SHIP OF PTOLEMY PHILOPATOR.
(About 240 B. C. Banks of oars and lug-sails.)
Attention was now turned to the eastern seas, overland routes to India and even to China having become well known both to conquering armies and to mercantile caravans. The coasts of Abyssinia, of Arabia, of the Persian Gulf, and of western India were settled by a semi-civilized people for a thousand, perhaps two thousand, years before the Christian era; but they were broken into many independent tribes; and their ships, if they had any, only crept from one harbor to another near by, and neither knew nor cared what lay beyond the farther headlands. As time went on, however, and strong kingdoms arose in Egypt, Arabia, Syria, and Persia, consolidating these scattered tribes into nations, it became necessary to learn the sea-routes between more distant ports. Thus it came about that while the Pharaohs still flourished, Arabic commerce extended regularly along the coast of Abyssinia, and doubtless as far southward as Zanzibar, while the Malays had probably already reached and colonized Madagascar. There seems no reason to doubt that those remarkable ruins in stone which the late Mr. Thomas Bent has studied at and near Zimbabwe, in Mashonaland, East Africa, are the work of Arabian gold-miners, made perhaps a thousand or more years ago; and it is pretty certain that Arabic seamen even at that date regularly traded as far as the island of Madagascar.
The Persian Gulf has been another nursery of a seafaring people since long before the record of history begins; yet so slow were they to learn of anything outside their capes, that it was accounted a wonderful thing when, in the winter of 325-4 B. C., Nearchus, the admiral of the fleet of Alexander the Great, voyaged from the mouth of the Indus to the head of the Persian Gulf. Soon afterward, however, under the house of the Ptolemies, rulers of Egypt, fleets sailed regularly between Red Sea ports and India and Ceylon.
But now for many long centuries the boundaries of the known world were not to be much enlarged (although methods of navigation were improved and commerce continued within the limits of Roman and Arabic dominion), for we know of the discovery of no new coasts until we begin to hear of the doings of an independent and far northern people, scarcely known to the civilized world, and certainly not regarded as a part of it.
On the bleak shores of the North Sea, where the fiords and creek-mouths of Scandinavia gave shelter not only from foreign enemies, but from each other, there had grown up a seafaring race of men, of Gothic ancestry, who had settled on the coasts of what are now Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. They styled themselves Norsemen, or men of the North, and did not object to the title Vikings, or Fiord-men; but their enemies called them pirates, and with much reason, for they ravaged and ruled all the coasts both north and south of the Baltic, voyaging northward to the “land of the midnight sun,” colonizing northern France in the tenth century, and taking practical possession of all they pleased of the British Isles—Ireland and northern Scotland in particular. Here these Norsemen met equally fierce foes, or found congenial partners, as the case might be, in the Scottish and Irish seamen of that day, who were themselves bold freebooters and wide voyagers; and when, in the middle of the ninth century, the Northmen had discovered, as they supposed, the Faroe Islands and Iceland, a little exploration soon showed them that the Irish culdees, or priests of the Christian church planted in Ireland by St. Patrick, had been there before them—first in 725, according to the Irish chronicles of Dicuilus, who seems worthy of credence. Indeed, it is believed by some antiquarians that these Irish sea-wanderers had colonized Iceland at the same early age; had reached Newfoundland, and regularly resorted to its banks for fishing and whaling (five hundred years before Cabot); and were even acquainted with the coast of the North American continent, where traditions assert that their colonies were planted on what are now the shores of Virginia and the Carolinas, which they called New Ireland.
These are entertaining old stories, and may have some truth in them, for it seems certain that the Irish reached Iceland, at least, in the eighth century. Icelandic history, however, begins with the visits of Norsemen in 850, followed by others, who, a few years later, took colonies there and set up an island population which before a century had elapsed numbered more than fifty thousand people. They had a republican form of government, and were quite independent of the King of Norway (Harold the Fair-haired, great-great-grandfather of William the Conqueror), from whom the earlier colonists had fled because of his oppression; but they kept up acquaintance with the mother-country, and merchants and adventurers were continually voyaging between Iceland and all the islands and coasts of that region, using stanch vessels sometimes one hundred feet in length, and eminently seaworthy; yet their only guides were the stars and such signs as seafaring men read in the water and weather about them.
A WAR EXPEDITION OF THE VIKINGS.
Showing build, steering-oar, and rig (colored lug-sail), of Scandinavian exploring ships in the North Atlantic.
It continually happened, however, that they were driven far out of their courses, in such a region of gales, currents, and fogs as is the North Atlantic. In one such adventure, in the year 876, a sea-captain named Gunnbjörn Ulfkragesson was driven far to the west of Iceland, and when he got back to port told his friends that he had seen land. Probably he also told them that so far as he could see there was nothing but icy mountains, of which they already had enough, for no one seems to have investigated the matter further until more than a century later, when a turbulent viking of the rebellious house of Erik, called Erik the Red, was banished from Norway and fled to Iceland with his followers. He was soon convicted there also of manslaughter in a neighborhood quarrel, and again condemned to banishment. Iceland wanted to get rid of him and his brawlers, and Europe would not let him return. Whither should he go?
Then his thoughts turned toward the strange land in the west that tradition said Gunnbjörn had sighted. It is believed by the most careful students that Gunnbjörn’s “rocks” were volcanic islets, which have now disappeared, and are represented only by certain shoals; but it would not be incredible that he had caught a glimpse of the Greenland coast itself.