The Rev. W. H. H. Murray, the eloquent minister who was once so conspicuous in Boston, on a yacht excursion to Canada recently wrote from Tadousac to the Boston Herald as follows:
“At that point of time touched by the earliest ray of historic knowledge, the eye of the student of human annals sees, occupying the Spanish peninsula, a race of men called Iberians. These old Iberians were not a tribe or clan, but a people, numerous and potential, with a fully developed and virile language, skilled in arms and the working of precious metals, and industriously commercial. This much can be clearly inferred from the extent of their territory and the remnant of them, with their characteristics and habits, which still remain. This old people, themselves a colony from some other country, once existent and highly civilized in the remote past, spread from the Mediterranean Sea to the slopes of the Pyrenees, and all over southern Gaul as far as the Rhone, and flowed westward with a movement so forceful that it included all the British Islands. All this happened 4000 to 5000 B. C. They are older than the Egyptians probably by 1000 years, and were strong enough to attempt the conquest of the known world.
“These Iberians colonized Sicily. They were the original settlers in Italy and pushed their way northward as far as Norway and Sweden, where can still be found among the present inhabitants their physical characteristics—dark skin and jet black hair. This ancient people were not barbarians, but highly civilized. They had the art of writing and a literature. Poetry was cultivated. Their laws were set in verse; and for these laws thus written they claimed an antiquity of 6000 years.
“This ancient race has passed away, as all great races do. The rise and decline of a people are as a day. They have a sunrise, a noon, a sunset, and there remains of them and their splendor nothing but a gloaming, a twilight of a thousand years, perhaps, and after that
OBLIVION’S STARLESS NIGHT.
“This old Iberian, world-conquering race came to its sunset hour a thousand years ago, and the gloaming after their sunset is deepening into that gloom which hides all. Only a remnant, a hint of the old-time radiance, remains up to this day.
“In Southern Europe, the remnant of this antique race, the fragment of a root with the old-time vigorous sap in it, may still be found. There, on the Spanish peninsula where its cradle was rocked, the grave of a once powerful race is being slowly sodded; for there still live that strange people called the Basques. It matters not today what they are—chiefly mountaineers, I think—but they are of the old Iberian stock, and the Iberians were colonists from some unknown land, pre-historic, undiscoverable by us. Colonists and colonizers also. From some unknown land, hidden from us in the gloom of ages, these Iberians came to Southern Europe in ships. To Sicily they went in ships; to Britain and Ireland; to Norway also, and where else, or how far or for what, is left to conjecture. But being strong in numbers, ambitious to conquer, skilled in navigation, we can well believe that they pushed their flag and commerce nigh to the ends of the world.
“Now these Basques, to-day mountaineers, they tell me, were once, nor long ago, great sailors. In instinct and habit, they were true to the old Iberian stock, to which they were as the last green leaf on a dying tree. They were of a world-conquering race, and they sailed the seas of the world, seeking profit fearlessly. Four hundred years ago Jacques Cartier, himself a Breton, with the old Basque or Iberian blood warm in him—for the Bretons were of the old Iberian stock, with the same temper and look of face—sailed into the gulf of the St. Lawrence, and found—what?
THE BASQUES BEFORE HIM.
Not one Basque ship, but many. Engaged in what? In hunting whales. Whalers they were, and whalers they had been in these parts for years and centuries.