Every one who has studied the history of the first voyage of Columbus knows that this voyage was but the culmination of more than four centuries of European commercial history. Ever since the time of the crusades, and even before, there had gone on in Europe an extensive trade in Asiatic wares; spices and gums, drugs, medicaments and perfumes, diamonds, pearls, rubies and ivories, silk, cotton and woolen fabrics had been imported in ever-increasing quantities by the Italian towns and distributed through them from Seville to Novgorod. Then in the fifteenth century came a time when the eastern trade routes were closed by the conquering Turks and the nations of Western Europe were forced in consequence to seek these luxuries by new and unaccustomed routes. The discovery of America was not an accident, nor was Columbus the only hero of his age—this the student should be made thoroughly to comprehend.
Second, a slight knowledge of the aborigines must be insisted upon. Here, however, the teacher will need to exercise care and judgment lest he waste time on unessential details.
Third in order comes the geography of the new continent. The study of the physiography of the North American continent, if properly handled, will prove to the students a fascinating, an almost inexhaustible subject. If properly led, boys and girls will study their maps with even greater interest than they do their text-books. One lesson at least the teacher should devote to the shore line, the water courses, the gaps and mountain passes, the portages and the wood roads, else the story of the exploration of the continent must ever remain to the students a blind story of purposeless wanderings in a trackless wilderness. (See Farrand “Basis of American History,” Chaps. I to IV.)
When the student has grasped these fundamentals it will be time, and then only, to begin to thread with him the labyrinth of voyages and explorations which mark the first century of American history. Here the teacher will need to exercise great ingenuity and considerable caution. Rather a few facts well co-ordinated, than a multitude of details without any unifying principle is the one infallible rule. The Norsemen, for instance, one is tempted to say, may with profit be entirely neglected. “Nothing is clearer,” say Fiske (“Discovery of America,” I, pp. 235-254), “from a survey of the whole subject, than that these pre-Columbus voyages were quite barren of results of historic importance.... [That they constituted] in any legitimate sense of the phrase, a discovery of America is simply absurd.” Columbus, De Soto, Cortez, Coronado are really the only Spaniards whose names the student need remember. Equally, the voyages of Verrazano, Ribault, Cartier, Champlain, La Salle, Marquette and Joliet tell the whole tale of French activities over a hundred and fifty years.
Throughout this period, the teacher should keep these guiding posts constantly before the eyes of his students: First, that the Spaniards, when once they realized that they had discovered a new continent and had not reached the longed for shores of Cathay, were lured farther and farther into the heart of the continent in search of gold; second, that, owing to the direction of their approach, they occupied the southern and southwestern part of the continent only; third, that their forward movement ended in the end of the sixteenth century because of (a) their loss of naval supremacy (the Armada), (b) their narrow internal national policy (the expulsion of the Moriscos and the Inquisition), (c) their struggle to subdue the revolted Netherlands.
French Explorations.
Of the French, it should be noted: First, that they approached the continent from the north, entering it through the Gulf of St. Lawrence; second, that they rapidly turned their entire attention to the search for furs and to the conversion of the heathen Indian, “the quaint alliance of missionary and merchant, the black-robed Jesuit and the dealer in peltries,” as Fiske calls it (“Discovery,” II, p. 529); third, that the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes led them farther and farther into the continent, and consequently that the French settlements lacked the unity and compactness which is characteristic of the later English settlements with which they were soon to come into hostile contact.
Finally, of the history of this period of Spanish and French settlements, it may be said that it is better to follow the history of both nations down to the end of the seventeenth century before entering upon the English and Dutch settlements.
English and Dutch Settlements.
In studying the history of the English and Dutch settlements the way will again be a way through a trackless wilderness unless the teacher is bold enough to make a judicious selection among the many details which must appear in every text-book, neglecting all the others and insisting that his students obtain a clear comprehension of the two or three leading motives which are ever present in the colonizing efforts of both these nations. First, the student should be compelled to grasp clearly the significance of the trading and colonizing companies which were formed in such profusion in both England and Holland in the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. Cheyney (“European Background,” pp. 137-139), mentions seventy of them. If teacher and student will follow carefully the activities of these companies in America they will find a key to the history of the founding of most of the Atlantic coast colonies.