The lost Atlantis, and other ethnographic studies

by Sir Daniel Wilson

To immortality and blessed rest

Within the landless waters of the West.

The time chosen is that of England’s Edward III., and, still more, of England’s Chaucer. But in reality all memory of the land which lay beyond the waters of the Atlantic had faded as utterly from the minds of Europe’s mariners, in that fourteenth century, as in the older days when Plato restored a lost Atlantis to give local habitation to his ideal Republic. When the idea revived in the closing years of the fifteenth century, not as a philosophic dream, but as a legitimate induction of science, the reception which it met with from the embodied wisdom of that age, curiously illustrates the common experience of the pioneers in every path of novel discovery.

To Columbus, with his well-defined faith in the form of the earth which gave him confidence to steer boldly westward in search of the Asiatic Cipango: the existence of a continent beyond the Atlantic was no mere possibility. So early, at least, as 1474 he had conceived the design of reaching Asia by sailing to the West; and in that year he is known to have expounded his plans to Paolo Toscanelli, the learned Florentine physician and cosmographer, and to have received from him hearty encouragement. Assuming the world to be a sphere, he fortunately erred alike in under-estimating its size, and in over-estimating the extent to which the continent of Asia stretched eastward. In this way he diminished the distance between the coasts of Europe and Asia; and so, when at length he sighted the new-found land of the West, so far from dreaming of another ocean wider than the Atlantic between him and the object of his quest, he unhesitatingly designated the natives of Guanahani, or San Salvador, “Indians,” in the confident belief that this was an outlying coast of Asiatic India. Nor was his reasoning unsound. He sought, and would have found, a western route to that old east by the very track he followed, had no American continent intervened. It was not till his third voyage that the great Admiral for the first time beheld the new continent,—not indeed the Asiatic mainland, nor even the northern continent,—but the embouchures of the Orinoco river, with its mighty volume of fresh water, proving beyond dispute that it drained an area of vast extent, and opened up access far into the interior of a new world.

Columbus had realised his utmost anticipations, and died in the belief that he had reached the eastern shores of Asia. Nor is the triumph in any degree lessened by this assumption. The dauntless navigator, pushing on ever westward into the mysterious waters of the unexplored Atlantic in search of the old East, presents one of the most marvellous examples of intelligent faith that science can adduce. To estimate all that it implied, we have to turn back to a period when his unaccomplished purpose rested solely on that sure and well-grounded faith in the demonstrations of science.

In the city of Salamanca there assembled in the Dominican convent of San Esteban, in the year 1487, a learned and orthodox conclave, summoned by Prior Fernando de Talavera, to pronounce judgment on the theory propounded by Columbus; and to decide whether in that most catholic of Christian kingdoms, on the very eve of its final triumph over the infidel, it was a permissible belief that the Western World had even a possible existence. Columbus set before them the scientific demonstration which constituted for himself indisputable evidence of an ocean highway across the Atlantic to the continent beyond. The clerical council included professors of mathematics, astronomy, and geography, as well as other learned friars and dignitaries of the Church: probably as respectable an assemblage of cloister-bred pedantry and orthodox conservatism as that fifteenth century could produce. Philosophical deductions were parried by a quotation from St. Jerome or St. Augustine; and mathematical demonstrations by a figurative text of Scripture; and in spite alike of the science and the devout religious spirit of Columbus, the divines of Salamanca pronounced the idea of the earth’s spherical form to be heterodox; and declared a belief in antipodes incompatible with the historical traditions of the Christian faith: since to assert that there were inhabited lands on the opposite side of the globe would be to maintain that there were nations not descended from Adam, it being impossible for them to have passed the intervening ocean.

It may naturally excite a smile to thus find the very ethnological problem of this nineteenth century thus dogmatically produced four centuries earlier to prove that America was an impossibility. But in reality this ethnological problem long continued in all ways to affect the question. Among the various evidences which Columbus adduced in confirmation of his belief in the existence of a continent beyond the Atlantic, was the report brought to him by his own brother-in-law, Pedro Correa, that the bodies of two dead men had been cast ashore on the island of Flores, differing essentially from any known race, “very broad-faced, and diverse in aspect from Christians”; and, in truth, the more widely they differed from all familiar Christian humanity, the more probable did their existence appear to the men of that fifteenth century. Hence Shakespeare’s marvellous creation of his Caliban. Upwards of a century and half had then elapsed since Columbus returned with the news of a world beyond the Western Ocean; yet still to the men of Shakespeare’s day, the strange regions of which Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Gomara, Lane, Harriot, and Raleigh wrote, seemed more fitly occupied by Calibans, and the like rude approximations to humanity, than by men and women in any degree akin to ourselves. Othello indeed only literally reproduces Raleigh’s account of a strange people on the Caoro, in Guiana. He had not, indeed, himself got sight of those marvellous Ewaipanoma, though anxious enough to do so. Their eyes, as reported, were in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts. But the truth could not be doubted, since every child in the provinces of Arromaia and Canuri affirmed the same. The founder of Virginia, assuredly one of the most sagacious men of that wise Elizabethan era, and with all the experience which travel supplies, reverts again and again to this strange new-world race, as to a thing of which he entertained no doubt. The designation of Shakespeare’s Caliban, is but an anagram of the epithet which Raleigh couples with the specific designation of those monstrous dwellers on the Caoro. “To the west of Caroli,” he says, “are divers nations of Cannibals, and of those Ewaipanoma without heads.” Of “such men, whose head stood in their breasts,” Gonsalo, in The Tempest, reminds his companions, as a tale which every voyager brings back “good warrant of”; and so it was in all honesty that Othello entertained Desdemona with the story of his adventures:—

Of moving accidents by flood and field . . .

And of the Cannibals that each other eat,

The Anthropophagi and men whose heads