labrador about the year 1000 A.D. and found a dwarfish race of men “of short stature,” whom they called skraelings. We know well such terms could not apply to the stately Algonquin warriors the Europeans found in New England. No; these were Esquimaux, whom the warlike Indians had compelled to follow the retreat of the glaciers toward the Land of the Midnight Sun. They crossed to the Great Lakes and compelled the peaceful Mound-builders to go southward. They crossed the Rocky Mountains and drove the inhabitants of the Sierras also. They crowded them into the gorges and cañons of Colorado, Utah and Arizona. The frightened refugees were driven to the necessity of building dwellings in the overhanging cliffs of rivers, and these nests of human swallows are now known as the “Cliff-dwellers” of the Colorado and Hili.
They were not allowed to stay here. Driven by their relentless hunters, they moved onward to the plateaus of Arizona and cactus plains of New Mexico, where, huddled up between the tribes of Mexico on the south, and the hunting Indians behind them, they built the pueblos and “The Seven Cities of Cibola.” The archæological remains prove to us to-day that New Mexico was as thickly settled by these miserable fugitives as Pennsylvania or Delaware. The mournful spectacle to-day of the adobe pueblos along the Pecos and Rio Grande, is the closing chapter of a history written in blood, and sealed by the life of a nation, with characters forever enigmatical to the civilized world.
VII.
Conclusion.
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“And thy request think now fulfilled, that asked
How first this world and face of things began,
And what before thy memory was done
From the beginning.”
The former existence of Atlantis is an hypothesis, it is true, but so is the existence of Lemuria, and nearly every scientist of Europe believes that a continent once existed in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and India, and the proof is not wanting.
On the Island of Madagascar are found thirty-three species of monkeys, called Lemurs, which are not found in Africa, nor in any other part of the globe, except Ceylon, India, and the Malay Archipelago. Because the Lemurs are found only in this region, Sclater, the English zoölogist, has called the sunken continent “Lemuria.”