The Portuguese seem for a long time to have kept up the connection with Newfoundland, more especially in order to avail themselves of the rich fisheries that had been discovered there. But of this it is only by the merest accident that history has anything to relate. It appears as though this fishery became active immediately after Corte-Real’s discovery; for we see that as early as 1506 King Manuel gave orders that the fishermen on their return from Newfoundland to Portugal were to pay one-tenth of the proceeds in duties [cf. Kunstmann, 1859, p. 69].
CONCLUSION
If we would discover how a watercourse is formed, from the very first bog-streams up in the mountain, we must follow a multitude of tiny rills, receiving one fresh stream after another from every side, running together into burns, which grow and grow and form little rivers, till we come to the end of the wooded hillside and are suddenly face to face with the great river in the valley below.
A similar task confronts him who endeavours to explore the first trickling rivulets of human knowledge; he must trace all the minute, uncertain, often elusive beginnings, follow the diversity of tributaries from all parts of the earth, and show how the mass of knowledge increases constantly from age to age, sometimes reposing in long stretches of dead water, half choked with peat and rushes, at other times plunging onward in foaming rapids. And then he too is rewarded; the stream grows broader and broader, until he stands beside the navigable river.
But a simile never covers the whole case. The latter task is rendered not only wider, but incomparably more difficult, by the fact that the brooks and rivers whose course is to be followed are even more intricate and scarcely ever flow in an open stream. True knowledge is so seldom undiluted; as a rule it is suffused with myths and dogmatic conceptions, often to such a degree that it becomes entirely lost, and something new seems to have arisen in its place.
For one thing, man’s power of grasping reality varies greatly; in primitive man it is clouded to a degree which we modern human beings can hardly understand. He is as yet incapable of distinguishing between idea and reality, between belief and knowledge, between what he has seen and experienced and the explanation he has provided for his experience.
But even with those who have long outgrown the primitive point of view imagination steps in, supplying detail and explanation wherever our information fails us and our knowledge falls short; it spreads its haze over the first uncertain outlines of perception, and the distant contours are sometimes wholly lost in the mists of legend.