A story was repeated by Oviedo in 1535 as an idle rumor, adopted by Gomara in 1552 without comment, and given considerable currency in 1609 by Garcilasso de la Vega, of a Spanish pilot,—Sanches, as the name is sometimes given,—who had sailed from Madeira, and had been driven west and had seen land (Hispaniola, it is inferred), and who being shipwrecked had been harbored by Columbus in his house. Under this roof the pilot is said to have died in 1484, leaving his host the possessor of his secret. La Vega claimed to have received the tale from his father, who had been at the Court of Spain in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. Oviedo repeated it, but incredulously;[97] and it was later told by Gomara, Acosta, Eden, and others. Robertson,[98] Irving,[99] and most later writers find enough in the indecision and variety of its shapes to discard it altogether. Peter Martyr, Bernaldez, and Herrera make no mention of it. It is singular, however, that Ferdinand de Galardi, in dedicating his Traité politique des abassadeurs, published at Cologne in 1666, to a descendant of Columbus, the Duke of Veraguas, mentions the story as an indisputable fact;[100] and it has not escaped the notice of querulous writers even of our day.[101]
Others have thought that Columbus, in his voyage to Thule or Iceland,[102] in February, 1477, could have derived knowledge of the Sagas of the westerly voyages of Eric the Red and his countrymen.[103] It seems to be true that commercial relations were maintained between Iceland and Greenland for some years later than 1400; but if Columbus knew of them, he probably shared the belief of the geographers of his time that Greenland was a peninsula of Scandinavia.[104]
The extremely probable and almost necessary pre-Columbian knowledge of the northeastern parts of America follows from the venturesome spirit of the mariners to those seas for fish and traffic, and from the easy transitions from coast to coast by which they would have been lured to meet the more southerly climes. The chances from such natural causes are quite as strong an argument in favor of the early Northmen venturings as the somewhat questionable representations of the Sagas.[105] There is the same ground for representing, and similar lack of evidence in believing, the alleged voyage of Joāo Vas Costa Cortereal to the Newfoundland banks in 1463-1464. Barrow finds authority for it in Cordeyro, who gives, however, no date in his Historia Insulana das Ilhas a Portugal, Lisbon, 1717; but Biddle, in his Cabot, fails to be satisfied with Barrow’s uncertain references, as enforced in his Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions, London, 1818.[106]
Another of these alleged northern voyagers was a Polish navigator, John Szkolny,—a name which we get in various Latinized or other forms, as Scolve, Skolnus, Scolvus, Sciolvus, Kolno, etc.,—who is said to have been on the Labrador coast in 1476, while in the service of Denmark. It is so stated by Wytfliet,[107] Pontanus,[108] and Horn.[109] De Costa cites what is known as the Rouen globe, preserved in Paris, and supposed to belong to about 1540, as showing a legend of Skolnus reaching the northwest coast of Greenland in 1476.[110] Hakluyt quotes Gemma Frisius and Girava. Gomara, in 1553, and Herrera, in 1601, barely refer to it.[111]
There is also a claim for a Dieppe navigator, Cousin, who, bound for Africa, is said to have been driven west, and reached South America in 1488-1489. The story is told by Desmarquets in his Mémoires chronologiques pour servir à l’histoire de Dieppe, i. 92, published at Paris, 1785. Major, giving the story an examination, fully discredits it.[112]
There remains the claim for Martin Behaim, the Nuremberg cosmographer and navigator, which rests upon a passage in the Latin text of the so-called Nuremberg Chronicle[113] which states that Cam and Behaim, having passed south of the equator, turned west and (by implication) found land. The passage is not in the German edition of the same year, and on reference to the manuscript of the book (still preserved in Nuremberg) the passage is found to be an interpolation written in a different hand.[114] It seems likely to have been a perversion or misinterpretation of the voyage of Diego Cam down the African coast in 1489, in which he was accompanied by Behaim. That Behaim himself did not put the claim forward, at least in 1492, seems to be clear from the globe, which he made in that year, and which shows no indication of the alleged voyage. The allegation has had, however, some advocates; but the weight of authority is decidedly averse, and the claim can hardly be said to have significant support to-day.[115]
It is unquestionable that the success of the Portuguese in discovering the Atlantic islands and in pushing down the African coast, sustained Columbus in his hope of western discovery, if it had not instigated it.[116] The chance wafting of huge canes, unusual trunks of trees, and even sculptured wood and bodies of strange men, upon the shores of the outlying islands of the Azores and Madeira, were magnified as evidences in his mind.[117] When at a later day he found a tinned iron vessel in the hands of the natives of Guadeloupe, he felt that there had been European vessels driven along the equatorial current to the western world, which had never returned to report on their voyages.
Of the adventurous voyages of which record was known there were enough to inspire him; and of all the mysteries of the Sea of Darkness,[118] which stretched away illimitably to the west, there were stories more than enough. Sight of strange islands had been often reported; and the maps still existing had shown a belief in those of San Brandan[119] and Antillia,[120] and of the Seven Cities founded in the ocean waste by as many Spanish bishops, who had been driven to sea by the Moors.[121]