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

by Justin Winsor

Scandinavian views of Vinland.

Stephanius's map, 1570.

It was not till a time long after the period of Columbus that, so far as we know, any cartographical records of the discoveries associated with the Vinland voyages were made in the north; and not till the discoveries of Columbus and his successors were a common inheritance in Europe did some of the northern geographers, in 1570, undertake to reconcile the tales of the sagas with the new beliefs. The testimony of these later maps is presumably the transmitted view then held in the north from the interpretation of the Norse sagas in the light of later knowledge. This testimony is that the "America" of the Spaniards, including Terra Florida and the "Albania" of the English, was a territory south of the Norse region and beyond a separating water, very likely that of Davis' Straits. The map of Sigurd Stephanius of this date (1570) puts Vinland north of the Straits of Belle Isle, and makes it end at the south in a "wild sea," which separates it [B of map] from "America." Torfæus quotes Torlacius as saying that this map of Stephanius's was drawn from ancient Icelandic records. If this cartographical record has its apparent value, it is not likely that Columbus could have seen in it anything more than a manifestation of that vague boreal region which was far remote from the thoughts which possessed him, in seeking a way to India over against Spain.

SIGURD STEPHANIUS, 1570.

Dubious sagas.

Beside the scant historic record respecting Vinland which has been cited from the Heimskringla, it is further possible that Columbus may have seen that series of sagas which had come down in oral shape to the twelfth century. At this period put into writing, two hundred years after the events of the Vinland voyages, there are none of the manuscript copies of these sagas now existing which go back of the fourteenth century. This rendering of the old sagas into script came at a time when, in addition to the inevitable transformations of long oral tradition, there was superadded the romancing spirit then rife in the north, and which had come to them from the south of Europe. The result of this blending of confused tradition with the romancing of the period of the written preservation has thrown, even among the Scandinavians themselves, a shade of doubt, more or less intense at times, which envelops the saga record with much that is indistinguishable from myth, leaving little but the general drift of the story to be held of the nature of a historic record. The Icelandic editor of Egel's saga, published at Reikjavik in 1856, acknowledges this unavoidable reflex of the times when the sagas were reduced to writing, and the most experienced of the recent writers on Greenland, Henrik Rink, has allowed the untrustworthiness of the sagas except for their general scope.

Codex Flatoyensis.

Leif Erikson.

Less than a hundred years before the alleged visit of Columbus to Thule, there had been a compilation of some of the early sagas, and this Codex Flatoyensis is the only authority which we have for any details of the Vinland voyages. It is possible that the manuscript now known is but one copy of several or many which may have been made at an early period, not preceding, however, the twelfth century, when writing was introduced. This particular manuscript was discovered in an Icelandic monastery in the seventeenth century, and there is no evidence of its being known before. Of course it is possible that copies may have been in the hands of learned Icelanders at the time of Columbus's supposed voyage to the north, and he may have heard of it, or have had parts of it read to him. The collection is recognized by Scandinavian writers as being the most confused and incongruous of similar records; and it is out of such romancing, traditionary, and conflicting recitals that the story of the Norse voyages to Vinland is made, if it is made at all. The sagas say that it was sixteen winters after the settlement of Greenland that Leif went to Norway, and in the next year he sailed to Vinland. These are the data from which the year A. D. 1000 has been deduced as that of the beginning of the Vinland voyages. The principal events are to be traced in the saga of Eric the Red, which, in the judgment of Rask, a leading Norse authority, is "somewhat fabulous, written long after the event, and taken from tradition."