Footnote 479: For example, the pilot Martin Vicenti told Columbus that 1,200 miles west of Cape St. Vincent he had picked up from the sea a piece of carved wood evidently not carved with iron tools. Pedro Correa, who had married Columbus's wife's sister, had seen upon Porto Santo a similar piece of carving that had drifted from the west. Huge reeds sometimes floated ashore upon those islands, and had not Ptolemy mentioned enormous reeds as growing in eastern Asia? Pine-trees of strange species were driven by west winds upon the coast of Fayal, and two corpses of men of an unknown race had been washed ashore upon the neighbouring island of Flores. Certain sailors, on a voyage from the Azores to Ireland, had caught glimpses of land on the west, and believed it to be the coast of "Tartary;" etc., etc. See Vita dell' Ammiraglio, cap. ix. Since he cited these sailors, why did he not cite the Northmen also, if he knew what they had done?[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 480: Larger History of the United States, p. 54.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 481: "Terram veró Landa Rolfoni quæsitam existimarem esse Vinlandiam olim Islandis sic dictam; de qua alibi insulam nempe Americæ e regione Gronlandiæ, quæ fortè hodie Estotilandia," etc. Crymogœa, Hamburg, 1610, p. 120.
Abraham Ortelius in 1606 speaks of the Northmen coming to America, but bases his opinion upon the Zeno narrative (published in 1558) and upon the sound of the name Norumbega, and apparently knows nothing of Vinland:—"Iosephus Acosta in his book De Natura noui orbis indeuors by many reasons to proue, that this part of America was originally inhabited by certaine Indians, forced thither by tempestuous weather ouer the South sea which now they call Mare del Zur. But to me it seemes more probable, out of the historie of the two Zeni, gentlemen of Venice, ... that this New World many ages past was entred upon by some islanders of Europe, as namely of Grœnland, Island, and Frisland; being much neerer thereunto than the Indians, nor disioyned thence ... by an Ocean so huge, and to the Indians so vnnauigable. Also, what else may we coniecture to be signified by this Norumbega [the name of a North region of America] but that from Norway, signifying a North land, some Colonie in times past hath hither beene transplanted?" Theatre of the Whole World, London, 1606, p. 5. These passages are quoted and discussed by Reeves, The Finding of Wineland the Good, pp. 95, 96. The supposed connection of Norumbega with Norway is very doubtful. Possibly Stephanius, in his map of 1570 (Torfæus, Gronlandia antiqua, 1706), may have had reference to Labrador or the north of Newfoundland.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 482: Gallo, De navigatione Columbi, apud Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, tom. xxiii. col. 302.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 483: Lafuente, Historia de España, tom. ix, p. 428.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 484: Vasconcellos, Vida del rey Don Juan II., lib. iv.; La Clède, Histoire de Portugal, lib. xiii.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 485: The Portuguese have never been able to forgive Columbus for discovering a new world for Spain, and their chagrin sometimes vents itself in amusing ways. After all, says Cordeiro, Columbus was no such great man as some people think, for he did not discover what he promised to discover; and, moreover, the Portuguese geographers were right in condemning his scheme, because it really is not so far by sea from Lisbon around Africa to Hindustan as from Lisbon by any practicable route westward to Japan! See Luciano Cordeiro, De la part prise par les Portugais dans la découverte d'Amérique, Lisbon, 1876, pp. 23, 24, 29, 30. Well, I don't know that there is any answer to be made to this argument. Logic is logic, says the wise Autocrat:—
"End of the wonderful one-hoss shay,
Logic is logic, that's all I say."
Cordeiro's book is elaborately criticised in the learned work of Prospero Peragallo, Cristoforo Colombo in Portogallo: studi critici, Genoa, 1882.[Back to Main Text]