Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery

by Justin Winsor

Story of Atlantis.

Land of the Meropes.

Saturnian continent.

There are, however, three legends which have come down to us from the classic times, which the discovery of America revived with new interest in the speculative excursions of the curiously learned, and it is one of the proofs of the narrow range of Columbus's acquaintance with original classic writers that these legends were not pressed by him in support of his views. The most persistent of these in presenting a question for the physical geographer is the story of Atlantis, traced to a tale told by Plato of a tradition of an island in the Atlantic which eight thousand years ago had existed in the west, opposite the Pillars of Hercules; and which, in a great inundation, had sunken beneath the sea, leaving in mid ocean large mud shoals to impede navigation and add to the terrors of a vast unknown deep. There have been those since the time of Gomara who have believed that the land which Columbus found dry and inhabited was a resurrected Atlantis, and geographers even of the seventeenth century have mapped out its provinces within the usual outline of the American continents. Others have held, and some still hold, that the Atlantic islands are but peaks of this submerged continent. There is no evidence to show that these fancies of the philosopher ever disturbed even the most erratic moments of Columbus, nor could he have pored over the printed Latin of Plato, if it came in his way, till its first edition appeared in 1483, during his stay in Portugal. Neither do we find that he makes any references to that other creation, the land of the Meropes, as figured in the passages cited by Ælian some seven hundred years after Theopompus had conjured up the vision in the fourth century before Christ. Equally ignorant was Columbus, it would appear, of the great Saturnian continent, lying five days west from Britain, which makes a story in Plutarch's Morals.

Earlier voyages on the Atlantic.

Phœnicians.

Carthaginians.

Romans.

We deal with a different problem when we pass from these theories and imaginings of western lands to such records as exist of what seem like attempts in the earliest days to attain by actual exploration the secret of this interjacent void. The Phœnicians had passed the Straits of Gibraltar and found Gades (Cadiz), and very likely attempted to course the Atlantic, about 1100 years before the birth of Christ. Perhaps they went to Cornwall for tin. It may have been by no means impossible for them to have passed among the Azores and even to have reached the American islands and main, as a statement in Diodorus Siculus has been interpreted to signify. Then five hundred years later or more we observe the Carthaginians pursuing their adventurous way outside the Pillars of Hercules, going down the African coast under Hanno to try the equatorial horrors, or running westerly under Hamilko to wonder at the Sargasso sea. Later, the Phœnicians seem to have made some lodgment in the islands off the coasts of northwestern Africa. The Romans in the fourth century before Christ pushed their way out into the Atlantic under Pytheas and Euthymenes, the one daring to go as far as Thule—whatever that was—in the north, and the other to Senegal in the south. It was in the same century that Rome had the strange sight of some unknown barbarians, of a race not recognizable, who were taken upon the shores of the German Ocean, where they had been cast away. Later writers have imagined—for no stronger word can be used—that these weird beings were North American Indians, or rather more probably Eskimos. About the same time, Sertorius, a Roman commander in Spain, learned, as already mentioned, of some salubrious islands lying westward from Africa, and gave Horace an opportunity, in the evil days of the civil war, to picture them as a refuge.