It forms one of the indisputable facts of ancient history that, long before Greece became the world’s intellectual leader, the eastern Mediterranean was settled by maritime races whose adventurous enterprise led them to navigate the Atlantic. There was no greater impediment to such adventurous mariners crossing that ocean in earliest centuries before Christ, than at any subsequent date prior to the revival of navigation in the fifteenth century. It would not, therefore, in any degree, surprise me to learn of the discovery of a genuine Phœnician, or other inscription; or, of some hoard of Assyrian gryphons, or shekels of the merchant princes of Tyre “that had knowledge of the sea,” being recovered among the still unexplored treasures of the buried empire of Montezuma, or the long-deserted ruins of Central America. Such a discovery would scarcely be more surprising than that of the Punic hoards found at Corvo, the most westerly island of the Azores. Yet it would furnish a substantial basis for the legend of Atlantis, akin to that which the runic monuments of Kingiktorsoak and Igalikko supplied in confirmation of the fabled charms of a Hesperian region lying within the Arctic circle; and of the first actual glimpses of the American mainland by Norse voyagers of the tenth century, as told in more than one of their old Sagas. But until such evidence is forthcoming, the legendary Atlantis must remain a myth, and pre-Columbian America be still credited with a self-achieved progress.
| [1] | Popular Science Monthly, xxviii. 296. |
| [2] | Races of Man (Bohn), p. 445. |
| [3] | The Alphabet, ii. 10. |
II
THE VINLAND OF THE NORTHMEN
The idea that the western hemisphere was known to the Old World, prior to the ever-memorable voyage of Columbus four centuries ago, has reproduced itself in varying phases, not only in the venerable Greek legend of the lost Atlantis; and the still vaguer myth of the Garden of the Hesperides on the far ocean horizon, the region of the setting sun; but in mediæval fancies and mythical epics. The Breton, in The Earthly Paradise of William Morris—
Spoke of gardens ever blossoming
Across the western sea, where none grew old,
E’en as the books at Micklegarth had told;