After the middle of the last century we begin to find new signs of the belief. Charles Beatty, in his Journal of a two months’ tour with a view of promoting religion among the frontier inhabitants of Pennsylvania (Lond., 1768), finds traces of the lost tribes among the Delawares, and repeats a story of the Indians long ago selling the same sacred book to the whites with which the missionaries in the end aimed to make them acquainted. Gerard de Brahm and Richard Peters, both familiar with the Southern Indians, found grounds for accepting the belief. The most elaborate statement drawn from this region is that of James Adair, who for forty years had been a trader among the Southern Indians.[735] Jonathan Edwards in 1788 pointed out in the Hebrew some analogies to the native speech.[736] Charles Crawford in 1799 undertook the proof.[737] In 1816 Elias Boudinot, a man eminent in his day, contributed further arguments.[738] Ethan Smith based his advocacy largely on the linguistic elements.[739] A few years later an Englishman, Israel Worsley, worked over the material gathered by Boudinot and Smith, and added something.[740] A prominent American Jew, M. M. Noah, published in 1837 an address on the subject which hardly added to the weight of testimony.[741] J. B. Finlay, a mulatto missionary among the Wyandots, was satisfied with the Hebrew traces which he observed in that tribe.[742] Geo. Catlin, working also among the Western Indians, while he could not go to the length of believing in the lost tribes, was struck with the many analogies which he saw.[743] The most elaborate of all expositions of the belief was made by Lord Kingsborough in his Mexican Antiquities (1830-48).[744] Since this book there has been no pressing of the question with any claims to consideration.[745]
[J.] Possible Early African Migrations.—These may have been by adventure or by helpless drifting, with or without the Canaries as a halting-place. The primitive people of the Canaries, the Guanches, are studied in Sabin Berthelot’s Antiquités Canariennes (Paris, 1879) and A. F. de Fontpertuis’ L’archipel des Canaries, et ses populations primitives, also in the Revue de Géographie, June, 1882, not to mention earlier histories of the Canary Islands (see Vol. II. p. 36). Retzius of Stockholm traces resemblances in the skulls of the Guanches and the Caribs (Smithsonian Rept., 1859, p. 266). Le Plongeon finds the sandals of the statue Chac-mool, discovered by him in Yucatan, to resemble those of the Guanches (Salisbury’s Le Plongeon in Yucatan, 57).
The African and even Egyptian origin of the Caribs has had some special advocates.[746] Peter Martyr, and Grotius following him, contended for the people of Yucatan being Ethiopian Christians. Stories of blackamoors being found by the early Spaniards are not without corroboration.[747] The correspondence of the African and South American flora has been brought into requisition as confirmatory.[748]
[THE CARTOGRAPHY OF GREENLAND.]
The oldest map yet discovered to show any part of Greenland, and consequently of America,[749] is one found by Baron Nordenskjöld attached to a Ptolemy Codex in the Stadtbibliothek at Nancy. He presented a colored fac-simile of it in 1883 at the Copenhagen Congrès des Américanistes, in his little brochure Trois Cartes. It was also used in illustration of his paper on the Zeni Voyages, published both in Swedish and German. It will be seen by the fac-simile given herewith, and marked with the author’s name, Claudius Clavus, that “Gronlandia Provincia” is an extension of a great arctic region, so as to lie over against the Scandinavian peninsula of Europe, with “Islandia,” or Iceland, midway between the two lands. Up to the time of this discovery by Nordenskjöld, the map generally recognized as the oldest to show Greenland is a Genovese portolano, preserved in the Pitti Palace at Florence, about which there is some doubt as to its date, which is said to be 1417 by Santarem (Hist. de la Cartog., iii., p. xix), but Lelewel (Epilogue, p. 167) is held to be trustier in giving it as 1447.[750] It shows how little influence the Norse stories of their Greenland colonization exerted at this time on the cartography of the north, that few of the map-makers deemed it worth while to break the usual terminal circle of the world by including anything west or beyond Iceland. It was, further, not easy to convince them that Greenland, when they gave it, lay in the direction which the Sagas indicated. The map of Fra Mauro, for instance, in 1459 cuts off a part of Iceland by its incorrigible terminal circle, as will be seen in a bit of it given herewith, the reader remembering as he looks at it that the bottom of the segment is to the north.[751] We again owe to Nordenskjöld the discovery of another map of the north, Tabula Regionum Septentrionalium, which he found in a Codex of Ptolemy in Warsaw a few years since, and which he places about 1467. The accompanying partial sketch is reproduced from a fac-simile kindly furnished by the discoverer. The peninsula of “Gronlandia,” with its indicated glaciers, is placed with tolerable accuracy as the western extremity of an arctic region, which to the north of Europe is separated from the Scandinavian peninsula by a channel from the “Mare Gotticum” (Baltic Sea), which sweeps above Norway into the “Mare Congelatum.” The confused notions arising from an attempt by the compiler of the map to harmonize different drafts is shown by his drawing a second Greenland (“Engronelant”) to his “Norbegia,” or Norway, and placing just under it the “Thile”[752] of the ancients, which he makes a different island from “Islandia,” placed in proper relations to his larger Greenland.
CLAUDIUS CLAVUS, 1427.
A few years later, or perhaps about the same time, and before 1471, the earliest engraved map which shows Greenland is that of Nicolas Donis, in the Ulm edition of Ptolemy in 1482. It will be seen from the little sketch which is annexed that the same doubling of Greenland is adhered to.[753] With the usual perversion put upon the Norse stories, Iceland is made to lie due west of Greenland, though not shown in the present sketch.