PRE-COLUMBIAN EXPLORATIONS.
BY JUSTIN WINSOR, THE EDITOR.
IN the previous chapter, in attempting to trace the possible connection of the new world with the old in the dimmest past, it was hard, if not hopeless, to find among the entangled myths a path that we could follow with any confidence into the field of demonstrable history. It is still a doubt how far we exchange myths for assured records, when we enter upon the problems of pre-Columbian explorations, which it is the object of the present chapter to discuss. We are to deal with supposable colonizations, from which the indigenous population of America, as the Spaniards found it, was sprung, wholly or in part; and we are to follow the venturesome habits of navigators, who sought experience and commerce in a strange country, and only incidentally left possible traces of their blood in the peoples they surprised. If Spain, Italy, and England gained consequence by the discoveries of Columbus and Cabot, there were other national prides to be gratified by the priority which the Basques, the Normans, the Welsh, the Irish, and the Scandinavians, to say nothing of Asiatic peoples, claimed as their share in the gift of a new world to the old. The records which these peoples present as evidences of their right to be considered the forerunners of the Spanish and English expeditions have in every case been questioned by those who are destitute of the sympathetic credence of a common kinship. The claims which Columbus and Cabot fastened upon Spain and England, to the disadvantage of Italy, who gave to those rival countries their maritime leaders, were only too readily rejected by Italy herself, when the opportunity was given to her of paling such borrowed glories before the trust which she placed in the stories of the Zeni brothers.
There is not a race of eastern Asia—Siberian, Tartar, Chinese, Japanese, Malay, with the Polynesians—which has not been claimed as discoverers, intending or accidental, of American shores, or as progenitors, more or less perfect or remote, of American peoples; and there is no good reason why any one of them may not have done all that is claimed. The historical evidence, however, is not such as is based on documentary proofs of indisputable character, and the recitals advanced are often far from precise enough to be convincing in details, if their general authenticity is allowed. Nevertheless, it is much more than barely probable that the ice of Behring Straits or the line of the Aleutian Islands was the pathway of successive immigrations, on occasions perhaps far apart, or may be near together; and there is hardly a stronger demonstration of such a connection between the two continents than the physical resemblances of the peoples now living on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean in these upper latitudes, with the similarity of the flora which environs them on either shore.[510] It is quite as conceivable that the great northern current, setting east athwart the Pacific, should from time to time have carried along disabled vessels, and stranded them on the shores of California and farther north, leading to the infusion of Asiatic blood among whatever there may have been antecedent or autochthonous in the coast peoples. It is certainly in this way possible that the Chinese or Japanese may have helped populate the western slopes of the American continent. There is no improbability even in the Malays of southeastern Asia extending step by step to the Polynesian islands, and among them and beyond them, till the shores of a new world finally received the impress of their footsteps and of their ethnic characteristics. We may very likely recognize not proofs, but indications, along the shores of South America, that its original people constituted such a stock, or were increased by it.
As respects the possible early connections of America on the side of Europe, there is an equally extensive array of claims, and they have been set forth, first and last, with more persistency than effect.[511]
Leaving the old world by the northern passage, Iceland lies at the threshold of America. It is nearer to Greenland than to Norway, and Greenland is but one of the large islands into which the arctic currents divide the North American continent. Thither, to Iceland, if we identify the localities in Geoffrey of Monmouth, King Arthur sailed as early as the beginning of the sixth century, and overcame whatever inhabitants he may have found there. Here too an occasional wandering pirate or adventurous Dane had glimpsed the coast.[512] Thither, among others, came the Irish, and in the ninth century we find Irish monks and a small colony of their countrymen in possession.[513] Thither the Gulf Stream carries the southern driftwood, suggesting sunnier lands to whatever race had been allured or driven to its shelter.[514] Here Columbus, when, as he tells us,[515] he visited the island in 1477, found no ice. So that, if we may place reliance on the appreciable change of climate by the precession of the equinoxes, a thousand years ago and more, when the Norwegians crossed from Scandinavia and found these Christian Irish there,[516] the island was not the forbidding spot that it seems with the lapse of centuries to be becoming.
NORSE SHIP.
This cut is copied from one in Nordenskiöld’s Voyage of the Vega (London, 1881), vol. i. p. 50, where it is given as representing the vessel found at Sandefjord in 1880. It is drawn from the restoration given in The Viking ship discovered at Gokstad in Norway (Langskibet fra Gokstad ved Sandefjord) described by N. Nicholaysen (Christiania, 1882). The original vessel owed its preservation to being used as a receptacle for the body of a Viking chief, when he was buried under a mound. When exhumed, its form, with the sepulchral chamber midships, could be made out, excepting that the prow and stern in their extremities had to be restored. In the ship and about it were found, beside some of the bones of a man, various appurtenances of the vessel, and the remains of horses buried with him. They are all described in the book above cited, from which the other cuts herewith given of the plan of the vessel and one of its rowlocks are taken. The Popular Science Monthly, May, 1881, borrowing from La Nature, gives a view of the ship as when found in situ. There are other accounts in The Antiquary, Aug., 1880; Dec., 1881; 1882, p. 87; Scribner’s Magazine, Nov., 1887, by John S. White; Potter’s American Monthly, Mar., 1882. Cf. the illustrated paper, “Les navires des peuples du nord,” by Otto Jorell, in Congrès Internat. des Sciences géographiques (Paris, 1875; pub. 1878), i. 318.
Of an earlier discovery in 1872 there is an account in The ancient vessel found in the parish of Tune, Norway (Christiania, 1872). This is a translation by Mr. Gerhard Gadé of a Report in the Proceedings of the Society for preserving Norwegian Antiquities. (Cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xiii. p. 10.) This vessel was also buried under a mound, and she was 43½ feet long and four feet deep.