The Book of the Ocean

by Ernest Ingersoll

A VIKING GALLEY.

Over the long but slow history of these American settlements of the Northmen we need not linger. Although Vinland seems to have been abandoned within a few decades, the Greenland settlements were maintained. A republican government was organized; Christianity was introduced, and remains of their stone churches and Augustinian monasteries have been identified. By the end of the fifteenth century, however, these colonies had completely disappeared, worn out in the hopeless struggle against climate and the savage Eskimos, but exterminated, at last, perhaps, by the Black Death—for the great plague which almost depopulated Europe in the fourteenth century seems to have reached even the desolate shores of Greenland, and to have consumed the last of these remote people, causing them to be utterly forgotten.

A more definite account of pre-Columbian North America than that of the sagas and other traditions of the Vinlanders, and one accepted as true by Mr. Major of the English Hakluyt Society and other competent geographical critics, is that of the voyages and reports of the brothers Nicolò and Antonio Zeno. These men belonged to a family distinguished in Venice; and toward the close of the fourteenth century they separately or together made many voyages in the North Atlantic, going far beyond any previous navigators of which they knew. They wrote letters home containing an account of these, but little publication was given to them, and they were forgotten until the revival of interest in geography following the early discoveries of Columbus. The documents possessed by the Zeno family were then made the basis of a pamphlet by a grand-nephew reciting what his ancestor had done, long before the time of Columbus. The most interesting thing in it is an account of how, about 1390, Nicolò Zeno fitted out a ship at the Faroes, went over to Greenland and there learned of an island which was called Estotiland, and which we know as Newfoundland. Not very far away to the southwest of it, he says, was the country of Drogeo, which fishermen whom he saw had visited. They claimed to have “discovered” none of these places, but spoke of them as formerly well known, although then little frequented by Europeans.

As to Drogeo,—which he speaks of as if it were the mainland,—that was still occasionally resorted to for fishing; and he relates the adventures of a white man who had been captured by the mainland savages a few years previously, and adopted by them on account of his knowledge of how to fish with a net, and to do other useful things. Such a course would be very characteristic of the aborigines of eastern North America, as we have since learned to know; and it is also natural that he should have been fought for by rival chiefs, as Zeno says happened to this man, who, by capture and exchange, or of his own motion, traveled about and saw much of the people of this “country” Drogeo. At any rate, the information given by Zeno tallies remarkably well with the truth about primitive North America and its inhabitants. “They have no kind of metal,” reported this wandering refugee, who finally drifted back to the coast, and was able to make his escape to a fishing-boat. Now the one really remarkable and distinctive fact about the North Americans was just this,—that with a considerable advance in other directions, they had never learned to fuse and forge or otherwise utilize iron or other metals, save a little metallic copper and silver in the Great Lakes region. But listen to the rest of his brief report:

They live by hunting, and carry lances of wood sharpened at the point. They have bows, the strings of which are made of beasts’ skins. They are very fierce, and have deadly fights amongst each other, and eat one another’s flesh [as was true, to a limited ceremonial extent, after battles]. They have chieftains and certain laws among themselves, but differing in the different tribes. The farther you go southwestward, however, the more refinement you meet with, because the climate is more temperate, and, accordingly, there [i. e., in Mexico] they have cities and temples dedicated to their idols, in which they sacrifice men and afterwards eat them. In those parts they have some knowledge of gold and silver.

Now, whether all this was the observation of a single rude sailor, or, as is more likely, summarizes what Zeno was able to learn from all sources at his command regarding the new western mainland and its people, it is correct and forcible. Had young Nicolò the editor, a century afterward, tried to invent something of the kind, he would surely have made his invention marvelous, for that was an age of fable and bombast. On the contrary, this is a simple and accurate statement of what we now know were the facts. Nor did he have any means of knowing anything more of the case than his family archives revealed, since he wrote and published this account of his uncle’s voyages only a few years after the first return of Columbus, and before any writer had visited the northern American coasts, or had learned the habits of the natives. I can but believe, therefore, that the report was made in good faith, and records simply what the Zeni did and saw and heard; and that these bold Venetian navigators knew more about North America, at least, before the end of the fourteenth century than Columbus had learned by the end of the fifteenth.

I have run ahead of my story, but I wanted to show how little impression these northern investigations and occupation of a new continent had made upon the Mediterranean “world,” which seems rarely to have heard of them, much less to have profited by the information, for more than four hundred years, in spite of the fact that there was constant communication between the Normans and British, at least, and the Mediterranean peoples.

Let us now go back to those southern countries and see what they had been doing toward maritime exploration during these thousand years and more when the Scandinavians were so busy in the north. It was principally perfecting the knowledge of the world their fathers knew. From the very first men had tried to make maps, and succeeded fairly well for small spaces; but to make a map of the whole world was a task that defied human knowledge for many centuries. After Aristotle’s time all men of education understood that the world was a sphere; and about 150 B. C. Hipparchus, borrowing an idea from the Babylonians, taught the Greeks that the way to place their towns and mountains and rivers and the outlines of the coast correctly upon a model of the world, was to determine their position by observations of the heavenly bodies. Thus the ideas of latitude and longitude originated. He could not apply his method practically very far, because there were few or no accurate astronomical observations away from a few cities in Egypt and Greece; but two hundred and fifty years later Ptolemy, a learned mathematician of Alexandria, gathered all the facts obtainable, and made an attempt which bore a rude resemblance to the truth and served as the best and almost the only account of the world for several hundred years. Ptolemy flourished about 150 A. D. His book describes Asia as far east as the Malayan peninsula, Africa south to Zanzibar and the Gulf of Guinea, and shows a knowledge of Europe as far north as the Shetland Islands (Ultima Thule) and Denmark; the original work seems to have contained no maps, but these were added to it about 500 A. D. by another mathematician named Agathodæmon. It is called the Almagest.