“What is the great fact that is sustained by such an array of authority? It is this: that somewhere to the southwest of Greenland, at least a fortnight’s sail, there were, for 300 years after the beginning of the 11th century, Norse colonies on the coast of America, with which colonies the home country maintained commercial intercourse. The country to which the merchant vessels sailed was Vinland.
“The fact next in importance that this history establishes is, that the first of the Northmen to set foot on the shores of Vinland was Leif Ericson. The story is a simple one, and most happily told by Prof. Mitchell, who for forty years was connected with the coast survey of the United States in the latitudes which include the region between Hatteras and Cape Ann. Leif, says Prof. Mitchell, never passed to the south of the peninsula of Cape Cod. He was succeeded by Thorwald, Leif’s brother. He came in Leif’s ship in 1002 to Leif’s headquarters in Massachusetts Bay and passed the winter. In the spring, he manned his ship and sailed eastward from Leif’s house, and, unluckily running against a neck of land, broke the stem of the ship. He grounded the ship in high water at a place where the tide receded with the ebb to a great distance, and permitted the men to careen her in the intervals of the tide, to repair her. When she was ready to sail again, the old stem or nose of the ship was set up in the sand. Thorwald remained a couple of years in the neighboring bay, examining sandy shores and islands, but not going around the point on or near which he had set up his ship’s nose. In a battle with the Indians he was wounded and died, and was buried in Vinland, and his crew returned to Greenland. A few years later, Thorfinn and his wife, Gudrid, set out with a fleet of three ships and 160 persons, of whom seven were women, to go to Vinland, and in two days’ sail beyond Markland they came to the ship’s nose set upon the shore, and, keeping that upon the starboard, they sailed along a sandy shore, which they called Wunderstrandir, and also Furderstrandir. One of the captains, evidently satisfied that they were not in the region visited by Leif and Thorwald, turned his vessel to the north to find Vinland. Thorfinn and Gudrid went further south and trafficked, and gathered great wealth of furs and woods, and then returned to Greenland and Norway.”
Prof. Horsford refers next to various geographic names on the New England coast which are of Scandinavian origin.
“What do all these names mean? They are certainly not Algonquin or Iroquois names. They are not names bestowed by the Plymouth or Massachusetts Bay colonies. Of most of them is there any conceivable source other than the memories lingering among a people whose ancestors were familiar with them? Are they, for the most part, relics of names imposed by Northmen once residing here?
“I have told you something of the evidence that Leif Ericson was the first European to tread the great land southwest of Greenland. His ancestry was of the early Pilgrims, or Puritans, who, to escape oppression, emigrated, 50,000 of them in sixty years, from Norway to Iceland, as the early Pilgrims came to Plymouth. They established and maintained a republican form of government, which exists to this day, with nominal sovereignty in the King of Denmark, and the flag, like our own, bears an eagle in its fold. Toward the close of the 10th century a colony, of whom Leif’s father and family were members, went out from Iceland to Greenland. In about 999, Leif, a lad at the time of his father’s immigration, went to Norway, and King Olaf, impressed with his grand elements of character, gave him a commission to carry the Christianity to which, he had become a convert to Greenland. He set out at once, and, with his soul on fire with the grandeur of his message, within a year accomplished the conversion and baptism of the whole colony, including his father.
“To Leif a monument has been erected. In thus fulfilling the duty we owe to the first European navigator who trod our shores, we do no injustice to the mighty achievement of the Genoese discoverer under the flags of Ferdinand and Isabella, who, inspired by the idea of the rotundity of the earth, and with the certainty of reaching Asia by sailing westward sufficiently long, set out on a new and entirely distinct enterprise, having a daring and a conception and an intellectual train of research and deduction as its foundation quite his own. How welcome to Boston will be the proposition to set up in 1892, a fit statue to Columbus.
“We unveil to-day the statue in which Anne Whitney has expressed so vividly her conception of this leader, who, almost nine centuries ago, first trod our shores.”
The statue, however, is purely fanciful, and gives no idea either of the personal appearance or costume of the great sailor, who has waited for this justice to his memory much longer than Bruno and many other heroes of human progress.
Columbus may have been original in his ideas, but it was the Northmen who led in exploration. It was they who changed the old flat-bottomed ships of the Roman Empire to the deep keels which made the exploration of the Atlantic ocean possible.
This act of justice has been prompted by the appreciative sentiments of the late Ole Bull, and the efforts of Miss Marie Brown, who has lectured on the subject. Miss Brown says that Columbus learned of the discovery of America at Rome, and also at Iceland, which he visited in 1477. Indeed, Columbus was not seeking the America of the Norsemen, but was sailing to find the Indies.
But now that historic justice is done, we realize that as Bryant expressed it of Truth, “the eternal years of God are hers,” and she needs a good many centuries to recover her stolen sceptre. The triumph of truth follows battles in which there are many defeats that seem almost fatal. What is the loss of five centuries in geographic truth to the loss of a thousand years in astronomic science? It was for more than a thousand years that the heliocentric theory of the universe, developed by the genius of Pythagoras, was ignored, denied, and forgotten, until the honest scholar, Copernicus, revived it by a mathematical demonstration, which he did not live long enough to see trampled on; for the great astronomer that next appeared, Tycho Brahe, denied it, and the Catholic Church attempted to suppress it in the person of Galileo, who is said to have been forced by imprisonment and torture to succumb to authority (the torture may not be positively known, but is believed with good reason). Even Luther joined in the theological warfare against science, saying, “I am now advised that a new astrologer is risen, who presumeth to prove that the earth moveth and goeth about, not the firmament, the sun and moon—not the stars—like as when one sitteth on a coach, or in a ship that is moved, thinketh he sitteth still and resteth, but the earth and trees do move and run themselves. Thus it goeth; we give ourselves up to our own foolish fancies and conceits. This fool (Copernicus) will turn the whole art of astronomy upside down; but the Scripture showeth and teacheth another lesson, when Joshua commandeth the sun to stand still, and not the earth.”
The attitude of Luther in this matter was the attitude of the Church generally, in opposition to science, for it assumed its position in an age of dense ignorance, and claimed too much infallibility to admit of enlightenment. Nevertheless, the Church feels the spirit of the age and slowly moves. At the present time it is being slowly permeated by the modern spirit of agnostic scepticism, which is another form of ignorance.
Mankind generally occupy the intrenched camp of ignorance within which they know all its walls embrace; outside of which they look upon all that exists with feelings of suspicion and hostility, and alas, this is as true of the educated as of the uneducated classes. It was the French Academy that laughed at Harvey’s discovery and at Fulton’s plan of propelling steamboats, and even at Arago’s suggestion of the electric telegraph, as the Royal Society laughed at Franklin’s proposed lightning rods. It was Bonaparte who treated both Fulton and Dr. Gall with contempt. It was the medical Faculty that arrayed itself against the introduction of Peruvian bark, which they have since made their hobby; and it was the same Edinburgh Review which poured its ridicule upon Gall, that advised the public to put Thomas Gray in a straight-jacket for advocating the introduction of railroads. Equally great was the stupidity of the French. The first railroad was constructed in France fifty years ago. Emil Periere had to make the line at his own expense, and it took three years to obtain the consent of the authorities. Their leading statesman, Thiers, contended that railroads could be nothing more than toys. We remember that a committee of the New York Legislature was equally stupid, and endeavored to prove in their report that railways were entirely impracticable. English opposition was still more stupidly absurd. Both Lords and Commons in Parliament were entirely opposed. “The engineers and surveyors as they went about their work were molested by mobs. George Stephenson was ridiculed and denounced as a maniac, and all those who supported him as lunatics and fools.” “George Stephenson although bantered and wearied on all sides stood steadfastly by his project, in spite of the declarations that the smoke from the engine would kill the birds and destroy the cattle along the route, that the fields would be ruined, and people be driven mad by noise and excitement.”
Nothing is better established in history than the hostility of colleges and the professional classes to all great innovations. “Truly (says Dr. Stille in his Materia Medica) nearly every medicine has become a popular remedy before being adopted or even tried by physicians,” and the famous author Dr. Pereira declares that “nux vomica is one of the few remedies the discovery of which is not the effect of mere chance.”