There now remains only one quotation to make from the ancients. We have been reserving it for two reasons—first, because it is a singularly happy anticipation of the discovery of the New World, so happy that it became a favorite stanza with the discoverer himself. This we learn from the life of the "Great Admiral," written by his son Ferdinand.
Secondly, because it adorns our title-page and has been characterized as "a lucky prophecy"—written in the first century A. D. The author, Seneca, was a dramatist as well as a philosopher, the lines occurring at the end of one of his choruses—Medea, 376. We may thus translate the prophetic stanza:
For at a distant date this ancient world
Will westward stretch its bounds, and then disclose
Beyond the Main a vast new Continent,
With realms of wealth and might.
CHAPTER I
PRE-COLUMBIAN DISCOVERIES OF AMERICA
1 Norse Discovery.—By glancing at a map of the north Atlantic, the reader will at once see that the natural approach from Europe to the Western Continent was by Iceland and Greenland—especially in those early days when ocean navigation was unknown. Iceland is nearer to Greenland than to Norway; and Greenland is part of America. But in Iceland there were Celtic settlers in the early centuries; and even King Arthur, according to the history of Geoffrey of Monmouth, sailed north to that "Ultima Thule." During the ninth century a Christian community had been established there under certain Irish monks. This early civilization, however, was destined to become presently extinct.
It was in A. D. 875, i. e., during the reign of Alfred the Great in England, that the Norse earl, Ingolf, led a colony to Iceland. More strenuous and savage than the Christian Celts whom they found there, the latter with their preaching monks soon sailed to the south, and left the Northmen masters of the island. The Norse colony under Ingolf was strongly reenforced by Norwegians who took refuge there to avoid the tyranny of their king, Harold, the Fair-haired. Ingolf built the town Ingolfshof, named after him, and also Reikiavik, afterward the capital, named from the "reek" or steam of its hot springs. So important did this colony become that in the second generation the population amounted to 60,000.
Ingolf was admired by the poet James Montgomery (not to be confounded with Robert, whom Macaulay criticized so severely), who in 1819 thus wrote of him and his island:
There on a homeless soil his foot he placed,
Framed his hut-palace, colonized the waste,
And ruled his horde with patriarchal sway
—Where Justice reigns, 'tis Freedom to obey....
And Iceland shone for generous lore renowned,
A northern light when all was gloom around.