The Project Gutenberg eBook, Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. IV (of 8), by Various, Edited by Justin Winsor

NARRATIVE AND CRITICAL

HISTORY OF AMERICA

NARRATIVE AND CRITICAL

HISTORY OF AMERICA

EDITED

By JUSTIN WINSOR

LIBRARIAN OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY
CORRESPONDING SECRETARY MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

VOL. IV

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

The Riverside Press, Cambridge

Copyright, 1884,
By JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY.

All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.

CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

[The French arms on the title are those used by the Royal Printing-Office in Paris in the Seventeenth Century.]

INTRODUCTION.

PHYSIOGRAPHY OF NORTH AMERICA.

BY NATHANIEL S. SHALER,

Professor of Palæontology in Harvard University.

Part I.

PHYSIOGRAPHY OF NORTH AMERICA.

THE continents of the earth have two distinct types of form,—the one regular, symmetrical, triangular in outline; the other without these regularities of shape. To the first of these groups belong the continents of Africa and Australia of the Old World, and the two Americas of the New; to the second, the massive continent of Europe and Asia. Some have sought to reduce the continent of Asia to the same type as that of the other continents; but a glance at a map of the hemispheres will show how different is this Indo-European continent from the other land-masses.

These general features of the continents are not only of scientific interest; they are of the utmost importance to the history of man’s development upon these several lands. It is not without meaning, that, while man has existed for a great length of time upon all the continents, the only original civilizations that have been developed have been on the lands of the Indo-European continent. Working on several different lines of advance, several diverse races—Aryan, Semitic, Chinese, and perhaps others—have risen from the common plane of barbarism, and have created complicated social systems, languages, literatures, and arts; while on the four other continents, despite their great area, greater fertility, and wider range of physical conditions, no race has ever had a native development to be compared with that undergone by the several successful races of Asia and Europe.[1]

In this great Old-World continent there are many highly individualized areas, each separated from the rest of the continent by strong geographical barriers; it has a dozen or so of great peninsulas upon its seaboard, many great islands off its shores, and the interior of the land is divided into many separated regions by mountain ridges or by deserts. It is a land where man necessarily fell into variety, because of the isolation that the geography gave. If we look at the other continents,—namely, the Americas, Africa, and Australia,—we find that they want this varied and detailed structure. They each consist of a great triangular mass, with scanty subordinate divisions. In all of them put together there are not so many great peninsulas as there are in Europe. If we exclude those that are within the Arctic Circle, there are but few on the four regular continents, none of which compare in size or usefulness to man with the greater peninsulas of the Old World. The only one of value is that of Nova Scotia, in North America.

These regular continents are all in the form of triangles, with their apices pointing towards the southern pole. Near either long shore lie the principal mountain systems that give definition to the coast line. The middle portion of each continent is generally a region of plain, somewhat diversified by lesser mountain systems. Along either shore is a narrow fringe of plain land to the east and west of the main mountain chains. Near the northern part of the continent, and aiding to define the base of the triangle, there is another system of mountains having a general east and west course. With the exception of North America, none of these regular continents have seas inclosed within their areas,—such bodies of water as form so striking a feature in the Asiatic continent, which is indeed a land of mediterranean seas.

In a word, these continents are characteristically as simple as the Asiatic continent is varied. Their mass is undivided, and their organic or human histories are necessarily less diversified than in such a land-mass as Asia.

The continent of North America is, of all the triangular continents, the most nearly akin in its structure to the great Old-World land. In the first place, it is the only one of these continents that has the same general conditions of climate; then it has a far greater diversity of form than the similar masses of South America, Africa, and Australia. North America has several considerable seas inclosed within its limits or bordering upon its shores; its mountain systems are more varied in their disposition than in the other regular continents. So that in a way this continent in its structure lies intermediate between the Asiatic type and what is considered the normal form of continents.

Although this varied structure of the continent of North America makes it more fit for the uses of man than the continents of Africa, South America, and Australia, there are certain considerable disadvantages in its physical conditions. To show the relation of these evil and fortunate features, it will be necessary for us to consider the general geography of the continent somewhat in detail.

The point of first importance concerns the distribution of heat and moisture over the surface of the land; for on these features depends the fitness of the land for all forms of life. The influences which principally determine the climate of a continent come to it from the neighboring seas. The moisture arises there, and finds its way thence to the land; and the heat or coolness which modifies the land climate comes with it.

North America faces three oceans. On the north is the extremely cold Arctic Sea, mostly covered by enduring ice: it is the extreme coldness of this sea, and its ice-clad character near the continent of America, that in good part causes the great severity of its winters. Where the Arctic Sea lies against Europe and Asia it is partly warmed by the Gulf Stream, and so is not completely ice-bound even in winter; but that part of it which lies near the northern coast of America is ice-bound the whole year, and the winds that come from it are many degrees below those that come over open water.

Both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans send streams of warm water against the American coast. But the Gulf Stream has actually very little direct effect upon our climate; it only touches the coast about the Gulf of Mexico, where the temperature is naturally so high that its warming power is not felt. It then leaves our coast, to give its warmth to the shores of Europe and to the European part of the Arctic Ocean. The Pacific current corresponding to the Gulf Stream is feebler than the Atlantic current, and sends its tide of waters against the northwest shore of America. Its effects on that coast are very noticeable; but they are limited, by the geography of that shore, within narrow bounds. In the first place, the passage of Behring’s Strait is too small to permit its waters to have access to the Arctic Sea; then the high ranges of the Cordilleras fence off the interior of the continent, so that the warm winds that blow from the sea cannot penetrate far to the east. Confined to the shore, the heat of the Pacific Gulf Stream generates a large amount of fog; this fog shuts off the sun’s rays, and so lowers the temperature almost as much as the current itself serves to raise it.

The distribution of moisture over the surface of the continent is effected in much the same way as is the distribution of heat. The Gulf Stream gives an abundant rainfall to the States about the Gulf of Mexico lying to the north of that basin; its effects on the rainfall are seen even as far north as the New England States, but they have little effect to the west of the Mississippi River. The high mountains of the Cordilleras cut off the Pacific winds from the centre of the continent, so that very little of the water which flows down to the Gulf of Mexico or to the Atlantic is derived from the Pacific. From the general conditions thus rudely outlined the following arrangement of climates arises. The northern half of the continent is more completely under the dominion of the Arctic Sea than any part of Europe or Asia; the only parts of it fit for the use of civilized man are the northern watershed of the St. Lawrence, the valley of Lake Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan, and the west-coast region as far north as Alaska. The rest of the northern part of the continent is practically barred out from the life of the race by the intensity of the winter cold, and by the brevity of the summer season.

South of this domain of northern cold, North America divides itself, by its climate, soil, and topographical reliefs, into the following fairly distinct regions: (1) The eastern lowlands lying between the shore and the Appalachian range; these shade southwardly into (2) the lowlands of the Gulf States, which is the only part of North America in the immediate control of the Gulf Stream. These Gulf lowlands pass northwardly into (3) the great plain of the Mississippi Valley. Between these lowlands of the centre of the continent and the Atlantic sea-coast lie (4) the table-lands and mountains of the Appalachian system. West of the Mississippi Valley lie (5) the region of the Cordilleras of North America; and finally on the western shore we find (6) a narrow region of low mountains, forming a slender fringe of shorelands.

The mountains of the Appalachian system are composed of two parallel series of elevations, an old eastern range of peaks which are worn down to mere shreds; so that in place of being as high as the Alps, as they once were, they have no peaks that rise seven thousand feet above the sea. This outer range is traceable from Newfoundland to Alabama; but it only rises above six thousand feet in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Black Mountains of North Carolina. In form these mountains are steep and rugged. Their steep sides hold the little untillable land that exists east of the Mississippi; their actual area is small, for the chain is very narrow, not exceeding a score or so of miles in width, except in the Carolinas and in the White Mountains, where it is somewhat wider. The total untillable area in this chain does not exceed twelve thousand square miles. West of this, the old Appalachian mountain system, separated from it by a broad, elevated, somewhat mountainous valley, lies the newer Alleghany range. This valley intermediate is one of the most fertile and admirably situated in the world; it extends from New Jersey to Georgia, with an average width of about forty miles and a length of about six hundred, having an area of over twenty thousand square miles. The Alleghany Mountains on the west are composed principally of round, symmetrical ridges, often like gigantic works of art, so uniform are their arches; none of them rise to more than five thousand feet above the sea, and their surfaces are so little broken that they generally afford tillable though as yet generally untilled land. Practically no part of this great range, which extends from near Albany to Alabama, is completely unfit for the uses of man, and it includes some of the most fertile valleys of America. The most important feature connected with this double mountain system of the Appalachians is the great area of table-lands which it upholds; these bordering uplands are found all around the mountain system. The greater part of the States of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio owe the considerable elevation of their surfaces to the table-land elevations bordering the Appalachian mountain system. Taken altogether, this mountain system is perhaps the finest region for the uses of man that the world affords; its great length, of more than fifteen hundred miles from north to south, gives it a range of climate such as would be had in Europe by a mountain chain extending from Copenhagen to Rome. The total area of this Appalachian district, mountains as well as table-lands, is about three hundred thousand square miles. This is an area equal to near thrice the surface of Great Britain.

The Appalachian table-lands fade gradually into the Mississippi Valley. Their distinct character continues to near the borders of that stream where it unites with the Ohio. As we come upon the table-land system of the Cordilleras, soon after we pass west of the Mississippi, this great valley may be considered as made up of the table-lands of two great mountain systems, with only a relatively small area of alluvial matter between the mouth of the Ohio and the Gulf. Unlike the Ganges, the Amazon, and most other great rivers of the first class, the Mississippi River has a small delta section: not over twenty to thirty thousand square miles has this character. By far the greater part of the basin is really table-land, and is thus free from the evil of low countries to a degree equalled by no other very great river basin. Its valley is characteristically a table-land valley, with a general surface of rolling plain, varying from three hundred to five thousand feet above the level of the sea. Outside of the Cordilleras and the Appalachians, this valley has few mountain folds within its ample space. The absence of included mountain systems is almost as noteworthy a feature as the small amount of delta. There are only two or three patches of mountains that lie far beyond the limits of the great mountain systems of the east and west; and only one of these, the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and Arkansas, is at any distance from the main ranges. This is an insignificant group of low hills having considerable geological but no geographical importance.

On the western border of the Mississippi Valley rise the vast ridges of the Cordilleras. This great mountain region is, next after the mountainous area of Central Asia, the most extensive region of great altitude in the world. From Mexico northward this system of mountains widens, until, in the parallel of forty degrees, it has a width of about one thousand miles. This system is made up of many ridges lying upon an elevated table-land. The valleys of the lesser streams are generally over seven thousand feet above the sea; the main peaks, to the number of many hundred, rise over twelve thousand feet above the sea level; many of them attain to about fourteen thousand feet of altitude. Its table-land extends east to near the Mississippi River. The great height and width of this mountain system produce a very marked effect upon the climate of the vast area that it incloses, and upon the country which lies within a thousand miles to the east of its mountain walls. The winds from the Pacific are to a great extent drained of their moisture in the western or Sierra Nevada section of these mountains, and have little moisture to give to the central and eastern chains; and when these winds emerge on to the western plains, they are as dry as those that blow over the Sahara.

Although these Cordilleras of North America afford access by their dislocations to a great supply of mineral substances, they are on the whole a curse to the continent. By the cold and dryness which their height entails, they reduce one third of the continent to sterility. Though here and there in their valleys we find oases of fertile land, and many regions of limited area may be made fertile by the use of irrigation, at least nineteen-twentieths of their lands are irretrievably barren. When their resources of precious metals are exhausted, as is likely to be the case within a hundred years, they will probably be to a great extent abandoned by man. Only the extreme northern section and a part of the central and border lands afford any other attractions to settlers than is found in their mineral wealth.

West of the Cordilleras of North America we have a narrow and mountainous coast region that is abundantly watered by the moisture from the Pacific, which penetrates some distance into the land over the lower ridges that border on them. Although this belt of fertile country cannot be compared in populationsustaining power with the Atlantic coast region, it is of great fertility, and has a climate of surpassing excellence.

On the borders of Mexico, within the limits of the United States, the mountains sink down to much less extreme heights, and the climate becomes less strenuous. This region is better fitted for the permanent occupation of man; but only a small part of the land is arable,—probably not one-tenth of its surface is or ever will be fit for the plough.

In Mexico proper we have a country that retains the character of the Cordilleras so far as its general elevation is concerned, but loses the lofty ridges which we find farther to the north. The loss of these barriers, combined with the narrowing of the space between the Atlantic and the Pacific waters, and its more southern position, increases the temperature and the rainfall; so that the fertility of the country augments in a rapid way as we go southwards, until finally in the isthmic part of the continent we have a tropical luxuriance of life. The lowland borders of the country gain upon the width of the table-land, until south of the Tehuantepec Isthmus the whole region is essentially unfit for the uses of our race.

The climate of North America south of the divide which separates the streams flowing toward the Arctic Circle from those entering the Atlantic south of Labrador may be said to resemble that of Europe in all important respects. The winters are far colder; but the summer seasons, which determine the usefulness of the soil to man, are as warm and quickening to plants as are those of the Old World. The more considerable cold of winter is a disadvantage, inasmuch as it limits the work of agriculture to a smaller part of the year, and requires a greater expense in the keeping of livestock. This is a considerable evil, especially in the regions north of the parallel of forty degrees; but the cold is not greater than in Northern Germany or in Scotland. There can be no doubt that the body and the mind receive certain advantages from the tonic quality of the winters which compensate for this loss.

Nearly the whole of North America that is within the limits of the United States receives some share of frost. This secures it against the permanent occupation of contagious fevers, which from time to time find their way to it from the tropics.

North America, east of the 100th meridian (west of Greenwich) and north of thirty-five degrees, has a soil which is on the whole superior to that of Europe. Practically the whole of this vast area is tillable, and the variety of crops is very great, considerably greater than that of Europe. West of the 100th meridian the rainfall diminishes rapidly, being especially limited in the summer season. The winters become longer and more extreme throughout all the region within or under the climatic influence of the Cordilleras; the soil is thinner, and over vast regions almost wanting. In certain exceptional tracts as far westward as the Saskatchewan, and at points along the line between the United States and Canada to the south of that valley, there are considerable areas of good soil; but, considered in a general way, we may exclude all the region between the 100th meridian and the Sierra Nevada range from the hope of any great agricultural future. Even should the rainfall be increased by tree-planting in those regions where trees may grow, the quality of the soil in this district, even where soil exists, is often too poor for any use. Yet in some parts it is very good, and if tree-planting should increase the rainfall, some limited areas will be tillable.

Next to the quality of the soil, the forest covering of a country does the most to determine its uses to man. Although the Western prairies have the temporary advantage that they are more readily brought under cultivation than wooded regions, the forests of a land contribute so largely to man’s well-being, that without them he can hardly maintain the structure of his civilization. The distribution of American forests is peculiar. All the Appalachian mountain system and the shore region between that system and the sea, as well as the Gulf border as far west as the Mississippi, were originally covered by the finest forest that has existed in the historical period, outside of the tropics. In the highlands south of Pennsylvania and in the western table-land north to the Great Lakes, this forest was generally of hard-wood or deciduous trees; on the shore-land and north of Pennsylvania in the highlands, the pines and other conifers held a larger share of the surface. The parts of the land bordering the Mississippi on the west, as far as the central regions of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri, are forest clad. Michigan and portions of Wisconsin and Minnesota have broad areas of forests, but the cis-Mississippian States of Indiana and Illinois, and the trans-Mississippian country west to the Sierra Nevada, is only wooded, and that generally scantily, along the borders of the streams. Data for precise statements are yet wanting, but there is no doubt that this area is untimbered over about seven eighths of its surface, and the wood which exists has a relatively small value for constructive purposes. North of the regions described, except along the Pacific coast, where fine soft-wood forests extend from near San Francisco to Alaska, the forest growth rapidly diminishes in size, and therefore in value, the trees becoming short and gnarled, and the kinds of wood inferior. So that the region north of the St. Lawrence and of the Great Lakes is not to be regarded as having any very great value from the forest resources it affords. In estimating the value of North America to man, the limitation of good forests to the region east of the Mississippi must be regarded as a disadvantage which is likely to become more serious with the advance of time. Undoubtedly the timberless character of the prairie country for at least two hundred miles west of the Mississippi is in the main due to the constant burning over of the surface by the aborigines. It seems possible that these regions may yet be made to bear extensive woods. The elevated plains that lie farther to the west seem to have too little rainfall for the support of forests.

The rivers of a country are a result and a measure of its climate. The generally large rainfall of the eastern half of North America is shown by the number and size of its streams, which, area for area, are longer and more frequent than those of the Old World, except on the eastern coast of Asia. The heaviest rainfall and the greatest average of streams is found about the Gulf of Mexico and the southern part of the Appalachian district. Hence, northerly, westerly, and northwesterly, the rainfall decreases in amount. The average of the region east of the Mississippi and south of the Laurentian Mountains is probably about fifty inches per annum, somewhere near one-third more than that of Europe. North America, despite the very dry district of the Cordilleras, has an average rainfall about as great as that of Europe, and probably rather greater than Asia; indeed its water-supply is rather greater than the average for lands situated so far from the equator.

The rivers of America have been of very great importance in the settlement of the land. They afford more navigable waters than all the streams of Asia put together. Without the system of the Mississippi, which has more navigable waters than any river except the Amazons, it would not have been possible for America to have been brought under the control of colonies with such speed.

The elevation of the surface of North America, at least of its more habitable portions, is very favorable to man. A large part of its fertile soils lie from five hundred to fifteen hundred feet above the sea. It has a larger part of its surface within the limits of height that are best suited to the uses of man than Asia, but less than Europe has.

In considering the fitness of this continent for the use of European races, it will not do to overlook the mineral resources of the country. It may be stated in general terms that North America is richer in the mineral substances which have most contributed to the development of man than any other continent. The precious metals may be briefly dismissed. They occur constantly in two areas: the Cordilleran,—which, from Mexico, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado, has doubtless furnished more gold and silver than any other one mountain district,—and the Appalachian region, which has given about sixty million dollars to the world’s store of gold. The precious mineral resources of the Cordilleran region are probably greater than those of any other continent. They have already exercised a very great influence on the commercial and political history of the continent, and are likely to become of more importance as time goes on, for at least half a century to come.

In the so-called baser, yet really more precious, metals this continent is even more fortunate. The supplies in the most important metal, iron, are very great,—certainly greater than in Europe. This metal is distributed with much uniformity over the country, there being scarcely a State except Florida that cannot claim some share of this metal. Especially rich in deposits of this metal are the States which share the Appalachian district, and the States of Missouri and Michigan. The Rocky Mountains also abound in iron ores, which there often contain a certain proportion of the precious metals; so that it is possible that the exploitation of the two metals may in time be carried on there together. There is probably no other continent that contains as large a share of iron,—the most important metal for the uses of man.

The other less used, but still commercially important, metals,—zinc, lead, and copper,—are found in considerable abundance in the Appalachian, the Laurentian, and the Cordilleran regions, especially in the last-named district. The only metal that is rarely found in North America, never yet in quantities of economic importance, is tin. Some specimens of bronze implements have been found in Mexico and Peru. They seem to afford the only evidence that the aboriginal peoples knew how to smelt any metals. Though the natives in the more northern districts used copper, they never discovered the art of smelting it.

Considering the useful metals as a whole, North America is proportionally richer than any other country that is well known to us.

The most considerable of the resources that the rocks of America offer, are found in the deposits of coal which they contain. These deposits are of vast extent, and are excellently fitted for the various uses of this fuel. While the other mineral resources of the country are most abundant in the region of the Cordilleras, the best of these deposits of coal are accumulated in and about the Appalachian district. At least nine tenths of the coal of America lies to the east of the Mississippi River. New England, New York, South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana are the only States that are practically without coal; and even in New England, Rhode Island and the neighboring parts of Massachusetts have promising but essentially undeveloped fields. In the Cordilleran district coal deposits of small area occur; but the material is generally of poor quality, and is not likely to have a great utility.

As a whole, the resources in the way of subterranean fuel are far richer on this continent than in Europe. The area of coal-bearing rocks is at least eight times as great, and the deposits are much better disposed for working. No other continent save Asia is likely to develop anything like these coal resources; in China the coal area seems much larger than that of North America, but the richness of the field has not yet been fully proven: it is, however, undoubtedly great.

As the latent power of any modern society depends in an intimate way upon the buried stores of solar energy in coal-beds, the large area and good quality of the American coal-fields are very important advantages, and are full of promise for the economic future of its people.

Among the less important resources of the rocks in North America are the various classes of coal-oils which were first brought into commerce from its fields. Although these oils are not peculiar to North America, the small amount of disruption which its rocks have undergone have caused them to be retained in the subterranean store-houses; while in other countries, where the rocks have been more disturbed, these oils have been allowed to escape to the streams or the air. The areas where these oils occur on the continent are widely scattered. They are, however, principally confined to the Upper Ohio Valley; they are known to exist also in the Valley of the Cumberland River, in California, and in Western Canada north of Lake Erie. Besides these flowing oils there are immense areas of black shales, which yield large quantities of oil to distillation. These are not now of value, on account of the abundance of these flowing oils; but as in the immediate future these flowing wells are likely to cease their production, we may look to these shales for an almost indefinite supply of oil. In the Ohio Valley, extending eastward in Virginia into the valleys of the Atlantic streams, there is an area of over one hundred thousand square miles of this shale, which is on the average over one hundred and fifty feet thick, and yields about ten per cent of oil. In other words, it is equal to a lake of oil as large as New York and Pennsylvania, and fifteen feet deep,—a practically unlimited source of this material.

It is important to note that the sources of supply of phosphate and alkaline marls are very large. As these substances are subject to a constant waste in agriculture, and are the most important of all materials to the growth of the standard crops, the soil of America promises on the whole to be as enduring as is that of Europe, though, owing to the larger rainfall, it tends to waste away more rapidly.

The building stones of a country are of importance, inasmuch as they affect the constructions of a people; in such materials, suited for the purposes of simple strength and durability, the country is very well supplied, being quite as well off as Europe. On the other hand, the stones that lend themselves to the more decorative uses, the pure white or variegated marbles, are not nearly as rich as the countries about the Mediterranean, which is of all known regions the richest in decorative stones.

It is not possible within the limits of this chapter to support by sufficient details the foregoing statements concerning the physical conditions of America. The necessary brevity of the work has made it difficult to find place for all the points that should be presented; it may be fairly said, however, that the statements as made are to a very great extent matters of general information, which lie beyond the scope of debate, being well known to all students of American physiography.

Accepting the foregoing statements as true, it may be fairly owned that the general physical conditions of the American continent closely resemble those of Europe, and that in all the more important matters our race gained rather than lost by its transfer from the Old World to the New.

Part II.

EFFECT OF THE PHYSIOGRAPHY OF NORTH AMERICA ON MEN OF EUROPEAN ORIGIN.

In their organic life the continents of America have always stood somewhat apart from those of the Old World. This isolation is marked in every stage of their geological history. In each geological period they have many forms that never found their way to the other lands, and we fail to find there many species that are abundant in the continents of the Old World.

The same causes that kept the animal and vegetable life of the Americas distinct from Europe and Asia have served to keep those continents apart from the human history of the Old World. Something more than the relations that are patent on a map are necessary to a proper understanding of the long continued isolation of these continents.

In the first place, we may notice the fact that from the Old World the most approachable side of these continents lies on the west. Not only are the lands of the New and Old World there brought into close relations to each other, but the ocean streams of the North Pacific flow toward America. Moreover the North Pacific is a sea of a calmer temper than the North Atlantic, and the chance farers over its surface would be more likely to survive its perils. In the North Atlantic, over which alone the Aryan peoples could well have found their way to America, we have a wide sea, which is not only the stormiest in the world, but its currents set strongly against western-going ships, and the prevailing winds blow from the west.[2] If it had been intended that America should long remain unknown to the seafaring peoples of Semitic or Aryan race, it would not have been easy, within the compass of earthly conditions, to accomplish it in a more effective manner than it has been done by the present geography.

The result is that man, who doubtless originated in the Old World, early found his way to America by the Pacific; and all the so-called indigenous races known to us in the Americas seem to have closer relations to the peoples living in northern Asia than to those of any other country. It is pretty clear that none of the aboriginal American peoples have found their way to these continents by way of the Atlantic.

Although the access to the continent of North America is much more easily had upon its western side, and though all the early settlements were probably made that way, the configuration of the land is such that it is not possible to get easy access to the heart of the continent from the Pacific shore. So that although the Atlantic Ocean was most forbidding and difficult as a way to America, once passed, it gave the freest and best access to the body of the continent. In the west, the Cordilleras are a formidable bar to those who seek to enter the continent from the Pacific. None but a modern civilization would ever have forced its barriers of mountains and of deserts. An ancient civilization, if it had penetrated America from the west, would have recoiled from the labor of traversing this mountain system, that combines the difficulties of the Alps and the Sahara. If European emigration had found such a mountain system on the eastern face of the continent, the history of America would have been very different. Scarcely any other continent offers such easy ingress as does this continent to those who come to it from the Atlantic side. The valleys of the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Mississippi, in a fashion also of the Susquehanna and the James, break through or pass around the low-coast mountains, and afford free ways into the whole of the interior that is attractive to European peoples. No part of the Alleghanian system presents any insuperable obstacles to those who seek to penetrate the inner lands. The whole of its surface is fit for human uses; there are neither deserts of sand nor of snow. The axe alone would open ways readily passable to men and horses. So that when the early settlers had passed the sea, all their formidable geographical difficulties were at an end,—with but little further toil the wide land lay open to them. I propose in the subsequent pages to give a sketch of the physical conditions of this continent, with reference to the transplanted civilization that has developed upon its soil. It will be impossible, within the limits of this essay, to do more than indicate these conditions in a very general way, for the details of the subject would constitute a work in itself. It will be most profitable for us first to glance at the general relations of climate and soil that are found in North America, so far as these features bear upon the history of the immigration it has received from Europe.

The climate of North America south of the Laurentian Mountains and east of the Rocky Mountains is much more like that of Europe than of any we find in the other continents. Although there are many points of difference, these variations lie well within the climatic range of Europe itself. On the south, Mexico may well be compared to Italy and Spain; in the southern parts of the Mississippi Valley we have conditions in general comparable to those of Lombardy and Central France; and in the northern portions of that area and along the sea-border we can find fair parallels for the conditions of Great Britain, Germany, or Scandinavia. As is well known, the range of temperature during the year varies much more in America than in Europe, but these variations in themselves are of small importance. Man in a direct way is not much affected by temperature; his elastic body, helped by his arts, may within certain limits neglect this element of climate. The real question is how far these temperatures affect the products of the soil upon which his civilization depends. In the case of most plants and domestic animals, their development depends more upon the summer temperature, or that of the spring season, than upon the winter climate. Now the summer climates of America are more like those of Europe than are those of the winter. So the new-won continent offered to man a chance to rear all the plants and animals which he had brought to domesticity in the Old World.

The general character of the soil of North America is closely comparable with that of Europe, yet it has certain noteworthy peculiarities. In the first place, there is a larger part of America which has been subjected to glacial action than what we find in Europe. In Europe, only the northern half of Great Britain, the Scandinavian peninsulas, a part of Northern Germany, and the region of Switzerland were under the surface of the glaciers during the last glacial period. In America, practically all the country north of the Susquehanna, and more than half of the States north of the Ohio, had their soils influenced by this ice period. The effects of glaciation on the soils of the region where it has acted are important. In the first place, the soils thus produced are generally clayey and of a rather stubborn nature, demanding much care and labor to bring them into a shape for the plough. The surface is usually thickly covered with stones, which have to be removed before the plough can be driven. I have estimated that not less than an average of thirty days’ labor has been given to each acre of New England soil to put it into arable condition after the forest has been removed; nearly as much labor has to be given to removing the forest and undergrowth: so that each cultivated acre in this glacial region requires about two months’ labor before it is in shape for effective tillage.[3] When so prepared, the soils of glaciated districts are of a very even fertility. They hold the same character over wide areas, and their constitution is the same to great depths. Though never of the highest order of fertility, they remain for centuries constant in their power. I have never seen a worn-out field of this sort. Another peculiarity of the American soils is the relatively large area of limestone lands which the country affords. America abounds in deposits of this nature, which produce soils of the first quality, extremely well fitted to the production of grass and grains. Although statistical information is not to be obtained on such a matter, I have no doubt, after a pretty close scrutiny of both America and Europe, that the original fertility of America was greater than that of Europe; but that, on the whole, the regions first settled by Europeans were much more difficult to subdue than the best lands of Central and Southern Europe had been.[4]

The foregoing statement needs the following qualification: Owing to the relative dryness and heat of the American summer, the forests are not so swampy as they are in Northern Europe, and morasses are generally absent. It required many centuries of continued labor to bring the surface of Northern Germany, Northern France, and of Britain into conditions fit for tillage.

Next to deserts and snowy mountains, swamps are the greatest barriers to the movements of man. If the reader will follow the interesting account of the Saxon Conquest given in Mr. Green’s volume on The Making of England, he will see how the tracts of marsh and marshy forest served for many centuries to limit the work of subjugation. In America there are no extensive bogs or wet forests in the upland district, south of the St. Lawrence, except in Maine and in the British Provinces. In all other districts fire or the axe can easily bring the surface into a shape fit for cultivation. In taking an account of the physical conditions which formed the subjugation of North America by European colonies, we must give a large place to this absence of upland swamps and the dryness of the forests, which prevented the growth of peaty matter within their bounds.

The success of the first settlements in America was also greatly aided by the fact that the continent afforded them a new and cheaper source of bread, in the maize or Indian corn which was everywhere used by the aborigines of America. It is difficult to convey an adequate impression of the importance of this grain in the early history of America. In the first place, it yields not less than twice the amount of food per acre of tilled land, with much less labor than is required for an acre of small grains; it is far less dependent on the changes of seasons; the yield is much more uniform than that of the old European grains; the harvest need not be made at such a particular season; the crops may with little loss be allowed to remain ungathered for weeks after the grain is ripe; the stalks of the grain need not be touched in the harvesting, the ears alone being gathered; these stalks are of greater value for forage than is the straw of wheat and other similar grains. Probably the greatest advantage of all that this beneficent plant afforded to the early settlers was the way in which it could be planted without ploughing, amid the standing forest trees which had only been deadened by having their bark stripped away by the axe. This rough method of tillage was unknown among the peoples of the Old World. None of their cultivated plants were suited to it; but the maize admitted of such rude tillage. The aborigines, with no other implements than stone axes and a sort of spade armed also with stone, would kill the forest trees by girdling or cutting away a strip around the bark. This admitted the light to the soil. Then breaking up patches of earth, they planted the grains of maize among the standing trees; its strong roots readily penetrated deep into the soil, and the strong tops fought their way to the light with a vigor which few plants possess. The grain was ready for domestic use within three months from the time of planting, and in four months it was ready for the harvest.

The beginnings in civilization which the aborigines of this country had made, rested on this crop and on the pumpkin, which seems to have been cultivated with it by the savages, as it still is by those who inherited their lands and their methods of tillage. The European colonists almost everywhere and at once adopted this crop and the method of tillage which the Indians used. Maize-fields, with pumpkin-vines in the interspaces of the plants, became for many years the prevailing, indeed almost the only, crop throughout the northern part of America. It is hardly too much to say, that, but for these American plants and the American method of tilling them, it would have been decidedly more difficult to have fixed the early colonies on this shore.

Another American plant has had an important influence on the history of American commerce, though it did not aid in the settlement of the country,—tobacco. That singular gift of the New World to the Old quickly gave the basis of a great export to the colonies of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina; it alone enabled the agriculture of the Southern colonies to outgrow in wealth those which were planted in more northern soil. To this crop, which demands much manual labor of an unskilled kind, and rewards it well, we owe the rapid development of African slavery. It is doubtful if this system of slavery would ever have flourished if America had been limited in its crops to those plants which the settlers brought from the Old World. Although African slavery existed for a time in the States north of the tobacco region, it died away in them even before the humanitarian sentiments of modern times could have aided in its destruction; it was the profitable nature of tobacco crops which fixed this institution on our soil, as it was the great extension of cotton culture which made this system take on its overpowering growth during the first decades of the nineteenth century.

Another interesting effect of the conditions of tillage which met the early settlers upon this soil depends upon the peculiar distribution of forests in North America. All those regions which were first occupied by European peoples were covered by very dense forests. To clear these woods away required not less than thirty days’ labor to each acre of land. In the glaciated districts, as before remarked, this labor of preparation was nearly doubled. The result was that the area of tillage only slowly expanded as the population grew denser, and the surplusage of grain for export was small during the first two centuries. When in the nineteenth century the progress westward suddenly brought the people upon the open lands of the prairies, the extension of tillage went on with far greater celerity. We are now in the midst of the great revolution that these easily won and very fertile lands are making in the affairs of the world. For the first time in human history, a highly skilled people have suddenly come into possession of a vast and fertile area which stands ready for tillage without the labor that is necessary to prepare forest lands for the plough. They are thus able to flood the grain-markets of the world with food derived from lands which represent no other labor beyond tillage except that involved in constructing railways for the exportation of their products. This enables the people of the Western plains to compete with countries where the land represents a great expenditure of labor in overcoming the natural barriers to the cultivation of the soil.

There are many lesser peculiarities connected with the soils of North America that have had considerable influence upon the history of the people; the most essential fact is, however, that the climatic conditions of this continent are such that all the important European products, except the olive, will flourish over a wide part of its surface. So that the peoples who come to it from any part of Europe find a climate not essentially different from their own, where the plants and animals on which their civilization rested would flourish as well as in their own home.[5]

We may note also that the climate of North America brought Europeans in contact with no new diseases. North of the Gulf of Mexico the maladies of man were not increased by the transportation from Europe. It is difficult to arrive at a satisfactory determination concerning the effect of American conditions upon the peoples who have come from Europe to live a life of many generations upon its soil. Much has been said in a desultory way upon this subject, but little that has any very clear scientific value. The problem is a very complicated one. In the first place it is very difficult, if not impossible, to separate the effects of climate from those brought about by a diversity of the social conditions, such as habits of labor, of food, etc. Moreover, the problem is further complicated by the fact that there has been a constant influx of folk into America from various parts of Europe, so that in most parts of the country there has been a constant admixture of the old blood and the new.

After reviewing the sources of information, I am convinced that the following facts may be regarded as established: The American people are no smaller in size than are the peoples in Europe from which they are derived; they are at least as long-lived; their capacity to withstand fatigue, wounds, etc. is at least as great as that of any European people; the average of physical beauty is probably quite as good as it is among an equal population in the Old World; the fecundity of the people is not diminished. The compass of this essay will not permit me to enter into the details necessary to defend these propositions as they might be defended. I will, however, show certain facts which seem to support them. First, as regards the physical proportions of the American people. By far the largest collections of accurate measurements that have ever been made of men were made by the officers of the United States Sanitary Commission during the late Civil War. These statistics have been carefully tabulated by Dr. B. A. Gould, the distinguished astronomer. From the results reached by him, it is plain that the average dimensions of these troops were as good as those of any European army; while the men from those States where the population had been longest separated from the mother country were on the whole the best formed of all.[6]

The statistics of the life-insurance companies make it clear that the death-rate is not higher in America among the classes that insure than in England. I am credibly informed that American companies expect a longer life among their clients than the English tables of mortality assume.

The endurance of fatigue and wounds in armies has been proved by our Civil War to be as good as that of the best English or Continental troops. Such forced marches as that of Buell to the relief of the overwhelmed troops at Pittsburg Landing, or Shiloh,—where the men marched thirty-five miles without rest, and at once entered upon a contest which checked a victorious army,—is proof enough of the physical and moral endurance of the people. The extraordinary percentage of seriously wounded men that recovered during this war,—a proportion without parallel in European armies,—can only be attributed to the innate vigor of the men, and not to any superiority in the treatment they received. The distinguished physiologist, Dr. Brown-Séquard, assures me that the American body, be it that of man or beast, is more enduring of wounds than the European; that to make a given impression upon the body of a creature in America it is necessary to inflict severer wounds than it would be to produce the same effect on a creature of the same species in Europe. His opportunities for forming an opinion on this subject have been singularly great, so that the assertion seems to me very important. That the fecundity of the population is not on the whole diminishing, is sufficiently shown by the statistics of the country. In the matter of physical beauty, the condition of the American people cannot, of course, be made a matter of statistics. The testimony of all intelligent travellers is to the effect that the forms of the people have lost nothing of their distinguished inheritance of beauty from their ancestors. The face is certainly no less intellectual in its type than that of the Teutonic peoples of the Old World, while the body is, though perhaps of a less massive mould, without evident marks of less symmetry.

Perhaps the best assurance we obtain concerning the fitness of North America for the long-continued residence of Teutonic people may be derived from the consideration of the history of the two American settlements that have remained for about two hundred years without considerable admixture of new European blood. These are the English settlement in Virginia and the French in the region of the St. Lawrence; both these populations have been upon the soil for about two hundred years, with but little addition from their mother countries. In Virginia, essentially the whole of the white blood is English; the only mixture of any moment is from the Pennsylvania Germans, a people of kindred race, and equally long upon the soil. I believe that not less than ninety-five per cent of the white blood,—if I may be allowed this form of expression,—is derived from British soil. We have no statistics concerning the bodily condition of the Virginian people which will enable us to compare them with those of other States. The few recruits in the Federal army who were measured by the Sanitary Commission were mainly from the poorer classes, the oppressed “poor whites,” and are not a fair index of the physical condition of the people of this State. We have only the fact that the Confederate army of northern Virginia, composed in the main of the small farmers of the commonwealth, fought, under Lee and Jackson, a long, stubborn, losing fight, as well as any other men of the race have done. No other test of vigor is so perfect as that which such a struggle gives. Where a people make such men as Jackson, and such men as made Jackson’s career possible, we may be sure that they are not in their decadence.

In Kentucky and Tennessee we have little else than Virginia blood and that of northwestern Carolina, which was derived from Virginia, with the exception of the very localized German settlements along the Ohio River: practically the whole of the white agricultural population of these States is of British blood that has been on this soil for about two hundred years. I do not believe there is any other body of folk of as purely English stock as this white population of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee: it amounts to almost three millions of people, and there is scarcely any admixture of other blood. In Virginia, as before remarked, there are no statistics to show just what the physical conditions of the population are; but in Kentucky and Tennessee a large number of men who were born upon the soil were measured by the Sanitary Commission. The results were as follows: the troops from Kentucky and Tennessee were larger than those from any other State; in height, girth of chest, and size of head, they were of remarkable proportions. The men of no European army exceed them in size, though some picked bodies of troops are equally large. We must remember also that these men were not selected from the body of the people, as European armies are, but that they represent the State in arms, very few being rejected for disability. We must also remember that the men from the most fertile parts of these States, those parts which have the reputation of breeding the largest men, went into the Confederate army; while the Union troops were principally recruited from the poorer districts, where the people suffer somewhat from the want of sufficient variety in their food. The fighting quality of these men is well shown by the history of a Kentucky brigade in the Confederate army in the campaign near Atlanta in 1864, in which the brigade, during four months of very active service, received more wounds than it had men, and not over ten men were unaccounted for at the end of the campaign.[7] The goodness of this service is probably not exceptional; it has for us, however, the especial interest that these men were the product of six generations of American life,—showing as well as possible that the physical and moral conditions of life upon this continent are not calculated to depreciate the important inheritances of the race.

Although it is only a part of the problem, it is well to notice that the death-rate in these States of old American blood is singularly low, and the number of very aged people who retain their faculties to an advanced age very great. The census of 1870 gave the death-rate of Kentucky at about eleven in a thousand,—a number small almost beyond belief. It should also be noticed that the emigration from Kentucky has for fifty years or more been very large, relatively almost as heavy as that from Massachusetts. It is a well-known fact, which is made most evident by the statistics of the Sanitary Commission above referred to, that the larger and stronger citizens of a State are more apt to emigrate than those of weaker frame, the result being that the population left behind is deprived of its most vigorous blood.

The Canadian-French population presents us with another instance in which a European people long upon the soil, and without recent additions of blood from the native country, have maintained themselves unharmed amid conditions of considerable difficulty. This French population has been upon the soil for about as long as that of Virginia; that is to say, for two centuries and more. I have been unable to find any statistics concerning the numbers brought as colonists to America. I have questioned various students on this matter, and have come to the conclusion that the original number did not exceed twenty-five thousand souls. This people has not perceptibly intermingled with those of other blood, so that its separate career can be traced with less difficulty than that of any other people. Race-hatreds, differences of language, of religion, and of customs have kept them apart from their neighbors in a fashion that is more European than American. This has been a great disadvantage to the race, for they have remained in a state of subordination as great as that in which the Africans of the Southern States now are. No other folk of European origin within the British Empire have remained so burdened by disabilities of all kinds as this remarkable people. The soil with which they have to deal is much more difficult than the average of America; most of it lies beyond the limits where Indian corn will grow, and much of it will scarcely nourish the hardier small grains. Despite the material difficulties of their position, their general illiteracy and intensified provincialism, this people have shown some very vigorous qualities; they have more than doubled in numbers in each generation; they are vigorous, exceedingly industrious, and have much mechanical tact. In New England they hold their own in the struggle with the native, so that it seems likely that the States of that district may soon be in good part peopled by the folk of this race. As near as I can ascertain, these Canadian-French of pure blood in Canada and the United States amount to about two and a half millions; if this be the case, the population has more than doubled each thirty years since their arrival upon American soil,—which is about as rapid a rate of increase as can be found among any people in the world, perhaps only surpassed by the population of Virginia; which commonwealth, starting with an original English emigration which could not have exceeded one hundred thousand, counts at the present day not less than six million descendants, or about twice as many as there would be if each generation only doubled the numbers of the preceding.

There is yet another separate people on the American soil which has been here for about six generations without any addition from abroad: these are the so-called Pennsylvanian Germans. I shall not take time to do more than mention them, for they, without recent European admixture, show the same evidences of continued vigor that is presented by the Virginian British and the Canadian French blood. Their progeny are to be counted by millions; and though they, like the Canadian French, have shown as yet little evidence of intellectual capacity, this may be explained by the extreme isolation that their language and customs have forced upon them.

Imperfectly as I have been able to present this important series of facts, it is enough to make it clear that they are mistaken who think that the recent emigrations from Europe have helped to maintain the vigor of the American people. It seems more likely that, so far from adding to the strength of the older stocks, the newer comers, mostly of a lower kind of folk than the original settlers, have served rather to hinder than to help the progress of the population which came with the original colonies.

These considerations may be extended, by those who care to do so, by a study of several other isolated peoples in this country,—the German colonies of Texas, the Swiss of Tennessee, and several others; all of which have prospered, and all of which have gone to prove that the climate of North America is singularly well fitted for the use of Northern Europeans. No sufficiently large colonies of Italians, Spanish, or Portuguese have ever been planted within the limits of the present United States to determine the fitness of its conditions for the peoples of those States. There is no reason, however, to believe that they would not have succeeded on this soil if fortune had brought them here.

It is worth while to notice the fact that the European domesticated animals have without exception prospered on American soil. The seven really domesticated mammals and the half-dozen birds of our barnyards have remained essentially unchanged in their proportions, longevity, and fitness for the uses of man. As there can be no moral influences bearing upon these creatures, they afford a strong proof of the essential identity of the physical conditions of the two continents. Evidence of the same sort, though less complete, is afforded by the history of European domesticated plants on our soil. Speaking generally, we may say that with trifling exceptions they all do as well or better here than on their own ground. With the same care, wheat, rye, oats, barley, etc., give the same returns as in their native countries.

Imperfect as this résumé is, it will make it clear that we are justified in believing that the climate and other physical conditions of central North America is as favorable to the development of men and animals of European races as their own country. Those who would see how important this point is to the history of our race should consider the fact that the empire of India has proved utterly unfit for the uses of Europeans, though other branches of the Aryan race have attained a high degree of development within its limits.

I next propose to consider the especial physical features of the continent with reference to several settlements that were made upon it, the extent to which the geography and the local conditions of soil, climate, etc. have affected the fate of the several colonies planted on the eastern shore of North America north of Mexico.

Chance rather than choice determined the position of the several colonies that were planted on the American soil. So little was known of the natural conditions of the continent, or even of its shore geography, and the little that had been discovered was so unknown to navigators in general, that it was not possible to exercise much discretion in the placing of the first settlers in the New World. It happened that in this lottery the central parts of the American continent fell to the English people; while the French, by one chance and another, came into possession of two parts of the coast separated by over two thousand miles of shore. It will be plain from the map that these two positions were essentially the keys to the continent. The access to the interior of the continent by natural water-ways is by two lines,—on the north by the St. Lawrence system of lakes and rivers; on the south by the Mississippi system of rivers, which practically connects with the St. Lawrence system. Fortune, in giving France the control of these two great avenues, offered her the mastery of the whole of its vast domain. We have only to consider the part that the pathway of the Rhine played in the history of mediæval trade in Europe, to understand how valuable these lines would have been until railways and canals had come to compete with water-ways-.

The only long-continued and systematic effort that France made to perpetuate her power in North America was made through the Valley of the St. Lawrence. Let us, therefore, consider the physical conditions of this valley, and their influence upon the colonies that were planted there. The St. Lawrence River system and the valley it drains is most peculiar. It is, indeed, without its like in all the world. At the mouth of the main river we have a set of rugged islands and peninsulas enclosing an estuarine sea, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which gradually narrows in the course of three hundred miles to the channel of the great river. Ascending this river, the early explorers found a wonderful set of rapids; then a lake larger than any sheet of fresh water that had been seen by Europeans; then the swift channel of the Niagara River with its great Falls; then, above, a series of four great lakes, giving a real Mediterranean of fresh water. On the north was a rude and unpromising country, rising upward into low but sterile and rugged mountains; but on the south the natural boundaries of the valley about the Great Lakes hardly exist: indeed, it was possible in the time of rains for small boats to pass directly from Lake Michigan to the waters of the Mississippi without a portage. It is this absence of the southern bounding wall which constitutes the most peculiar feature in this region of geographical surprises.

Viewed on the map, this system of waters seems to afford the natural avenue to the heart of the continent; and when its geography became known, we may well imagine that the French believed that they had here the way to secure their dominion over it. Not only did it afford a convenient water-way to the heart of the continent, but also, by way of Lake Champlain, an easy access to the rear of the New-England settlements and to the Hudson. Thus it not only flanked and turned the English settlements of the whole continent, but it made the New-England position appear almost untenable.

Experience, however, showed that there were certain grave disadvantages attending the navigation of these waters. The river itself is not readily accessible to large vessels beyond the tidal belt. Its rapids and the Falls of Niagara are very great obstacles to its use,—barriers which were never overcome during the French occupation of the country. The Great Lakes are stormy seas, with scarcely a natural harbor, requiring for their navigation even more seamanship than do the open waters of the Atlantic. Moreover, these channels are frozen for five months in the year, so that all movements made by them are limited to about half the year.

Despite these disadvantages, the St. Lawrence system doubtless gave the French a vast advantage in the race for empire on this continent. When we consider that for a long time they had the control of the Mississippi as well, it seems surprising that their power was ever broken. The facilities which this water system gave to military movements that took the whole of the English colonies in the rear was not the sole advantage it afforded its first European possessors; though, on the other hand, it must be remembered that the strategic movements of the English were on interior lines, if largely indeed without water-ways. It was the key to the best of the fur-trade country, and to the best fisheries in America. For the first hundred years after the settlement of this country, furs and fish were the only exports of value from the region north of Maryland. The French settlements gave them control of the best fishery grounds, as also the trade with the Indians, who occupied the best country for peltries in the world. As soon as the English came to possess it, this trade was greatly developed. Along with these advantages, the country had many evils that made the beginnings of colonies a matter of great labor and difficulty. The soil is made up of drift, and requires a great amount of labor to fit it for tillage. The greater part of it is north of the maize belt, so that this cheap and highly nutritious food was denied to the people. I have already said something concerning the singular advantages that this grain had for the pioneer in the American forests. I am inclined to believe that the want of this plant in the French colonies was one cause of their slow development. Another hindrance lay in the very long and severe winters. This limited the time which could be given to the tillage of land, and made the keeping of domesticated animals a matter of great difficulty. Something, too, must be attributed to the character of the colonists and to the nature of the land-tenure in this region. Their system of immigration gave a smaller proportion of natural leaders to the people, so that the colony always remained in a closer dependence on the mother country. There was always an absence of the initiative power which so marked the English colonies. The seigniorial systems of Europe have never prospered in America, and the early experiments in founding colonies by the mere exportation of men to this soil were failures even when the men were of English blood. The efforts to colonize the seaboard region of North Carolina without giving the fee of the land to the people, and without care in the selection of the colonists, resulted in a failure even more complete than that of the Canadian colonies. The Pamlico-Sound settlements showed so little military power that they were incapable of protecting themselves against the savages of the country, and without the help of Virginia they would have been annihilated. The French-Canadian colonists have always showed this incapacity to act for themselves, which cannot be attributed to physical conditions. As compared with the New-England colonists, with whom they came most in contact, they represented a colonizing scheme based on trading-posts; while their neighbors established and fought for homes in the English sense. The struggle for existence was in the English settler met with a vigor which grew out of political and religious convictions; in the Frenchman it was endured for lucrative trade. Anything higher was left to the missionary, who, while he led the pioneer life, failed in turn to develop it.

We may sum up what is to be said of the St. Lawrence Valley, that it is the best inlet to the continent north of the Mississippi River, affording an easy way to the heart of the continent for six months of the year. The valley is peculiar in the fact that it has no distinct southern boundary, and that a large part of its area is occupied by a system of fresh-water lakes. These sheets of water and this absence of a strong ridge separating this basin from the water-sheds which lie to the south of it would, if the French had been strong in a military sense, have given them an advantage in the struggle for the continent; but as long as this valley was held by a less powerful people than their neighbors on the south, these geographical features would no longer be advantageous to its occupiers.

The soil and climate of the St. Lawrence Valley are both rather against the rapid development of agriculture, requiring far more labor to make them arable, and giving a more limited return than do the more southern soils; so that, despite the very great advantage which came from the peculiarly open nature of this path into the interior of the continent, the French did not succeed in maintaining themselves there until its great military advantages could be turned to profit.

At the present time the existence of railways has greatly lessened the value of geography as a factor in military movements, and the St. Lawrence, closed as it is for nearly half a year by ice, has no longer any military importance. As it is, we may be surprised that it has not played a more important part in the military history of the continent than it has done. We cannot avoid the conclusion that if the conditions had been reversed, and the English settlements had occupied the Valley of the St. Lawrence, and the French colonies the country to the southward, the English colonists would have made use of its advantages in a more effective way.

The settlements at the mouth of the Mississippi did not come into the hands of the French until a late day; but the use they made of this, the easiest navigated of all the great American rivers, was considerable. These settlements were pushed up the valley of the main stream and its greater tributaries, until they practically controlled the larger part of the shores of the main waters. The swift current of the Mississippi and its tributaries made ascending navigation difficult and costly. It was, in fact, only with small cargoes in little boats propelled by poles, or with the aid of sails when the winds favored, that the stream could be mounted. The effective navigation was downward towards the mouth. By way of the Mississippi the French power worked into the centre of the continent far more rapidly than by the St. Lawrence route; indeed, the advance was so rapid that if these Gallic settlements had not been overwhelmed by the stronger tide of the English people getting across the Alleghanies, a few years would have given them a chance to fix their institutions and population in this valley.

Throughout their efforts in North America, the French showed a capacity for understanding the large questions of political geography, a genius for exploration, and a talent for making use of its results, or guiding their way to dominion, that is in singular contrast with the blundering processes of their English rivals. They seem to have understood the possibilities of the Mississippi Valley a century and a half before the English began to understand them. They planted a system of posts and laid out lines for commerce through this region; they strove to organize the natives into civilized communities; they did all that the conditions permitted to achieve success. Their failure must be attributed to the want of colonists, to the essential irreclaimableness of the American savage, and to the want of a basis for extended commerce in this country. There were no precious metals to tempt men into this wilderness, and none of the fancy for life or for lands among the home people, that wandering instinct which has been the basis of all the imperial power of the English race. Thus a most cleverly devised scheme of continental occupation, which was admirably well adapted to the physical conditions of the country, never came near to success. It fell beneath the clumsy power of another race that had the capacity for fixing itself firmly in new lands, and that grew without distinct plan until it came to possess it altogether.

The British settlements on the American coast were not very well placed for other than the immediate needs that led to their planting. They did not hold any one of the three water-ways which led from the coast into the interior of the continent, as we have seen the French obtained control of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, and as is well known the Dutch possession of the Hudson, which constituted the third and least complete of the water-ways into the interior of the continent.

As regards their physical conditions, the original English colonies are divisible into three groups,—those of New England; those of the Chesapeake and Delaware district, including Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and the central part of North Carolina; and those on the coast region of the Carolinas. Each of these regions has its proper physical characters, which have had special effects upon their early history. In New England we have a shore-line that affords an excellent system of harbors for craft of all sizes, and a sea that abounds in fish. The land has a rugged surface made up of old mountain folds, which have been worn down to their roots by the sea and by the glaciers of many ice periods. There are no extended plains, and where small patches of level land occur, as along the sea, there they are mostly of a rather barren and sandy character. The remainder of the surface is very irregular, and nearly one half of it is either too steep for tillage or consists of exposed rocks. The soil is generally of clay, and was originally covered almost everywhere with closely sown boulders that had to be removed before the plough could do its work. The rivers are mostly small, and from their numerous rapids not navigable to any great distance from the sea, and none of their valleys afford natural ways to the interior of the continent. In general structure this region is an isolated mass separated from the body of the continent by the high ridges of the Green Mountains and the Berkshire Hills, as well as by the deep valley in which lie the Hudson and Lake Champlain. The climate is rigorous, only less so than that of Canada. There are not more than seven months for agricultural labor.

The New-England district, including therein what we may term the Acadian Peninsula of North America, or all east of Lake Champlain and the Hudson and south of the St. Lawrence, is more like Northern Europe than any other part of America.

Nature does not give with free hands in this region, yet it offered some advantages to the early settlers. The general stubbornness of the soil made the coast Indians few in number, while its isolation secured it from the more powerful tribes of the West. The swift rivers afforded abundant water-power, that was early turned to use, and in time became the most valuable possession that the land afforded. The climate, though strenuous, was not unwholesome, and its severity gave protection against the malarial fevers which have so hindered the growth of settlements in more southern regions. Maize and pumpkins could be raised over a large part of its surface, and afforded cheap and wholesome food with little labor. The rate of gain upon the primeval forest was at first very slow; none of the products of the soil, except in a few instances its timber, had at first any value for exportation. The only surplusage was found in the products of the sea. In time the demand for food from the West Indian Islands made it somewhat profitable to export grain. Practically, however, these colonies grew without important help from any foreign commerce awakened by the products of their soil. Their considerable foreign trade grew finally upon exchanges, or on the products of the sea-fisheries and whaling. Even the trade in furs, which was so important a feature in the French possessions, never amounted to an important commerce in New England. The aborigines were not so generally engaged in hunting, nor were the rivers of New England ever very rich in valuable fur-bearing species. The most we can say of New England is, that it offered a chance for a vigorous race to found in safety colonies that should get their power out of their own toil, with little help from fortune. It was very badly placed for the occupancy of a people who were to use it as a vantage-ground whence to secure control over the inner parts of the continent. But for the modern improvement in commercial ways, the isolation of this section from the other parts of the continent would have kept it from ever attaining the importance in American life which now belongs to it.

The settlements that were made along the Hudson were, as regards their position, much better placed than were those in New England. The valley of this stream is, as is well known to geologists, a part of the great mountain trough separating from the newer Alleghanian system on the west the old mountain system of the Appalachians, which, known by the separate names of the Green Mountains, Berkshire Hills, South Mountains, Blue Ridge, and Black Mountains, stretches from the St. Lawrence to the northern part of Georgia. In the Hudson district the Appalachian or eastern wall of the valley is known as the Berkshire Hills and the Green Mountains, while the western or Alleghanian wall is formed by the Catskill Mountains and their northern continuation in the Hilderberg Hills. On the south the Appalachian wall falls away, allowing the stream a wide passage to the sea; on the northwestern side the Catskills decline, opening the wide passage through which flows the Mohawk out of the broad fertile upland valley which it drains. It appears likely that the Mohawk Valley for a while in recent geological times afforded a passage of the waters of Lake Ontario to the channel of the Hudson. This will serve to show how easy the passage is between the Hudson Valley and the heart of the continent. Save that it is not a water-way, this valley affords, through the plain of the Mohawk, the most perfect passage through the long mountain line of the Alleghanies. Before this passage could have any importance to its first European owners, it fell into the hands of the English settlers. The fertility of this valley of the Hudson and Mohawk is far greater than that of New England. A larger portion of the land is arable, and it is generally more fertile than that of the region to the east. The underlying rock of the country is generally charged with lime, which assures a better soil for grain crops than those derived from the more argillaceous formations of New England. The Mohawk is for its size perhaps the most fertile valley in America. The climate of this district is on the whole more severe than that of New England, but the summer temperature admits the cultivation of all the crops of the Northern States.

Though from Holland, the original settlers of the Hudson Valley were by race and motives so closely akin to the English settlers to the north and south of them that a perfect fusion has taken place. The Dutch language is dead save in the mouths of a few aged people, and of their institutions nothing has remained.[8]

The most striking contrast between the physical conditions of the New York colony and those of New England is its relative isolation from the sea. Staten Island and Long Island are strictly maritime; the rest is almost continental in its relations.

South of New York the conditions of the colonists as regards agriculture were very different from what they were north of that point. To the north the soil is altogether the work of the glacial period. It is on this account stony and hard to bring into cultivation, as before described; but when once rendered arable, it is very enduring, changing little with centuries of cropping. South of this point the soil is derived from the rocks which lie below it, save just along the sea and the streams. The decayed rock that happens to lie just beneath the surface produces a fertile or an infertile earth, varied in quality according as the rocks. On the whole it is less enduring than are the soils of New England, though it is much easier to bring it into an arable state. It also differs from glacial soil in the fact that there is an absolute dependence of the qualities it possesses upon the subjacent rock. When that changes, the soil at once undergoes a corresponding alteration. In certain regions it may be more fertile than any glacial soil ever is; again, its infertility may be extreme, as, for instance, when the underlying rocks are sandstones containing little organic matter.

In this southern belt the region near the shore is rather malarial. The soil there is sandy, and of a little enduring nature, and the drainage is generally bad. Next within this line we have the fringe of higher country which lies to the east of the Blue Ridge. This consists of a series of rolling plains, generally elevated four or five hundred feet above the sea. Near the Blue Ridge it is changed into a rather hilly district, with several ranges of detached mountains upon its surface; to the east it gradually declines into the plain which borders the sea. Within the Blue Ridge it has the steep walls of the old granite mountains, which, inconspicuous in New Jersey, increase in Pennsylvania to important hills, become low mountains of picturesque form in Virginia, and finally in North and South Carolina attain the highest elevation of any land in eastern North America. This mountain range widens as it increases in height, and the plains that border it on the east grow also in height and width as we go to the southward in Virginia. All this section is composed of granite and other ancient rocks, which by their decay afford a very good soil. Beyond the Blue Ridge, and below its summits, are the Alleghanies. Between them is a broad mountain valley, known to geologists as the great Appalachian valley. This is an elevated irregular table-land, generally a thousand feet or more above the sea, and mostly underlaid by limestone, which by its decay affords a very fertile soil. This singular valley is traceable all the way from Lake Champlain to Georgia. The whole course of the Hudson lies within it. As all the mountains rise to the southward, this valley has its floor constantly farther and farther above the sea, until in Southern Virginia much of its surface is about two thousand feet above that level. This southward increase of elevation secures it a somewhat similar climate throughout its whole length. This, the noblest valley in America, is a garden in fertility, and of exceeding beauty. Yet west of this valley the Alleghanies proper extend, a wide belt of mountains, far to the westward. Their surface is generally rugged, but not infertile; they, as well as the Blue Ridge, are clad with thick forests to their very summits.

The shore of this, the distinctly southern part of the North American coast, is deeply indented by estuaries, which have been cut out principally by the tides. These deep sounds and bays,—the Delaware, Chesapeake, Pamlico, Albemarle, and others,—with their very many ramifications, constitute a distinctive feature in North America. Although these indentations are probably not of glacial origin, except perhaps the Delaware, they much resemble the great fjords which the glaciers have produced along the shores of regions farther to the northward. By means of these deep and ramified bays all the country of Virginia and Maryland lying to the east of the Appalachians is easily accessible to ships of large size. This was a very advantageous feature in the development of the export trade of this country, as it enabled the planters to load their crops directly into the ships which conveyed them to Europe, and this spared the making of roads,—a difficult task in a new country. The principal advantage of this set of colonies lay in the fact that they were fitted to the cultivation of tobacco. The demand for this product laid the foundations of American commerce, and was full of good and evil consequences to this country. It undoubtedly gave the means whereby Virginia became strong enough to be, on the part of the South, the mainstay of the resistance of the colonies to the mother country. On the other hand, it made African slavery profitable, and so brought that formidable problem of a foreign and totally alien race to be for all time a trouble to this country. Although the cultivation of cotton gave the greatest extension to slavery, it is not responsible for its firm establishment on our soil. That was the peculiar work of tobacco.

The climate of this region is perhaps the best of the United States. The winters want the severity that characterizes them in the more northern States, and the considerable height of the most of the district relieves it of danger from fevers. I have elsewhere spoken of the evidences that this district has maintained the original energy of the race that founded its colonies.

The Carolinian colonies are somewhat differently conditioned from those of Virginia, and their history has been profoundly influenced by their physical circumstances. South of the James River the belt of low-lying ground near the sea-shore widens rapidly, until the nearest mountain ranges are one hundred and fifty miles or more from the shore. This shore belt is also much lower than it is north of the James; a large part of its surface is below the level where the drainage is effective, and so is unfit for tillage. Much of it is swamp. The rivers do not terminate in as deep and long bays, with steep clay banks for borders, as they do north of the James. They are generally swamp-bordered in their lower courses, and not very well suited for settlements.

The soil of these regions is generally rather infertile; it is especially unfitted for the cultivation of grains except near the shore, where the swamps can often be converted into good rice-fields. Maize can be tilled, but it, as well as wheat, barley, etc., gives not more than half the return that may be had from them in Virginia. Were it not for the cotton crop, the lowland South would have fared badly.

All the shore belt of country is unwholesome, being affected with pernicious fevers, which often cannot be endured by the whites, even after the longest acclimatization. The interior region, even when not much elevated above the sea, or away from the swamps, is a healthy country, and the district within sight of the Blue Ridge and the Black Mountains is a very salubrious district. This region was, however, not at once accessible to the colonists of the Carolinian shore, and was not extensively settled for some time after the country was first inhabited, and then was largely occupied by the descendants of the Virginian colonists.

The history of this country has served to show that much of the lowlands near the shore is not well fitted for the use of European peoples; they are likely to fall into the possession of the African folk, who do not suffer, but rather seem to prosper in the feverish lowlands. The interior districts beyond the swamp country are well suited to Europeans, and where the surface rises more than one thousand feet above the sea, as it does in western North and South Carolina, the climate is admirably well suited to the European race. It is probable that the English race has never been in a more favorable climate than these uplands afford.

This Carolinian section was originally settled by a far more diversified population than that which formed the colonies to the northward. This was especially the case in North Carolina. This colony was originally possessed by a land company, which proposed to find its profit in a peculiar fashion. This company paid contractors so much a head for human beings put ashore in the colony. One distinguished trader in population, a certain Baron de Graffenreid, settled several thousand folk at and about New Berne, on the swampy shores of the Eastern sounds. They were from a great variety of places,—a part from England, others from the banks of the Rhine, others again from Switzerland. There was a great mass of human driftwood in Europe at the close of the seventeenth century, the wreck of long-continued wars; so it was easy to bring immigrants by the shipload if they were paid for. But the material was unfit to be the foundation of a State. From this settlement of eastern North Carolina is descended the most unsatisfactory population in this country. The central and western parts of North Carolina had an admirable population, that principally came to the State through Virginia; but this population about Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds, though its descendants are numerous, perhaps not numerically much inferior to that which came from the Virginia settlements, is vastly inferior to it in all the essential qualities of the citizen. From the Virginia people have come a great number of men of national and some of world-wide reputation. It is not likely that any other population, averaging in numbers about five hundred thousand souls, has in a century furnished as many able men. On the other hand, this eastern North Carolina people has given no men of great fame to the history of the country, while a large part of the so-called “poor white” population of the South appears to be descended from the mongrel folk who were turned ashore on the eastern border of North Carolina.

South Carolina was much more fortunate in its early settlers on its seaboard than the colony to the north. Its population was drawn from rather more varied sources than that of Virginia, New York, or New England, but it would be hard to say that its quality was inferior; despite the considerable admixture of Irish and French blood, it was essentially an English colony.

On the whole, although the quality of the climate would lead some to expect a lowering of the quality of the English race in these southern colonies, it is not possible to trace any such effect in the people. Although the laboring classes of whites along the seaboard appear to occupy a physical level rather below that of the same class in Virginia and the more northern regions, they have great endurance,—as was sufficiently proven by the fact that they made good soldiers during the recent Civil War. In the upland districts of these States, in western North and South Carolina, and especially in northern Georgia, the physical constitution of the people is, I believe, the best in this country. In the district north of Pennsylvania, the elevation of the mountains, or the table-lands which lie about them, is not profitable to the dwellers in these districts; each added height scarcely gives any additional healthfulness, and the additional cold is hurtful to most crops. In this southern region, however, the greater height and width of the Appalachian mountain system, including its elevated valleys, is a very great advantage to this region in all that concerns its fitness for the use of man. The climate of one half of the country south of the James and Ohio Rivers and east of the Mississippi is purified and refreshed by the elevations of this noble mountain system. It is the opinion of all who have examined this country, that it is extremely well fitted for all the uses of the race: an admirable climate, much resembling that of the Apennines of Tuscany, a fertile soil admitting a wide diversity of products, and a great abundance of water-power characterize all this upland district of the South.

A few words will suffice for all that concerns the mineral resources of the original colonies. At the outset of the colonization of America we hear a good deal about the search for gold; fortunately there was a very uniform failure in the first efforts to find this metal, so that it ceased to play a part in the history of these colonies. Very little effort to develop the mineral resources of this region was made during the colonial period. A little iron was worked in Rhode Island, New York, and Virginia, some search of a rather fruitless sort was made for copper ore in Connecticut, but of mining industry, properly so called, there was nothing until the Revolutionary War stimulated the search for iron and lead ores. The discovery of the gold deposits in the Carolinas did not come about until after the close of the colonial period. These deposits were not sufficiently rich to excite an immigration of any moment to the fields where they occur.

Practically the mineral resources of what we may term the Appalachian settlements of North America never formed any part of the inducements which led immigrants to them. In this respect they differ widely from the other colonies which were planted in the Americas. The greater part of the Spanish and Portuguese settlements in America were made by gold-hunters. The state of morals which led to these settlements was not favorable to the formation of communities characterized by high motives. There were doubtless other influences at work to lower the moral quality of the settlements in Mexico and South America, but the nature of the motives which brought the first settlers upon the ground and gave the tone to society is certainly not the least important of the influences which have affected the history of the American settlements.

To close this brief account of the physical conditions of the first European settlements in North America, we may say, that the English colonies were peculiarly fortunate in those physical conditions upon which they fell. There is no area in either of the Americas, or for that matter in the world outside of Europe, where it would have been possible to plant English colonies that would have been found so suitable for the purpose: climate, soil, contact with the sea, and a chance of dominion over the whole continent were given them by fortune. They had but the second choice in the division of the New World; yet to the English fell the control of those regions which experience has shown to hold its real treasures. Fortune has repeatedly blessed this race; but never has she bestowed richer gifts than in the chance that gave it the Appalachian district of America.

NARRATIVE AND CRITICAL

HISTORY OF AMERICA.

CHAPTER I.

CORTEREAL, VERRAZANO, GOMEZ, THEVET.

BY GEORGE DEXTER.

JOHN CABOT discovered the continent of North America June 24, 1497; and his son Sebastian the next year coasted its shores for a considerable distance,—perhaps even, as some accounts say, from Hudson’s Bay to North Carolina.[9] The reports of their voyages doubtless reached the Continental courts of Europe without delay. Spain was occupied with the attempts of Columbus to attain the Indies by a southern route promising success; while Portugal, always among the foremost maritime nations, had now an energetic ruler in her young King Emanuel, who had succeeded to the throne in 1495. He had already sent out Vasco da Gama and Cabral, who followed the route to the Indies by the way of the Cape of Good Hope;[10] and he was well disposed also for an attempt to pursue the indications given by the Cabots, that a short way to the Land of Spices might lie through a northwest passage among the islands, of which the New World was still supposed to consist. Such is at least generally thought to have been the reason for the expeditions of the Cortereals, although we have no official reports of their voyages or their aims.

The family of Cortereal was not without position in the Portuguese kingdom. Ioâo Vaz Cortereal had been appointed, some years before this time, hereditary governor of the Island of Terceira; and his sons had perhaps learned there the secrets of navigation. It has been even asserted by some Portuguese writers that this Ioâo Vaz had himself discovered some part of America nearly thirty years before the first voyage of Columbus, and had received his governorship as the reward of the discovery; but there is no evidence for this claim.

It is known, however, that in the year 1500 a son of Ioâo Vaz, Gaspar Cortereal, having obtained from the King a grant or license to discover new islands, fitted out one, or perhaps two, vessels, with the help of his brother Miguel, and sailed from Lisbon early in the summer for a voyage to the northwest. The accounts say that he touched at the family island of Terceira, and in due time returned to Portugal with a report of having landed in a country situated in a high degree of latitude, now supposed to have been Greenland, which name, indeed (or rather its equivalent, Terra Verde), he is said to have given to the country. The details of the voyage are scanty, and have been confused with those of the second expedition; but it was so far successful that the enterprise was renewed the next year. Miguel Cortereal again contributed to the expenses of this second voyage. It appears, indeed, from a letter of his dated August 6, and preserved in the State archives at Lisbon, that he had prepared a vessel with the expectation of sharing personally in the expedition, but was delayed by a royal order to increase the number of his crew, and afterward by contrary winds, until it was too late in the season to follow Gaspar with any hope of success. Gaspar had sailed with three ships, May 15, 1501, and had directed his course west-northwest. After sailing in this direction two thousand miles from Lisbon, he discovered a country quite unknown up to that time. This he coasted six or seven hundred miles without finding any end to the land; so he concluded that it must be connected with the country discovered to the north the year before, which country could not now be reached on account of the great quantity of ice and snow. The number of large rivers encountered, encouraged the navigators in their belief that the country was no island. They found it very populous, and brought away a number of the natives; and those savages who safely arrived in Portugal were described as “admirably calculated for labor, and the best slaves I have ever seen.” A piece of a broken sword, and two silver earrings, evidently of Italian manufacture, found in the possession of the natives, were probably relics of the visit of Cabot to the country three years earlier. One of the vessels reached Lisbon on its return, October 8, and brought seven of the kidnapped natives. It reported that another ship had fifty more of these. This vessel arrived three days later with its expected cargo; but the third, with Gaspar Cortereal, was never heard from. Her fate remained a mystery, although several efforts were made to ascertain it.

The next year, 1502, Miguel Cortereal started with three ships (one account says two) well equipped and found, having agreed with the King to make a search for the missing Gaspar. The expedition sailed May 10. Arriving on the American coast, they found so many entrances of rivers and havens, that it was agreed to divide the fleet, the better to search for the missing vessel. A rendezvous was arranged for the 20th of August. Two ships met at the appointed time and place; but Miguel Cortereal’s did not appear, and the others, after waiting some time, returned to Portugal.

EARLY FISHING STAGES.

[This cut is a fac-simile of one in the corner of A New and Correct Map of America, 1738, which belongs to Sir William Keith’s History of the British Plantations in America: Part I., Virginia, London, 1738. It presumably represents the fashion of these appliances of the fishermen which had prevailed perhaps for centuries.

It was suggested by Forster, Northern Voyages, book iii. chaps. iii. and iv., that Breton fishermen may have been on the Newfoundland coast before Columbus. Scholars are coming more and more to believe the possibility and even probability of it. Every third day in the calendar was then a fast-day, and the incentive to seeking fish on distant seas was great. That Cabot should find the natives of this region calling the cod baccalaos, a name applied by the seamen of the Bay of Biscay to that fish, has also been suggestive; but this story, deducible apparently from no earlier writer than Peter Martyr in 1516, is not altogether trustworthy, since there is doubt if the folk who called the fish by that name were the natives, as Martyr seems to think, or simply the common people, as would seem to be implied in other forms of the statement (see Vol. III. p. 45). Greenland, as we know from the pre-Columbian maps (Ptolemy of 1482, etc.), was considered a part of Europe. Its adjacent shores were in the common mind but further outposts of the same continent; so that the returned sailors’ reports of the distant parts—islands they thought them—might cause no awakening of the idea of a new world. Cf. Navarrete, Viages, iii. 41, 46, 176; Eusebius, Chronicon (1512), p. 172; Wytfliet, Histoire des Indes, p. 131; Lescarbot, Nouvelle France (1618), p. 228; Biard, Relation (1616), chap. i.; Champlain (1632), p. 9; Charlevoix, Nouvelle France, i. 4, 14, or Shea’s edition, i. 106; Estancelin, Navigateurs Normands; Kunstmann, Entdeckung Amerikas, pp. 69, 125; Peschel, Geschichte des Zeitalters, etc., p. 332; Vitet, Histoire de la Dieppe, p. 51; Harrisse, Cabots, p. 271; Kohl, Discovery of Maine, pp. 188, 201, 203, 205, 280; Parkman, Pioneers, p. 171; Mag. of Amer. Hist., 1882, April; N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1880, p. 229, etc.—Ed.]

Miguel also was never heard of again. Another expedition, sent out at the expense of the King, a year later, returned without having found a trace of either brother. And yet once more, the oldest of the family, Vasqueanes Cortereal, then governor of Terceira, proposed to undertake the quest in person; but Emanuel refused the necessary permission, declining to risk the lives of more of his subjects.

The Cortereals had no successors among their countrymen in the attempt to reach the Indies by the Northwest Passage; but their voyages opened for Portugal a source of much trade. Individuals, and perhaps companies or associations, soon followed in their track in the pursuit of fish, until the Portuguese enterprises of this sort on the American coasts grew to large proportions, and produced considerable revenue for the State.

The consolidation of France into one great kingdom may be said to date from 1524, when the death of Claude, the wife of Francis I., vested the hereditary right to the succession of Brittany in the crown of France. The marriage of Charles VIII. with Anne, Claude’s mother, in 1491, had brought the last of the feudal fiefs into subjection; but it required many years to make the inhabitants of these provinces Frenchmen, and the rulers at Paris exercised little authority over the towns and principalities of the interior. The coasts of Normandy and Brittany were peopled by a race of adventurous mariners, some of them exercising considerable power; as, for instance, the Angos of Dieppe, one of whom (Jean) was ennobled, and created viscount and captain of that town. Such places as Dieppe, Honfleur, St. Malo, and others had already furnished men and leaders for voyages of exploration and discovery. These had made expeditions to the Canaries and the African coast, and the fishing population of the French provinces were not unused to voyages of considerable length. They were not slow, then, in seeking a share in the advantages offered by the new countries discovered by Cabot and Cortereal, and they speedily became skilful and powerful in the American fisheries. The fishermen of the ports of Brittany are known to have reached the Newfoundland shores as early as 1504. They have left there an enduring trace in the name of Cape Breton, which, in one form or another, is found upon very early maps. Two years afterward Jean Denys, who was from Honfleur, is said to have visited the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and to have made a chart of it; but what now passes for such a chart is clearly of later origin. Another two years elapse, and we read of the voyage, in 1508, of a Dieppe mariner, Thomas Aubert by name, who is said to have brought home the first specimens of the American natives. A contemporary chronicle relates the visit of seven of those savages to Rouen in 1509. The frequency of the voyages of these fishermen and their skill in navigation are proved by the provision in Juan de Agramonte’s commission from the Spanish Crown, in 1511, that he might employ as pilots of his proposed expedition two mariners from Brittany.[11] In 1518, or (as M. d’Avezac thinks) perhaps a few years later, the Baron de Léry attempted a French settlement in the new country. But storms and unfavorable circumstances brought about the failure of this expedition.[12]

We have few particulars of the early life of Giovanni da Verrazano, who commanded the first French expedition sent out under royal auspices. The date of his birth is uncertain; but he is supposed to have been born shortly after 1480, in Florence,—where members of the family had attained high office at various times,—and to have been the son of Piero Andrea da Verrazano and Fiametta Capella. He is said to have travelled extensively, to have passed some years in Egypt and Syria, and to have visited the East Indies. It has also been stated, but on doubtful authority, that he commanded one of Aubert’s ships in that mariner’s expedition to America in 1508. With the year 1521 Verrazano begins to appear in Spanish history as a French corsair; in which character, and under the name of Juan Florin or Florentin, he preyed upon the commerce between Spain and her new-found possessions. It was, perhaps, while engaged in this occupation that he gained the notice and favor of Francis I. Indeed, his voyage of discovery was immediately preceded by, or even connected with, one of these predatory cruises. The Portuguese ambassador in France, Joâo da Silveira, wrote home, April 25, 1523: “Joâo Verezano, who is going on the discovery of Cathay, has not left up to this date, for want of opportunity, and because of differences, I understand, between himself and men.” And Verrazano himself says, in the cosmographical appendix to his letter, that the object of his expedition was to reach Cathay by a westward voyage, and that he expected to be able to penetrate any intervening land. But we know from Spanish sources that in May or June of this same year, 1523, Juan Florin captured the treasure sent home by Cortes to the Emperor, and brought it into La Rochelle; and Verrazano speaks in the beginning of his letter to the King of his success against the Spaniards.[13]

Later in the year, perhaps (but it seems impossible now to separate the voyage of discovery distinctly from the cruise against Spanish commerce), Verrazano started with four ships. Disabled by storms, he was forced to put back into some port of Brittany with two vessels, the “Normandy” and the “Dauphine.” After repairing these, he made a fresh start, but decided finally to proceed on the voyage to Cathay with the “Dauphine” alone.

In this vessel he sailed, Jan. 17, 1524, from the Desiertas Rocks, near the Island of Madeira, having fifty men and provisions for eight months. For twenty-five days he proceeded, with a pleasant breeze, toward the west, without any incident. Then on February 14 (20, according to another version of his letter) he encountered a very violent tempest. Escaping from this, he continued the voyage, changing the course of the vessel more to the north, and in another twenty-five days came within sight of land. This appeared low when first seen; and on a nearer approach it gave evidence, from the fires burning on the shore, that there were inhabitants. This landfall Verrazano places in 34° N., which would be not far from the latitude of Cape Fear, upon the coast of North Carolina; and most commentators upon his letter accept that as the probable point. He began his search for a harbor by coasting south about fifty leagues; but finding none, and observing that the land continued to extend in that direction, he turned and sailed along the shore to the north. Still finding no opportunity to land with the vessel, he decided to send a boat ashore. This was met on its approach to the land by a crowd of the natives, who at first turned to fly, but were recalled by friendly signs, and at last showed the strangers the best place for making a landing, and offered them food. These people were nearly black in color, of moderate stature and good proportions. They went naked except for their breech-cloths, and were, from the description, simple and of kind disposition. The coast is described as covered with small sand-hills, and as pierced by occasional inlets, behind which appeared a higher country, with fields and great forests giving out pleasant odors. There were noticed, also, lakes and ponds, with abundance of birds and beasts. The anchorage Verrazano thought a safe one; for though there was no harbor, he says that the water continued deep very close to the shore, and there was excellent holding-ground for the anchor.

Thence he proceeded along a shore trending east, seeing great fires, which gave him the impression that the country had many inhabitants. While at anchor (perhaps near Raleigh Bay), the boat was sent to the shore for water. There was no possibility of landing, on account of the high surf; so a young sailor undertook to swim to the land, and to give the natives some bells or other trinkets which the French had brought for the purposes of traffic, or for presents. He was overpowered by the waves, and, after a struggle, thrown upon the beach, where he lay almost stunned. The Indians ran down, picked him up, and carried him screaming with fright up the shore. They reassured him by signs, stripped off his wet clothes, and dried him by one of their fires,—much to the horror, says the narrative, of his comrades in the boat, who supposed that the savages intended to roast and eat him. When he was refreshed and recovered from his fright, he made them understand that he wished to rejoin his friends, whereupon the natives accompanied him back to the water, and watched his safe return to the boat.

Following the shore, which here turned somewhat to the north, in fifty leagues more they reached a pleasant place, much wooded, near which they anchored. Here they landed twenty men to examine the country, and made a cruel return for the kindness which the natives had shown the French sailor a short time before. On landing, the men found that the Indians had taken refuge in the woods, with the exception of two women and some small children who had attempted to hide in the long grass. The Frenchmen offered food; but the younger woman refused it, and in great fright called for help to the natives who had fled into the forest. The French took the oldest of the children, a boy of eight, and carried him to their vessel, to take back with them to France. They attempted to kidnap also the young woman, who was handsome and tall, about eighteen years of age; but she succeeded in escaping. The people of this place are described as fairer than those first seen, and the country as fertile and beautiful, but colder than the other.

The vessel remained at anchor three days, and then it was decided to continue the voyage, but to sail only in the daytime, and to anchor each night. After coursing a hundred leagues to the northeast, they arrived at a beautiful spot where, between small steep hills, a great stream poured its waters into the sea. This river was of great depth at its mouth, and with the help of the tide a heavily loaded vessel could easily enter. As Verrazano had good anchorage for his ship, he sent his boat in. This, after going a half league, found that the entrance widened into a magnificent lake of three leagues circuit, upon which at least thirty of the natives’ boats were passing from shore to shore. These people received the strangers kindly, and showed them the best place to bring their boat to the land. A sudden squall from the sea frightened the French, and they returned in haste to the ship without exploring further this pleasant harbor,—which seems to have been that of New York.

Thence they sailed to the east about eighty leagues (fifty, by one account), keeping the land always in sight. They discovered an island of triangular shape, of about the size of that of Rhodes, and about ten leagues from the mainland, to which they gave the name of Louisa, the mother of Francis I.,—the only name mentioned in the narrative. This was covered with woods, and well peopled, as the number of fires showed. From this island, which has been generally identified with Block Island,[14] Verrazano, without landing, as the weather was bad, steered for the coast again; and in fifteen leagues (perhaps retracing his course) came to a most beautiful harbor. Here the ship was met by many boats of the natives, who crowded close around it with cries of astonishment and pleasure. They were easily persuaded to come on board, and soon became very friendly. This harbor, which Verrazano places in the parallel of Rome, 41° 40´ N., and which has been identified as that of Newport, is described as opening toward the south, with an entrance a half league in breadth, and widening into a great bay twenty leagues in circuit. It contained five islands, among which any fleet might find refuge from storms or other dangers. The entrance could be easily guarded by a fort built upon a rock which seemed naturally placed in its centre for defence. The natives are described as fine-looking, the handsomest people seen in the voyage, of taller stature than Europeans, of light color, sharp faces, with long black hair and black eyes, but with a mild expression. The visits of their kings to the strange vessel are described, and the eagerness of these rulers to know the use of everything they saw is mentioned. The women are spoken of as modest in their behavior, and as jealously guarded by their husbands. The interior country was explored for a short distance, and found pleasant and adapted to cultivation, with many large open plains entirely free from trees, and with forests not so dense but that they could easily be penetrated.

In this agreeable harbor, where everything that he saw filled him with delight, and where the kindness of the inhabitants left him nothing to desire, Verrazano tarried fifteen days. Then having supplied himself with all necessaries, he departed on the 6th of May (Ramusio says the 5th), and sailed a hundred and fifty leagues without losing sight of the land, which showed small hills, and was a little higher than before, while the coast, after about fifty leagues, turned to the north. No stop was made, for the wind was favorable, and the nature of the country appeared much the same. The next landing was made in a colder country, full of thick woods, where the natives were rude, and showed no desire to communicate with the strangers. They were clothed in skins, and their land seemed barren. They would accept nothing in barter but knives, fish-hooks, and sharpened steel. When the French landed and attempted to explore the country, they were attacked. This landing has been placed somewhere north of Boston, possibly not far from Portsmouth, in New Hampshire.

The voyage was continued in a northeasterly direction. The coast appeared pleasanter, open, and free from woods, with a sight of high mountains far inland. Within a distance of fifty leagues thirty-two islands were discovered, all near the shore, which reminded the navigator of those in the Adriatic. He did not stop to explore the country, or to open communication with the natives, but continued another hundred and fifty leagues in the same general direction, when he arrived at about the latitude of 50° N. Here, having reached the country already discovered by the Bretons, and finding his provisions and naval stores nearly exhausted, he took in a fresh supply of wood and water, and decided to return to France, having, he says, discovered more than seven hundred leagues of unknown territory. He arrived at Dieppe on his return early in July, for his letter to the King is dated from that port on the 8th of the month.

We lose trace of Verrazano after his return from this voyage. Francis I. was in no condition to profit from the opportunity offered him to colonize a new world. He had engaged in a struggle with the Emperor; was soon after the date of this letter busily occupied in fighting battles; and at that of Pavia, Feb. 24, 1525, was taken prisoner, and spent the next year in captivity in Spain. It has been suggested that Verrazano went to England, and there offered his services to Henry VIII., and there are contemporary allusions supporting the suggestion. Mr. Biddle, in his Memoir of Sebastian Cabot, advances the opinion that Verrazano was the Piedmontese pilot who was killed and eaten by the savages in Rut’s expedition of 1527, which would harmonize Ramusio’s statement that he made a second voyage to America and lost his life there. But this is extremely doubtful.[15] We know from French sources that in 1526 Verrazano joined with Admiral Chabot, Jean Ango, and others, in an agreement for a voyage to the Indies for spices, with a proviso inserted for the equitable division of any booty taken “from the Moors or others, enemies of the faith and the King our lord.” Spanish documents of official character show that Juan Florin, with other French pirates, was captured at sea in 1527, and hung at the small village of Colmenar, between Salamanca and Toledo, in November of that year. But it has been also lately stated that a letter has been found, dated at Paris, Nov. 14, 1527, which speaks of Verrazano as then preparing an expedition of five ships for America, expecting to sail the following spring. If this statement is accurate, and the date of the letter has been correctly read, grave doubts are thrown upon the Spanish story of his execution. Either Florin was not Verrazano, or he was not hanged at the time stated. I cannot undertake to reconcile all these statements, but must leave them as I find them.

The voyage of Estévan (Stephen) Gomez, although not made under the flag of France, should, perhaps, be studied in connection with that of Verrazano. Spain did not fail to take notice of the discoveries of the Cabots when the news of the return of Sebastian from the second voyage reached London in 1498. Her ambassador at that Court, Don Pedro de Ayala, in his despatch dated July 25 of that year, says that he has given notice to the English king that the countries discovered by Cabot belonged to his master. There are traces of voyages in a northwestern direction under Spanish auspices in subsequent years. Navarrete thinks that such was the object of the Spanish king in sending for Juan Dornelos, or Dorvelos, in the spring of 1500. It is stated also that Hojeda had orders about the same time to follow the English tracks. The commission to Agramonte in 1511 (he having proposed a similar project previously) was for the purpose of planting a settlement in the tierra nueva at the northwest. Magellan’s discovery of the long-sought strait through the New World leading to the Land of Spices, although it brought no immediate advantages, as the voyage was long and perilous, revived and increased the interest in seeking for a shorter and more northern passage. The agreement made with De Ayllon, June 12, 1523, provided, among other things, for the search for another way through the continent to the Moluccas, to be found north of Florida. Hernando Cortes wrote home to the Emperor, Oct. 15, 1524, a letter on the probability of there being such a passage easier than the one already discovered, and proposed to seek for it. Gomez was of the same opinion, for his voyage was undertaken to find this northern strait.

Estévan Gomez was a Portuguese and an experienced navigator. He had entered the service of Spain a few years before this time, having received the appointment of pilot in 1518 at the same time that Sebastian Cabot was created “pilot major.” He had sailed with Magellan on his great voyage as pilot of the “San Antonio,” but had joined the crew of that vessel in their mutiny against her captain, Alvaro de Mesquita, at the strait. He thus deserted Magellan, and brought the ship home. In 1521 he was ordered to serve with the fleet which was then preparing to sail against the French corsairs. He obtained a concession from the Emperor, dated March 27, 1523, by which he was to have a small vessel for an expedition to the northwest, armed and provisioned for one year. Although this grant, like that made soon afterward to De Ayllon, contained a proviso that the expedition should carefully avoid trespassing upon the King of Portugal’s possessions in the New World, that Power seems to have raised objections to the voyage. The following year a council was convened at the small town of Badajos for the settlement of the rival claims of Spain and Portugal, and Gomez was sent with Cabot, Juan Vespucius, and others to this council,—not as members, but in the capacity of specialists or experts, to give opinions on questions of navigation and cosmography. The congress accomplished nothing in the way of an agreement between the rival Powers, and after its adjournment the Council for the Indies decided to allow the voyage proposed by Gomez.

Gomez sailed from Corunna, a port in the north of Spain, to which the “Casa de Contratacion,” or India House, had been removed from Seville, some time in February of the following year (1525), and was absent about ten months. We have unfortunately no detailed account of his voyage, and it does not now seem possible to say with certainty even in which direction he explored the American coast. The accounts given by the Spanish historians are very meagre. They seem to have paid little attention to the voyage, except to record its failure to discover the desired northern strait. The Spanish maps, however, show plain traces of the voyage, in the Tierra de Estévan Gomez, the name applied by Ribero and others to the large tract of country between Cape Breton and Florida. Gomara, one of the earliest and best authorities on American matters, heads the chapter which he devotes to Gomez, “Rio de San Antonio,” which name is supposed to be the one given in Spanish maps to the Hudson River. Gomez is said to have visited the country at latitudes 40° and 41° north, and to have coasted a great extent of land never before explored by the Spaniards. It is related also that he visited the Island of Cuba, and refitted his vessel there. This would be presumably on the homeward voyage. Failing to obtain the rich cargo of spices which he had expected to bring home, he loaded his vessel with kidnapped savages of both sexes, and with this freight reached Corunna again in November, 1525.

All historians of the voyage made by Gomez have told the story about the mistake of a zealous newsmonger in reference to the nature of the cargo thus brought home. Peter Martyr is the first to tell it, in the final chapter of his last decade, inscribed to Pope Clement VII., written in 1526. In answer to a question as to what he had brought, Gomez was understood to reply “cloves” (clavos), when he really said “slaves” (esclavos). The eager friend hastened to Court with the news that the shorter strait had been discovered, thinking to obtain some reward for his intelligence. The favorers of Gomez’ project (in regard to which there appears to have been some difference of opinion) greeted the news with applause, but were covered with ridicule when the true story of the results of the voyage was published. Martyr quaintly says: “If they hadd learned that the influence of the heauens could bee noe where infused into terrestriall matters prepared to receiue that aromaticall spirit, saue from the Æquinoctiall sunne, or next vnto it, they woulde haue knowne that in the space of tenn moneths (wherein hee performed his voyage) aromaticall Cloues could not bee founde.”[16]

It does not fall within the limits of this chapter to relate the story of the early attempts of the French Huguenots to plant colonies in this country.[17] But I may refer very briefly to the first of these,—the expedition sent by Admiral Coligny to Brazil under the command of Villegagnon, in 1555; as a Franciscan monk, André Thevet, who accompanied it, claims to have coasted the continent of North America on his return voyage to France the next year.

Thevet says of himself that he had spent the early years of his life in travel, and that he had already made a voyage to the East, of which voyage, and of his skill in navigation, his friend Villegagnon was well aware when he asked him to join the proposed expedition to South America,—an offer which he (Thevet) was very ready to accept. The start, he says, was made from Havre, May 6, 1555, and the voyage across the ocean was long and tedious. It was not until the last day of October that, about nine o’clock in the morning, their vessel came within sight of the high mountains of Croistmourou. These were within the limits of a country whose inhabitants were friends of the Portuguese, and the French therefore decided to avoid landing there. They continued the voyage, and seventeen days later cast anchor at the River Ganabara (Rio Janeiro), where they were received in a friendly manner by the natives, and decided to make their settlement.

Thevet remained with the colony only about ten weeks, leaving on his homeward voyage, Jan. 31, 1556. He says that the commander of the vessel decided to return by a more northern passage than that by which he had crossed from France; and goes on to describe at some length their voyage along the coast, and to give many particulars of the countries and natives, most of which he must have obtained from other travellers’ books and histories after his return. The progress was slow. At the Cape of St. Augustine the vessel was delayed, he says, two months in the attempt to round that promontory. The equinoctial line was not crossed until about the middle of April; and after leaving Espagnola a contrary wind blew them in toward the coast.

Thevet claims to have coasted the entire shore of the United States, and gives occasional accounts of what he saw, and of intercourse with the natives. But his details are always uncertain, and the places he professes to have visited cannot be identified. No satisfactory information can be obtained from his story; and indeed his reputation for truth-telling is so poor that many historians are inclined to reject altogether his recital of the voyage along our coast. It may well be that Thevet invented the whole of it as a thread upon which to hang the particulars about Florida, Norumbega, and other countries which he gathered from books. After his return to France he was made aumonier to Catherine de Medicis, and also royal historiographer and cosmographer.

[CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.]

THE earliest mention in print of the Cortereal voyages is found in a small collection of travels (one of the very earliest collections made), entitled Paesi novamente retrovati. This was published at Vicenza, in Italy, as the colophon states, Nov. 3, 1507, and is supposed to have been compiled by Fracanzio da Montalboddo, or by Alessandro Zorzi.[18] The account of Gaspar Cortereal is contained (book vi. chap. cxxv) in a letter written from Lisbon, Oct. 19, 1501 (eleven days only after the return of the first vessel which succeeded in getting home from the second voyage), by the Venetian ambassador in Portugal, Pietro Pasqualigo, to his brothers. This is, of course, an authority of great value. The writer gives a brief account of the voyage, speaks of the customs of the inhabitants of the new country, and describes the captives which the ship had brought. He says that the other vessel is expected immediately. Pasqualigo mentions, however, only one voyage, and has apparently confused it with the earlier one; for he says that the expedition sailed “lāno passato” (that is 1500), and writes of the failure to reach a country discovered “lanno passato.” Perhaps he received some account of both voyages from the mariners, and in preparing his letter failed to preserve the distinction between them. French versions of the letter appeared in Paris in 1517 and 1522. An English translation of the interesting portions of this letter is given in Biddle’s Cabot, at pp. 239, 240.

Another contemporary account of this voyage of Gaspar Cortereal has lately been discovered. M. Harrisse has obtained from the archives of Modena a despatch sent to Hercules d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, by Alberto Cantino, his representative at Lisbon, in which the arrival of the second vessel (expected immediately in Pasqualigo’s letter) is reported. This despatch is dated Oct. 17, 1501. The vessel arrived on the 11th,—three days after the first one,—and brought the expected cargo of slaves. Cantino says that he saw, touched, and surveyed (li quali io ho visti, tochi et contemplati) these natives. He gives some account of the savages, and tells the story of the voyage as he heard the captain of the vessel relate it to the King, being present at their interview. The caravel had been a month on her return, and the distance was two thousand eight hundred miles,—“Questo naviglio è venuto di la a qua in un mese, et dicono esservi 2,800 milia de distantia.” Cantino makes no mention of the return of the first vessel, but speaks of a third, commanded by Cortereal in person, as having decided to remain in the new country, and to sail along its coast far enough to discover whether it were an island or terra firma,—“Laltro compagno ha deliberato andar tanto per quella costa, che vole intendere se quella è insula, o pur terra ferma.”

Harrisse prints this interesting letter of Cantino in his Jean et Sébastian Cabot (pp. 262-264). Cantino appears to have also sent his master a map showing the new discoveries. This map Harrisse has since reproduced with a commentary, in his work on the Cortereals, as explained in the second volume of the present history.

It should be noted that Harrisse counts three voyages of Gaspar Cortereal,—the first, without result, before May, 1500; the second, between May and December of that year; and a third, sailing in January, 1501,—the return of two of whose vessels in the following October is related by Pasqualigo and Cantino.[19]

The confusion of the voyages continued. The Spanish historians and those of Italy, knowing, perhaps, of only one, or getting their information from the Paesi and the maps, speak of but one expedition. Gomara, whose work was published at Saragossa in 1552-1553,[20] says that Cortereal was seeking a northwest passage, but failed to find it; that he gave his name to the islands at the mouth of the St. Lawrence in 50° N.; and that, dismayed at the snow and ice, he returned home with about sixty of the natives whom he had captured.[21] Herrera, who published his History early in the next century,[22] gets his information from Gomara. Peter Martyr does not mention the Cortereals. Turning to Italy, we find in Ramusio an account of Cortereal in the third volume of his great collection of voyages,[23] published in 1556, at fol. 417. Here, in an introductory discourse, written by Ramusio himself, “sopra la terra ferme dell’ Indie Occidentali,” it is stated that Gaspar Cortereal was the first captain who went to that part of the New World which “runs to the north,” in 1500, with two ships, in search of a shorter passage to the Spice Islands; that he penetrated so far north as to get into a region of great cold, discovering at 60° a river filled with snow, which was called the “Rio Nevado;” that he found inhabited islands to which he gave names, etc.

Even down to modern times the distinction between the voyages has not been recognized. Biddle, Humboldt, and others speak of only one expedition. The Portuguese authorities, however, are explicit in the matter. In 1563 there was published at Lisbon a volume of navigations and discoveries written by Antonio Galvano, who had died a few years before.[24] Galvano was born at Lisbon in 1503. He went, a young man, to India, and distinguished himself there, having command of the expedition which reduced the Moluccas to Portuguese rule, and becoming the governor of Ternate,—the largest of these islands. He was recalled home, and coldly received by the King. Becoming indigent, he was forced to take refuge in a hospital, where he finally died in 1557. His papers were bequeathed to a friend, Don Francisco y Sousa Tavares, who prepared the volume for the press. Galvano gives a good account of the expedition of Gaspar Cortereal, clearly dividing it into two voyages; and he tells also of Miguel Cortereal’s attempt to discover his brother’s fate. The original Portuguese text is very rare. Hakluyt published a translation of it in 1601,[25] and states in his Dedication of that book to Sir Robert Cecil that he could not succeed in finding a copy of the original. The translation was made, he says, “by some honest and well-affected marchant of our nation, whose name by no meanes I could attaine unto, and that, as it seemeth, many yeeres ago. For it hath lien by me above these twelve yeeres.” In 1862 the Hakluyt Society of London reprinted this translation under the editorial supervision of Vice-Admiral Bethune. In this edition corrections of the English version are noted, and the whole Portuguese text is given, page for page, from a copy of the original in the Carter-Brown Library. The passage relating to the Cortereals is found at pages 96, 97, of this Hakluyt Society’s volume.[26]

The Chronicle of King Emanuel, by Damiano de Goes, appeared at Lisbon in 1565-1567.[27] Goes was born in 1501, and died about 1573. He was employed in the diplomatic service of Portugal in Flanders, Denmark, and other countries, and travelled extensively. Galvano considered him, as a traveller, worthy of mention in his work, and says that he visited England, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Muscovy, and Norway. “He did see, speake, and was conuersant with all the kings, princes, nobles, and chiefe cities of all Christendome in the space of 22 yeeres (occupied in the work); so that by reason of the greatnes of his trauell I thought him a man woorthie to be here remembred.”[28] He became afterward historiographer of Portugal, and was placed in charge of the public archives. But he fell under the ban of the Inquisition, and died in obscurity. His account of the Cortereals, which is clear and of great value, from the learning of the writer and from his excellent opportunities to inform himself, is given in the sixty-seventh chapter of the first part of the Chronicle, at pp. 87, 88.[29]

Hieronymus Osorius (as his name is Latinized), the Bishop of Silves,—known sometimes as the Portuguese Cicero, from the elegance of his style,—published his De rebus Emmanuelis in 1571.[30] He was born in 1506, and lived until 1580. His writings include treatises on philosophy and theology, as well as works of history. In the Chronicle, under date of 1503, he gives a full account of the Cortereal voyages, including the search expedition sent out by the King that year, and the proposition of the eldest brother to equip a new exploration. The story may be found at p. 63 of the edition of 1586.

Oscar Peschel and Friedrich Kunstmann, in Germany, used these Portuguese authorities freely in their accounts of the Cortereals. Peschel’s book, an excellent one, Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, was published at Stuttgart in 1858, and went to a second edition in 1877. The discoveries of the Portuguese are treated in the ninth chapter of the second book.[31] Kunstmann’s work, of great learning and research, Die Entdeckung Amerikas, was published at Munich in 1859 by the Royal Bavarian Academy of Sciences, as part of the centennial commemoration (March 28, 1859) of its foundation. In addition to the printed authorities, Kunstmann instituted searches among the manuscript archives at Lisbon. He had the pretended early voyage of Joâo Vaz Cortereal examined, and ascertained that there was no foundation for it.[32] He found the letter of Miguel Cortereal, written Aug. 6, 1501, to Christovâo Lopez, which has been used in the preceding narrative; and that brother’s agreement with the King, Jan. 15, 1502, by which the grant previously made to Gaspar was continued to Miguel.[33]

An excellent account of the Cortereal voyages, based largely upon Kunstmann’s researches, is given by Dr. Kohl in the fifth chapter of his Discovery of Maine.[34] At the first session of the International Congress of “Américanistes,” held at Nancy in July, 1875, M. Luciano Cordeiro, professor in the Institut at Coïmbre, presented, through M. Lucien Adam, an elaborate essay on the share of the Portuguese in the discovery of America. M. Cordeiro’s paper shows great industry and research, but it should be read with caution, as his patriotism sometimes exceeds his discretion. He looks at everything with the distorted vision of an enthusiastic lover of his native land.[35]

With Kunstmann’s Entdeckung, the Bavarian Academy published, under the care of that gentleman, Karl von Spruner, and Georg M. Thomas, an elegant atlas of thirteen maps in beautifully executed colored fac-similes. Portions of three of these maps relating to the Cortereals are given in a greatly reduced form, without the brilliant colors, by Dr. Kohl, in the Appendage to his chapter on these navigators. The first of these is a Portuguese chart, made about 1504 by an unknown hand. The southern part of Greenland is laid down upon it without a name; and farther to the west appears a considerable extent of country, answering, perhaps, to parts of our Labrador and Newfoundland, which bears the name “Terra de cortte Reall.”[36] The second chart, made by Pedro Reinel at about the same period, shows only Portuguese names and gives the Portuguese flag on that part of America visited by the Cortereals. Reinel was a Portuguese pilot of eminence, who afterward entered the Spanish service. The third map, also of Portuguese origin, of about the year 1520, although its exact date and its author’s name are unknown, contains at Labrador these words: “terram istam portugalenses viderunt atamen non intraverunt” (“The Portuguese saw this country, but did not enter it”); and again at a place farther west occurs the legend: “Terram istam gaspar corte Regalis portugalensis primo invenit, et secum tulit hōīes silvestres et ursos albos. In ea est maxiā multitudo animalium et avium necnon et pescium. qui anno sequenti naufragium perpessus nunquam rediit: sic et fratri ejus micaeli anno sequenti contigit” (“This country was first discovered by Gaspar Cortereal, a Portuguese, and he brought from there wild and barbarous men and white bears. There are to be found in it plenty of animals, birds, and fish. In the following year he was shipwrecked, and did not return: the same happened to his brother Michael in the next year”).[37]

The original authorities for the early French expeditions have, unhappily, not been preserved, or they still lie hidden in some dusky receptacle, baffling all search for them. The Breton fishermen perhaps wrote no accounts of their voyages across the Atlantic; but we might hope for some authentic reports of the voyages of Denys, Aubert, and others, made under the auspices of the rich and powerful Angos. The archives of Dieppe, however, were destroyed at the bombardment of that town in 1694, and those of La Rochelle met a similar fate.

The earliest mention of these transatlantic voyages that we now find occurs in a discourse attributed to a great French captain of Dieppe, preserved in an Italian translation by Ramusio, in his collection of voyages.[38] This discourse gives a summary description of the new countries, and a very brief mention of their discoverers. From internal evidence it appears to have been written in 1539. Ramusio, in introducing it, expresses his regret that he could not ascertain the name of its author. M. Louis Estancelin published in 1832 a journal of the voyage made by Jean Parmentier to Sumatra in 1529, which corresponds so exactly with the details of a similar voyage in the great captain’s discourse as to make it evident that Parmentier was the person described by Ramusio under that title.[39] This discourse mentions the voyages of Denys and Aubert, and speaks of Verrazano as the discoverer of Norumbega. From this source other writers have generally drawn their authority for these early voyages. The Chronicle of Eusebius,[40] however, contains an account of the visit of American savages to Rouen in 1509; and there is a curious bas-relief over a tomb in the Church of St. Jacques at Dieppe, in which American natives are represented.[41] Charlevoix speaks of the map which Jean Denys is said to have made.[42]

The authorities for the voyage of Verrazano are two copies of his letter, written to the King of France from Dieppe July 8, 1524, on his return from the voyage. Both of these are, however, Italian translations of the letter, the original of which does not exist. One was printed by Ramusio in 1556, in the third volume of his collection of voyages.[43] The other was found many years later in the Strozzi Library (the historical documents in which were afterward transferred to the Magliabechian, now merged in the National Library) in Florence, and was first published in 1841 by the New York Historical Society, with a translation made by Dr. J. G. Cogswell.[44] This contained a Cosmographical Appendix not in the copy printed by Ramusio. The earlier printed version was translated into English by Hakluyt for his Divers Voyages, which appeared in London in 1582, and was incorporated by him into his larger collection published in 1600.[45] Dr. Cogswell’s translation was reprinted in London by Dr. Asher in his Henry Hudson the Navigator, prepared for the Hakluyt Society in 1860.[46] Dr. Asher considers the Cosmographical Appendix a document of great importance. With this Strozzi copy there was found a letter written by one Fernando Carli from Lyons, Aug. 4, 1524, to his father in Florence, accounting for sending Verrazano’s letter, which Carli thought would interest his countrymen. This letter of Carli was first printed in 1844, with the essay of George W. Greene on Verrazano, in the Saggiatore (i. 257), a Roman journal of history and philology. Professor Greene, who was the American Consul at Rome, had been instrumental in obtaining the Verrazano letter for the New York Society, and had previously published his essay in the North American Review for October, 1837. He reprinted it in his Historical Studies. Carli’s letter may be consulted in English translations in Mr. Smith’s, Mr. Murphy’s, and Mr. Brevoort’s essays on Verrazano.

References to the voyage occur occasionally in French, English, and Spanish authors;[47] and it was not until within a few years that any doubt was thrown upon the authenticity of the narrative.

In October, 1864, Mr. Buckingham Smith, an accomplished scholar, who had been secretary of the American Legation at Madrid, read a paper upon this subject before the New York Historical Society, afterward published the same year under the title, An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Documents concerning a Discovery in North America claimed to have been made by Verrazzano. Mr. Smith’s death interrupted an enlarged and revised edition of this essay, which he was urged to prepare.[48] Mr. J. Carson Brevoort presented a paper on Verrazano, taking an opposite view, to the American Geographical Society, in 1871, which he printed three years later, entitled Verrazano the Navigator.[49] This was followed by the appearance, in 1875, of Mr. Henry C. Murphy’s The Voyage of Verrazzano, in which he makes an able plea against the genuineness of the accounts of the voyage. This book caused considerable discussion, and has been answered several times. It remains, I think, the last word on that side of the question,—except that Mr. Bancroft has omitted all notice of Verrazano in the revised edition of his History of the United States, and the editors of Appleton’s American Cyclopædia seem to adopt Mr. Murphy’s conclusions. Mr. Murphy’s book was reviewed by Harrisse in the Revue critique for Jan. 1, 1876, and his conclusions were accepted with some reserve. It was noticed unfavorably by Mr. Major in the London Geographical Magazine (iii. 186) for July, 1876 (copied from the Pall Mall Gazette of May 26, 1876), and by the Rev. B. F. De Costa in the American Church Review of the same date. In 1878-1879 papers on this subject by De Costa appeared in the Magazine of American History, which were afterward collected and revised by their author, and issued, with the title, Verrazano the Explorer, in 1881. This work contains an exhaustive bibliography of the subject, to which reference should be made.[50] In this same year, 1881, M. Cornelio Desimoni, vice-president of the “Società Ligure di Storia Patria,” printed in the fifteenth volume of the Atti of that Society a second Studio on Verrazano, in which he takes strong ground in favor of the genuineness of the voyage. This essay had been presented to the third congress of “Américanistes,” which met at Brussels in 1879. M. Desimoni had previously contributed to the Archivio Storico Italiano for August, 1877, an article upon this navigator,[51] but was able to review Mr. Murphy’s book only from notices he had seen of it. In a note at the end of his paper he states that he had procured a copy, and, so far from finding any reason to modify the views he had expressed, he thought that he could find in Mr. Murphy’s essay additional arguments for the authenticity of the voyage. The second Studio was followed by what M. Desimoni modestly calls a Third Appendix (the Studio having two Appendices printed with it). This is a paper of considerable importance, as it contains the reproduction of the map of which I shall speak later.[52]

Hieronimo da Verrazano, the brother of the navigator, made about 1529 a large mappamundi, on which the discoveries of Giovanni are laid down.[53] This map is preserved in the Borgiano Museum of the College “di Propaganda Fide” in Rome. It is not certain that the map is an original; and it was first mentioned by Von Murr in his Behaim, Gotha, 1801, p. 28, referring to a letter of Cardinal Borgia of Jan. 31, 1795, regarding it. It was again referred to in Millin’s Magazin encyclopédique, vol. lxviii. (1807); but general attention was first directed to it by M. Thomassy in 1852, in a communication published in the Nouvelles Annales des Voyages.[54] Mr. Brevoort[55] has given a description of it, which he prepared from two photographs, much reduced in size, made for the American Geographical Society in 1871. These photographs were not large enough nor sufficiently distinct to allow the names of places on the American coast to be read. This North American section of the map was first given with the names by Dr. De Costa, who had made a careful examination of the original during a visit to Rome, in the Magazine of American History for August, 1878.[56]

This map is not dated; but the following legend, placed at the position of Verrazano’s discoveries, fixes the date for 1529: “Verrazana sive nova gallia quale discoprì 5 anni fa giovanni da verrazano fiorentino per ordine e Comandamento del Cristianissimo Re di Francia” (“Verrazana, or New Gaul, which was discovered five years ago by Giovanni di Verrazano, of Florence, by the order and command of the most Christian King of France”).

One of the most interesting of the maps which show the traces and influence of Verrazano’s voyage is the copper globe known as the globe of Ulpius, from its maker, Euphrosynus Ulpius, constructed (as appears by an inscription on it) in 1542. This was found in Spain by the late Buckingham Smith, and bought for the New York Historical Society in 1859 by Mr. John D. Wolfe. Mr. Smith prepared a paper on this globe, which was printed, with a map of the portion relating to North America, in the Historical Magazine in 1862.[57] Dr. De Costa published, in the Magazine of American History for January, 1879, an excellent account of the globe of Ulpius, with a representation of one hemisphere, which, he says, “without being a fac-simile, is nevertheless sufficiently correct for historical purposes, and may be relied upon.”[58] On this globe, between Florida and the “Regio Baccalearum,” we find this inscription, covering a large extent of territory: “Verrazana sive Nova Gallia a Verrazano Florentino comperta anno Sal MD.” (“Verrazana, or New Gaul, discovered by Verrazano the Florentine, in the year of Salvation MD.”). It will be observed that the date has been left incomplete.

Other maps showing traces of Verrazano’s voyage are enumerated by Kohl, Brevoort, and De Costa, the account by the last-named being the latest, and perhaps the most complete.[59]

The controversy about this letter and voyage of Verrazano has excited so much interest, that it is well to give a concise summary of Mr. Murphy’s objections to the genuineness of the voyage, and to consider with equal brevity some of the replies to these objections, and the additional evidence for the support of the narrative which has been discovered since the date of Mr. Murphy’s essay.

The conclusions which Mr. Murphy seeks to establish are set forth in the following brief:—

“That the letter, according to the evidence upon which its existence is predicated, could not have been written by Verrazzano; that the instrumentality of the King of France in any such expedition of discovery as therein described is unsupported by the history of that country, and is inconsistent with the acknowledged acts of Francis and his successors, and therefore incredible; and that its description of the coast and some of the physical characteristics of the people and of the country are essentially false, and prove that the writer could not have made them from his own personal knowledge and experience, as pretended; and, in conclusion, it will be shown that its apparent knowledge of the direction and extent of the coast was derived from the exploration of Estévan Gomez, a Portuguese pilot in the service of the King of Spain; and that Verrazzano, at the time of his pretended discovery, was actually engaged in a corsairial expedition, sailing under the French flag, in a different part of the ocean.”[60]

Mr. Murphy argues, first, that the letter is not genuine, because no original has ever “been exhibited, or referred to in any contemporary or later historian as being in existence; and, although it falls within the era of modern history, not a single fact which it professes to describe relating to the fitting out of the expedition, the voyage, or the discovery, is corroborated by other testimony, whereby its genuineness might even be inferred.”[61] He considers it “highly improbable” that there could have been a French original of the letter, from which two translations were made, with an interval of twenty-seven years between them, “and yet no copy of it in French, or any memorial of its existence in that language, be known.”[62] As the Carli copy contains a Cosmographical Appendix not in the Ramusio text, Mr. Murphy assumes that Ramusio took his version from the Carli manuscript, revising it, and changing its language to suit his editorial taste. Later in his book he goes farther, and accuses Ramusio of suppressing a fact here and adding another there, to make the Verrazano narrative agree with other documents in his possession. As Carli’s letter to his father covered his copy of Verrazano’s letter, the inquiry is narrowed down to a question of the authenticity of the Carli letter. Mr. Murphy argues that this letter cannot be genuine, because it was written by an obscure person, at a great distance from the French Court, and from Dieppe (the port from which Verrazano wrote), only twenty-seven days after the date of the letter which it pretended to enclose.

Mr. Murphy, in the next division of his argument, asserts that no such voyage was made for the King of France:—

“Neither the letter, nor any document, chronicle, memoir, or history of any kind, public or private, printed or in manuscript, belonging to that period or the reign of Francis I., who then bore the crown, mentioning or in any manner referring to it, or to the voyage and discovery, has ever been found in France; and neither Francis himself, nor any of his successors, ever acknowledged or in any manner recognized such discovery, or asserted under it any right to the possession of the country; but, on the contrary, both he and they ignored it, in undertaking colonization in that region, by virtue of other discoveries made under their authority, or with their permission by their subjects.”[63]

He claims that the accounts of Verrazano’s voyage given by French historians all show internal evidence that the information was derived from Ramusio. The life of Francis I., he further says, is a complete denial of the assertion that Verrazano’s voyage was made by his direction. Francis sent out the expeditions of Cartier and of Roberval, and yet never recognized the discovery made by Verrazano. And the map, sometimes called that of Henry II. (the date of which, however, has been supposed to be some years earlier than the accession of that monarch in 1547), an official map displaying all the knowledge the French Court possessed of the American coast, is destitute of any trace of Verrazano.[64]

Mr. Murphy considers next what he calls the misrepresentations in the letter in regard to the geography of the coast. Only to one place, an island, is a name given. A very noticeable omission is that of the Chesapeake Bay, which could not have been overlooked by an explorer seeking a passage to Cathay; and not even the named island really exists: there is none on the coast answering its description.

He next undertakes to show that the letter claims the discovery of Cape Breton and the southerly coast of Newfoundland; and that Ramusio, knowing this claim to be false, “deliberately” interpolated into his text a clause to limit Verrazano’s discoveries to the point where those of the Bretons began.

Mr. Murphy argues next that “the description of the people and productions of the land [were] not made from the personal observation of the writer of the letter. What distinctively belonged to the natives is unnoticed, and what is originally mentioned of them is untrue.”[65] He thinks that all the details given of Indian manners and customs may have been copied from well-known narratives of other visits to other parts of America, and instances a source whence they may have been drawn. Fault is found with Verrazano’s letter because it neglects to mention such peculiarities of the Indians as wampum, tobacco, and, “most remarkable omission of all,” the bark canoe. The falsity of the narrative, made probable by these omissions, is rendered certain by the positive statement of a radical difference in complexion between the tribes found in different parts of the country.[66] And, again, the condition in which plants and vegetation are described is equally absurd and preposterous. And so both in the case of the color of the natives and in that of the conditions of the grapes, Ramusio, says Mr. Murphy, is obliged to alter the text of the narrative to make these stories probable.

The extrinsic evidence in support of the Verrazano discovery is next considered. As Mr. Murphy knew this evidence, it consisted of two pieces,—the Verrazano map, and the discourse of the great French sea-captain. The map was known, at the time of the printing of Mr. Murphy’s essay, only by description and by two inadequate photographs. Our present information about this map is so much greater, that Mr. Murphy’s account of it may be passed over until the map itself is described, later. The French captain’s discourse is known only in the Italian translation printed by Ramusio, and placed in his third volume, immediately after the Verrazano letter. Mr. Murphy dismisses this piece of evidence with few words. Finding in the discourse a clause relating to Verrazano, he at once concludes that Ramusio interpolated it, to make this document consistent with the letter.

A skilled advocate, after proving to his own satisfaction the falsity of a document, likes to find some genuine story which may have served the concocters of the falsehood as a model and storehouse for their lies. He wants also to complete his case by showing the motive for the forgery. This motive Mr. Murphy finds in the civic pride of Florence. All the evidence in favor of the story is traceable, he says, to Florence. As for the model and source of the letter, he discovers these in an attempt “to appropriate to a Florentine the glory which belonged to Estévan Gomez, a Portuguese pilot ... in the service of the Emperor.” He gives the voyage of Gomez in pretty full details. The landfall occurred on the coast of South Carolina. Thence he ran the coast northwardly to Cape Breton, where he turned and retraced his track as far as Florida, returning to Spain by way of Cuba. Mr. Murphy brings forward the map of Ribero, made in 1529, which he claims as an official exhibition of the discoveries of Gomez, and which he thinks was used in the construction of the Verrazano letter, because the several courses and distances run, as described in the letter, agree with similar divisions on the map.[67]

Mr. Murphy adds a concluding chapter, in which he gives the true history of the life of Verrazano, as he gathers it from authentic sources. Beyond his birth and parentage nothing is perhaps certainly known, except his career as a French corsair, under the name of Juan Florin or Florentin. In this capacity he made several rich captures from the Spanish and Portuguese, notably the treasure sent home by Cortes in 1523. Mr. Murphy thinks that a passage in a letter of the Portuguese ambassador in France, which appears to refer to preparations for a voyage of discovery about this time, is really an allusion to the proposed raid, the other being used by the French as a cloak or cover. At all events, he says, Verrazano cannot have been in two places at once,—on the coast of America, or on his return from Newfoundland to France, and at the same time have taken a ship on her way from the Indies to Portugal. He cites, as authority for this alibi, a statement of the capture of a treasure ship brought by a courier from Portugal, and mentioned in a letter of Peter Martyr, dated August 3, 1524.[68] Mr. Murphy then closes with an account of the capture and execution of Florin, or Verrazano.

Mr. Murphy’s argument is an ingenious and able one; and the book, having never been published, is not within the reach of all.[69]

To the objections named in the first divisions of Mr. Murphy’s argument,—that the letter could not have been written by Verrazano, and that no such voyage or discovery was made for the King of France,—replies suggest themselves very easily. We have no originals of many important documents, and yet do not doubt their general accuracy,—the letters of Columbus and Vespucius, for instance; the original French of Ribault; and, to come closer to Mr. Murphy, where is the report of Gomez’ voyage? There is none; and its only supports are an occasional not too flattering reference in the historians, and a map made by another hand. The despised voyage of Verrazano rests upon both a personal narrative and a map, the work of a brother.[70]

Mr. Murphy himself furnishes corroborative testimony to the probable truth of Verrazano’s voyage. He cites a passage from Andrade’s Chronicle of John III., then King of Portugal. By this it appears that John learned that one “Joâo Varezano, a Florentine,” had offered to the King of France to “discover other kingdoms in the East which the Portuguese had not found, and that in the ports of Normandy a fleet was being made ready under the favor of the admirals of the coast and the dissimulation of Francis, to colonize the land of Santa Cruz, called Brazil,” etc. The Portuguese King lost no time in sending a special ambassador, João da Silveyra, to remonstrate; and Mr. Murphy prints a letter from him to his sovereign, dated April 25, 1523, in which he says: “By what I hear, Maestro Joâo Verazano, who is going on the discovery of Cathay, has not left up to this date for want of opportunity, and because of differences, I understand, between himself and men; and on this topic, though knowing nothing positively, I have written my doubts in accompanying letters. I shall continue to doubt, unless he take his departure.”[71]

His Appendix contains also the agreement made by Admiral Chabot with Verrazano and others to “equip, victual, and fit three vessels to make the voyage for spices to the Indies.” Of this expedition Verrazano was to be chief pilot. Chabot was created admiral in March, 1526, which settles the date of this agreement. All these documents Mr. Murphy is obliged to twist into attempts to cover attacks on Spanish or Portuguese commerce by pretended voyages to the West. Is it not easier to take the simple meaning which they carry on their face? This agreement with the Admiral is supported by two documents first printed by M. Harrisse.[72] In the first Giovanni appoints his brother Jerome his attorney during the voyage to the Indies; the second is an agreement with one Adam Godefroy, bourgeois of Rouen, in reference to some trading contemplated in the voyage.[73] Dr. De Costa brings forward also another document relating to Verrazano, dated “the last day of September, 1525,” found in the archives of Rouen; and M. Margry states that he has a letter written at Paris, Nov. 14, 1527, in which Verrazano is said to be preparing to visit America with five ships.[74] And here, too, a reference should be made to the visit of Verrazano to England with some map or globe, as mentioned more than once by Hakluyt.[75]

There is yet hope that the original of the Verrazano letter may be discovered. Dr. De Costa thinks that he has evidence of its probable existence at one time in Spain; and also that it was used by Allefonsce in 1545,—eleven years before the publication by Ramusio.[76] There certainly seems no greater improbability in the supposition of two independent translations, Carli’s and Ramusio’s, from a single original, now lost, than in the assumption that Ramusio rewrote the Carli text and omitted the cosmographical appendix. Indeed Mr. Murphy’s charge, renewed at intervals in his essay as his theory of the fabrication of the letter requires,—that Ramusio was guilty of almost fraudulent editing,—has no foundation. The reputation of the Italian editor stands too high to be easily assailed; and as he was not a Florentine, motive for the deceit is lacking. A careful collation of the verbal differences between the versions is said to support the theory that they are separate translations of one original.[77] And M. Desimoni, presumably an exact scholar of his own language, asserts that a philological examination of the two texts shows that, if either is a rimaneggiato (worked over) copy, it is Carli’s, and not Ramusio’s.[78]

As to the genuineness of Carli’s letter to his father, the epistle contains a reference to the expected arrival of the King at Lyons, fixing its date, and giving thereby internal evidence of its reality. There is really no improbability in the statement that Verrazano had sent a copy of his letter to the Lyons merchants, and it is very easy to suppose Carli in the employ, or enjoying the friendship, of one or more of these merchants. The government of France had not been extended over the seaports long enough to make it any breach of privilege to communicate the results of a voyage to others than the King. And, as Mr. Major observes, in regard to the great distance between Dieppe and Lyons, “it would be a poor courier who could not compass that distance in twenty-seven days.”[79]

AN AUTOGRAPH OF FRANCIS I.

A reason for the failure of the Verrazano letter to make any impression on the French King, or to influence his subsequent action in reference to American discoveries and colonization, is found in the peculiar circumstances of Francis at this time. Engaged in constant wars, almost from the date of his accession to the throne, he was, in the summer of 1524, hurrying south to defend Provence from the attack of the Constable de Bourbon and the Marquis of Pescara, who had obtained permission of Charles V. to invade it. Many towns, the capital, Aix, among them, soon submitted to the Imperial forces; Marseilles was hotly besieged, and only relieved by the close approach of Francis with his army. Now the Queen-Mother was renamed Regent of France, and the war transferred to Italy, where, at the battle of Pavia, Feb. 24, 1525, Francis was defeated and taken prisoner. The following year was spent in captivity in Spain. On his release he at once broke his plighted faith, to renew the bitter struggle with the Emperor. For the time there could be thought or plans for nothing but war. Verrazano and his discovery were entirely forgotten at Court.

To Mr. Murphy’s objections founded on the misrepresentations of the coast geography, and the mistakes and omissions in the description of the people, contained in the letter, it is sufficient to answer that that gentleman mistakes the character of the letter, and demands more from it than he has a right to expect. “We do not quite see,” says Mr. Major, “why the first description of a country should be the only one expected to be free from imperfections.”[80] All the accounts of the early visits to this country have mixed with the general truth of the narrative more or less absurd and improbable statements. Dr. Kohl says: “It is well known that the old navigators in these western countries very often saw what they wished to see.”[81] As for the omission to notice the Chesapeake Bay, and to describe wampum, tobacco, and the bark-canoe, others besides Verrazano have been guilty of the same offence.[82]

The Verrazano letter should be regarded, not as an exact, well-digested report of the voyage (such as a modern explorer might make), but rather as the first hasty announcement to the King of his return and of the success of the voyage. It should be remembered also that mention is made in it of a “little book,” called by Dr. Kohl “the most precious part of what Verrazano wrote respecting his voyage,”[83] wherein were noted the observations of longitude and latitude, of the currents, ebb and flood of the sea, and of other matters which he hoped might be serviceable to navigators. These and other notes were doubtless used by the brother, Hieronimo, in making his map, and the abundance of names displayed on that map is a reply to Mr. Murphy’s objection that the letter contains but one name,—the Island of Louise.

I shall enumerate the authorities for the voyage of Gomez later in this essay; but as Mr. Murphy finds in it the source of the forged Verrazano letter, something must be said of it here. First, it is to be noticed that while Mr. Murphy refuses the narrative of Verrazano’s voyage utterly, he finds no difficulty in accepting one of Gomez’ which is to a great degree of his own (Murphy’s) construction. Dr. Kohl and other scholars have found it impossible to decide with any certainty as to the extent and direction of this voyage. Mr. Murphy presents us with full details,—a landfall in South Carolina; a coasting voyage to the north as far as Cape Breton, a careful observation on the return of rivers, capes, and bays; a temporary belief that he had found the strait he was seeking in the Penobscot, or “Rio de los Gamos,” on account of the great tide issuing from it, and a return to Spain by way of Cuba. The authorities cited in support of these statements are Peter Martyr’s Decades, Herrera, and Cespedes’ Yslario general,—the last in manuscript. The extracts from Martyr and Herrera I have reserved for another part of this chapter.[84] They do not support Mr. Murphy’s details. The Cespedes manuscript was the subject of some remarks by Mr. Buckingham Smith before the New York Historical Society, briefly reported in the Historical Magazine.[85] Mr. Smith had not been able to find this manuscript, but understood that it contained a full account of the voyage of Gomez. Mr. Murphy’s note shows that he knew of its existence in the National Library at Madrid. The director of that library has examined this manuscript at the request of Harrisse, and has not found in it any report of the voyage of Gomez by the navigator, nor does it contain any detailed account of the expedition. There is a reference which shows, perhaps, that Cespedes had seen one of Gomez’ writings.[86]

The attempt to derive the Verrazano letter from the voyage of Gomez is called by Mr. Major the “climax of the series of Mr. Murphy’s constructive imputations.”[87] His elaborate comparison of the courses of Verrazano with similar divisions on Ribero’s map is open to serious question. There are no such divisions on the map. He argues from a knowledge of the two extreme terms of Verrazano’s voyage, and neglects the intermediate term, the latitude of the harbor where the explorers spent fifteen days, doubtless the most accurate latitude taken. And even at the close of his comparison he allows that the latitudes of Ribero’s map are wrong, and says that the map does not give a faithful representation of the voyage of Gomez. It does not give by name the “Rio de los Gamos” which Cespedes says Gomez discovered, although that estuary was already drawn, in the same form given to it by Ribero, on the earlier Weimar map of 1527, which map omits the name of Gomez altogether.[88]

The passage from one of Peter Martyr’s letters, which Mr. Murphy cites to prove that Verrazano was capturing a Portuguese vessel at the time when the letter claimed him as making discoveries, is not very conclusive. Mr. Major thinks that there was time for him to have run down from Dieppe, after his return to that port, to the coast of Portugal, attracted by so rich a game as one hundred and eighty thousand ducats. But Martyr’s statement is indefinite. There are no particulars of time or place, when or where the treasure was taken. It is not even certain that the news brought by the courier was more than a rumor. Martyr’s language is: “Ad aliud hac, iter fecit regis Portugalliæ cursor, quod Florinus pyrata Gallus nauim regi suo raptauerit ab Indis venientem, qua merces vehebãtur gemmarum et aromatum ad ducatorum centum octoginta millium summam conqueritur.”[89]

The map of Hieronimo da Verrazano is without doubt the strongest support of the letter and voyage of his brother Giovanni. That these persons were brothers appears from a document dated May 11, 1526, whereby the navigator constitutes “Jarosme de Varasenne, son frère et heritier,” his attorney to act for him during a proposed voyage to the Indies. This paper, first printed by M. Harrisse in 1876, is signed “Janus Verrazanus.” Dr. De Costa gives a fac-simile of this signature,—here reproduced,—the only known autograph of Verrazano.[90]

Mr. Brevoort gives perhaps the best description of the map, and I condense the following from his account of it. The map is on three sheets of parchment, pasted together, and is 260 centimetres long and 130 wide (about 102 inches by 51), its length being just double the width. It is well preserved, somewhat stained; but no part, except coast-names, is indistinct. Its projection is the simple cylindrical square one, in which all the degrees of latitude are made equal to each other and to the equatorial ones. Like other maps of its period, it has the equator drawn below the middle of the map, and shows 90° of latitude north, and 64° south of it. In breadth it represents about 320° of longitude. There is no graduation for longitude; but the meridians that cross the centres and sides of the two great circles of windroses appear to be drawn seventy degrees apart. There is the usual network of cross-lines radiating from windroses, with one great central rose in north latitude 16°. From the centre of each rose thirty-two lines are drawn to the points of the compass, and these lines are prolonged to the margin of the map. One meridian is divided into degrees of latitude of equal size, each one numbered. Close to the upper margin there is a small scale, with a legend explaining that from point to point there are twelve and a half leagues, each of four miles. The scale is equal to eighteen degrees of latitude in length, and is subdivided into six parts, each having four divisions or points.

THE VERRAZANO MAP

A fac-simile of the engraving given by Brevoort, sufficient for a general outline.

Mr. Brevoort next gives a careful account of the representation of different parts of the world upon this map. Passing somewhat rapidly over the eastern hemisphere, which appears to be generally drawn from the most recent authorities, he takes up the western in some detail. The latitudes of the map are wrong; all the West India Islands are placed several degrees too high, thus forcing northward all other places. Verrazano’s landfall, for instance, is here indicated at about 42°, instead of 34°, as stated in the letter. With this correction the map shows the American coast with some approach to accuracy. Three French standards[91] are placed (according to Brevoort) on the territory claimed as Verrazano’s discovery,—one at the southern and one at the northern limit, with the third at the place where the explorers spent fifteen days. Over these three flags appears the inscription, in capital letters, “NOVA GALLIA SIVE IUCATANET,” and the legend, already cited, “VERRAZANA SIVE NOVA GALLIA,” etc.

Mr. Brevoort has industriously collected the scanty references to this map after it became the property of Cardinal Borgia, with whose collection it was bequeathed to the Propaganda in 1804; but he has been unable to discover the time when the Cardinal procured it, and the source whence it came to his collection. Nothing, indeed, is known of its early history.[92]

Dr. De Costa devotes a chapter of his book to the map of Hieronimo. After showing that the map-maker and the navigator were brothers, he proceeds to consider the genesis of the map, and finds the beginning of its North American portion in the Lorraine map, published in the Ptolemy of 1513. The latitudes of the Verrazano map are recognized as erroneous, and the observer is warned to disregard them. “When this is done, the student will have no difficulty in recognizing the outlines of the North Atlantic coast. For general correctness, the delineation is not equalled by any map of the sixteenth century.” Prominent places are identified and named.

The influence of this map upon subsequent ones is next considered, and a long list of maps showing this influence is cited. Dr. De Costa adds to the value of his discussion by giving tracings from several of these maps, with fac-similes of the Verrazano map, and an enlarged drawing of its coast-line.[93] But the strong point of his chapter, and that for which he deserves the greatest credit, is the publication of a sketch of Verrazano’s coast of the United States, with the names of places attached. These names he deciphered from the original map during a late visit to Rome. They are, of course, of the greatest value in any future study of the map. Dr. De Costa enters somewhat into a study of these names.[94]

M. Desimoni, while generally acknowledging his indebtedness to Dr. De Costa’s work, and praising that gentleman’s scholarship and research, could not accept all his inferences in the matter of the names, and doubted some of his readings. He therefore caused a fresh examination of the map to be made, through the kind and learned services of Dr. Giacomo Lumbroso and Canon Fabiani. He prints, in the Appendix to his Studio secondo on Verrazano, in parallel columns, the variations from De Costa’s readings. The great difficulty and doubt attending the deciphering words, particularly names, in old documents and maps, is well known to all who have attempted such work.[95]

A discovery made lately at Milan brings out a new map, and one of great value in the discussion of Verrazano’s voyage. M. Desimoni, on his return to Genoa from the Geographical Congress held at Venice in September, 1881, stopped at Milan, where he visited the Ambrosian Library to consult some maps. He was there told by the prefetto, the Abbé Ceriani, that a map by Vesconte Maggiolo, hitherto supposed to bear the date of 1587, and therefore to have been the work of one of the second generation of this family of map-makers, was really dated 1527. By comparing the legend on this map with one of similar form and writing on a map of 1524, it could be seen that the numeral 2 in the first map had become an 8 by lengthening the curves of the figure until they were finally joined. This appeared to have been done with ink of a paler color. M. Desimoni reproduces the two legends, to show the process.[96] He finds also certain peculiarities in the map, supposed of 1587, which prove that it must belong to the first decades of the century, and therefore entertains no doubt of the correctness of the change in the date.

Fresh from studies of early American voyages, M. Desimoni examined the North American portion of this map, particularly the coast, with as great care as his limited time and the poor condition of the parchment permitted. He was not a little surprised to find that the coast bore names closely related both to the Verrazano and to other maps whose source is yet undiscovered. He made a copy of the names, and afterward submitted his work to Signor Carlo Prayer, of Milan, who verified it, and also furnished as perfect a copy as it was possible to make of the names, and a sketch of the whole coast. This was reproduced by M. Desimoni to illustrate a paper prepared for the Società Ligure di’ Storia Patria.

This map measures about seventy-five centimetres in length by about fifty in width,—about 29½ inches by 19½. Its legend reads: “Vesconte de Maiollo conposuy hanc cartam in Janua anno d̄ny. 1527, die xx Decenbris.” The place occupied in the Verrazano map by the title Nova Gallia, etc., and the legend about Verrazano’s discovery, bears in this map the name Francesca, to indicate exactly a name for the whole region.

There is no mention of Verrazano by name in this map, but there is ample evidence of a connection between Maggiolo’s map and that of Hieronimo da Verrazano; very probably, M. Desimoni thinks, through the intervention or medium of some chart or charts yet unknown. The Maggiolo map has a reference to Florence, Verrazano’s birthplace, in the names of “Valle unbrosa” (Vallambrosa), “Careggi,” etc.; references to France and Francis in such names as “Anguileme,” “Longavilla,” “Normanvilla,” “Diepa,” “San Germano,” and others, particularly “Luisa,” applied to an island. The map is connected with Verrazano’s, not only by this name, but by a great number which the two have in common. It is true that these names are not always applied to the same positions on the two maps: “Luisa” is a squarish island on the Maggiolo map, and a triangular one on the other, and in the letter. The latitudes of Maggiolo’s map are different. Florida is placed as far south as the tropic. There is naturally some diversity in the general direction of the coast, and in the distances from place to place. But the substantial points are equivalent, if not identical. We have the Nova Gallia in its equivalent, Francesca; the same allusions in the names to Tuscany, France, Dieppe; and an identity in the names of three very important places,—“Luisa,” the port of refuge, and the attempt to show Cape Cod.

M. Desimoni examines again the map of Gastoldo, first published in the Ptolemy of 1548, inserted later in Ramusio’s third volume, and the globe known as the globe of Ulpius, already mentioned here. Both contain names that appear on the Verrazano map; but an examination shows that both contain names not on that map, and each contains at least one name not on the other. All these names are found on the map of Maggiolo; and M. Desimoni concludes his paper with a table in four parallel columns, in which a careful comparison is given of the nomenclature of four maps,—the Maggiolo of 1527, the Verrazano of 1529, the Ulpius globe of 1542, and the Gastoldo of 1548.[97]

The earliest mention of the voyage of Gomez is found in Oviedo’s Sumario, which was published at Toledo in 1526.[98] It is there stated (folio xiv, verso) that Gomez returned in November from a voyage begun the year before (1524, which we now know is an error); that he had found in the north “a greate parte of lande continuate from that which is caued Baccaleos, discoursynge towarde the West to the xl. and xli. degree [et puesta en quarenta grados y xli, et assi algo mas y algo menos], frō whense he brought certeyn Indians,” etc.[99]

Peter Martyr’s Decades were published in a complete edition at Alcala in 1530,[100] and his Letters appeared also that same year from the same press.[101] He speaks thus of Gomez in the Decades: “It is also decreed that one Stephanus Gomez, who also himselfe is a skillful navigator, shal goe another way, whereby, betweene the Baccalaos and Florida, long since our countries, he saith he will finde out a waye to Cataia: one onely shippe, called a Caruell, is furnished for him, and he shall haue no other thing in charge then to search out whether any passage to the great Chan, from out the diuers windings and vast compassings of this our Ocean, were to be founde.”[102]

And later he narrates the return of the expedition, its failure to find the strait (declaring his own opinion that Gomez’ “imaginations were vaine and frivolous”), and tells the story about the mistake of cloves and slaves.[103] In a letter written in August, 1524, he speaks also of the voyage of Gomez, but I find no mention of his return in that publication.[104]

Gomara devotes a short chapter to Gomez. He says that his purpose was to find a northern passage, but that he failed; and so, loading his ship with slaves, returned home. He also relates the clove anecdote.[105]

Herrera gives an account of Gomez and his voyage. He says: “Corriò por toda aquella costa hasta la Florida, gran trecho de Tierra lo que hasta entonces, por otros Navios Castellanos, no estaba navegado, aunque Sebastian Gaboto, Juan Verraçano, i otros lo havian navegado.... Desde la Florida, atravesò à la Isla de Cuba, i fue à dar al Puerto de Santiago, adonde se refrescò, i le regalò Andrès de Duero, por lo qual el Rei le mostrò agradecimiento, bolviò à Castilla i aportò à la Coruña diez meses despues que saliò de aquel Puerto,” etc.[106] “He ran along that whole coast as far as Florida,—a great stretch of land which, up to that time, had not been traversed by other Spanish ships, although Sebastian Cabot, John Verrazano, and others had sailed along it.... From Florida he passed to the island of Cuba, and entered the port of Santiago, where he refreshed, and Andrès de Duero regaled him, for which the King showed gratitude. He returned to Castille, and landed at Corunna ten months after he had sailed from that port,” etc.

Galvano, in his account of the voyage, appears to make Gomez sail along the American coast from south to north; while Herrera, it will have been observed, reverses this direction.[107] The testimony of Cespedes has already been considered.[108] Dr. Kohl, in his Discovery of Maine, gives a good account of Gomez’ voyage, based on careful study of the authorities.[109]

The mutinous conduct of Gomez in the fleet of Magellan is related by Pigafetta, who accompanied that expedition, and kept a diary, from which he afterward made up an account of the voyage. One of the copies of this, which existed only in manuscript, was given to Louisa, mother of Francis I. of France, who employed Jacques Antoine Fabre to translate it into French. He made in preference an abridgment of the account, and this was published at Paris in 1525.[110]

For the opinion that a northern passage through America could be discovered somewhere between Florida and the Baccalaos, Navarrete’s work may be consulted.[111] He gives among his documents the letter of the King commanding the attendance of Dornelos;[112] the agreement with Agramonte in 1511, and his commission as captain of the expedition,[113] and the grant to De Ayllon.[114] He has found also the appointment of Gomez as pilot just before the sailing of his expedition, Feb. 10, 1525.[115]

The Agreement of Gomez with the Emperor for the voyage is printed in full in the Documentos ineditos.[116] Hernando Cortes’ letter about the existence of the northern passage may be consulted in an English translation in Mr. Folsom’s Despatches of Cortes.[117]

The discoveries of Gomez are laid down upon a map[118] of the world made, at the command of the Emperor, in 1529 by Diego Ribero, a well-known cosmographer, who had been sent to the Congress of Badajos as one of the Spanish experts.

On a large section of this coast extending from Cape Breton westward about three hundred leagues to a point where the land bends to the south, is the legend: “Tierra de Estevan Gomez la qual descubrio por mandado de su mag^t nel anno de 1525 ay en ella muchos arboles y fructas de los de españa y muchos rodovallos y salmones y sollos: no han allado oro.” (“The Country of Stephen Gomez, which he discovered at the command of his Majesty, in the year 1525. There are here many trees and fruits similar to those in Spain, and many walruses and salmon, and fish of all sorts. Gold they have not found.”)[119] This is supposed to have been drawn from the reports of Gomez, and to contain his coast-lines and the names which he gave to places.

Oviedo wrote in 1537 a description of the American coast from a map made by Alonzo de Chaves the year before. He frequently cites Gomez as his authority for the names of places, etc. This part of Oviedo’s work remained in manuscript until its publication by the Academy of Madrid in 1852. Dr. Kohl enters into an elaborate commentary of this description by Oviedo, and the Chaves map, of which not even a copy has come down to our times.[120]

The books of André Thevet which contain the accounts of his visit to this country are the Singularitez de la France antarctique and the Cosmographie universelle.[121] Besides these works Thevet published an account of his journey to the East, Cosmographie du Levant, at Lyons, in 1554, and a series of portraits and lives of great men, ancient and modern, in two volumes, at Paris, in 1584. He left also several manuscripts, which are now preserved in the National Library at Paris.

The Singularitez passed to a second edition,[122] and was translated into Italian by Giuseppe Horologgi,[123] and into English[124] by M. Hacket. A reprint of the original edition was published at Paris in 1878, with notes, and a biographical preface by M. Paul Gaffarel of Dijon.

The Cosmographie was not reprinted, nor was it, so far as I know, translated into any other language. In the Magazine of American History for February, 1882, however, Dr. De Costa published a translation of the part of the book which relates to New England.

It seems quite probable that Thevet never made the voyage along the American coast of which he pretends to give an account. He gives nothing at all from Florida to what he calls the River of Norumbega, and is generally very indefinite in all his statements. He may easily have taken his stories from other travellers’ books, and it is known he used Cartier and others; and indeed he is said to have been ill nearly all the time of his stay in Brazil, and to have scarcely stirred out of the island where the fort was, waiting for the ship to make ready for home.

Thevet’s reputation for veracity is poor, particularly among his contemporaries. Jean de Léry, who was one of the party which went out to Villegagnon, in response to his appeal for Protestant ministers in 1556, after Thevet’s return home, wrote an account of the Brazil enterprise. This, first published at La Rochelle in 1578, passed through several editions. The preface of the second edition is occupied with an exposure of the “errors and impostures” of Thevet, and that of the fifth edition contains more matter of the same kind. De Léry calls Thevet “impudent menteur,” and speaks of his books as “vieux haillons et fripperies.” Again he says, “Il fait des contes prophanes, ridicules, pueriles, et mensonges pour tous ses escrits.” Possibly some allowance may be made for the odium theologicum of the writer, a Calvinist, disputing with a monk; and it may be remembered that both had been disappointed in any hopes they had entertained of the conversion of the Indians, through the treachery of Villegagnon.

Belleforest and Fumée have also written in harsh terms about Thevet. De Thou, a historian of far more dignified and impartial character than these others, is nearly as abusive. He says: “Il s’appliqua par une ridicule vanité à écrire des livres, qu’il vendait à des misérables libraires: après avoir compilé des extraits de différents auteurs, il y ajoutait tout ce qu’il trouvait dans les guides des chemins et autres livres semblables qui sont entre les mains du peuple. Ignorant au-delà de ce qu’on peut imaginer, il mettait dans ses livres l’incertain pour le certain, et le faux pour le vrai, avec une assurance étonnante.”[125]

Even Thevet’s latest editor, M. Gaffarel, is forced to begin his notice of the monk by allowing that he was not “un de ces écrivans de premier ordre, qui, par la sûreté de leur critique, le charme de leur style, ou l’intérét de leurs écrits commandent l’admiration à leurs contemporains, et s’imposent à la postérité. Il passait, au contraire, même de son temps, pour ne pas avoir un jugement très sur,” etc. M. Gaffarel claims for Thevet the credit of introducing tobacco into France, and hopes that this may balance the imperfections of his books.

Dr. Kohl gave some credence to Thevet’s narrative, but admits that he is “not esteemed as a very reliable author.” Still, he translated the account of his visit to Penobscot Bay, and inserted it entire in his Discovery of Maine.[126] Dr. De Costa in 1870 criticised this view of Dr. Kohl.[127]

Note.—Harrisse, in his recent Discovery of North America (p. 234), cites for the first time a long passage about Gomez’s voyage from the Islario of Alonso de Santa Cruz, preserved in the Imperial Library at Vienna, and finds it to be the source whence Cespedes (see ante, p. 24) drew his language; and in it he finds somewhat uncertain proof that Gomez went as far north as the entrance of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and corrected some cartographical notions respecting those waters. A map showing Gomez’s discoveries is attached to the Islario, and Harrisse gives this map in fac-simile.

MAPS OF THE
EASTERN COAST OF NORTH AMERICA,

1500-1535,

WITH THE CARTOGRAPHICAL HISTORY OF THE SEA OF VERRAZANO.

BY THE EDITOR.

THE Editor has elsewhere[128] referred to the great uncertainty attending the identification of minor coast localities in the earliest maps. The most trustworthy interpreters recognize two important canons,—namely, that cartographical names during a long series of years, and at an era of exploration forerunning settlements, are always suspicious and often delusive, as Professor Bache has pointed out in the Coast Survey Report for 1855 (p. 10); and that direction is likely to be right, and distance easily wrong, as Humboldt has explained. Nothing is more seductive than to let a spirit of dogmatism direct in the interpretation of the early maps, and there is no field of research in which predisposition to belief may lead one so wrongly. It was largely in the spirit of finding what they sought, that the early map-makers fashioned their charts; and their interpretation depends quite as much on geographical views current in those days as upon geographical facts patent in these days.

The study of early American cartography may be said to have begun with Humboldt; and in this restricted field no one has since rendered greater service than Dr. Kohl.[129] Mr. Brevoort, not without justice, calls him “the most able comparative geographer of our day.”[130] The labor which Dr. Kohl performed took expression not only in his publications, but also in the collection of copies of early maps which he formed and annotated for the United States Government twenty-five years ago. His later printed books, using necessarily much of the same material, may be riper from longer experience; but the Washington Collection, as he formed it, is still valuable, and deserves to be better known. It belongs to the Department of State, and consists of not far from four hundred maps, following printed and manuscript originals. They are carefully and handsomely executed, but with little attempt at reproduction in fac-simile. By favor of the Secretary of State, and through the interest of Theodore F. Dwight, Esq., the librarian of that department, the collection has been intrusted to the Editor for use in the present work and for the preparation of an annotated calendar of the maps which will be printed by Harvard University.

THE ADMIRAL’S MAP, 1513.

Besides this collection in the State Department (which cost the Government nearly $6,000), the Reports of the United States Coast-Survey[131] describe three other collections, accompanied by descriptive texts, which he made for that office, and which he proposed to call collectively “The Hydrographic Annals of the United States.” They repeat many of the maps belonging to the State Department Collection. These supplemental collections are,—

1. On the eastern coast of the United States, giving copies of 41 maps; the titles of 155 surveys of the coast between 1612 and 1851; a list of 291 works on the early explorations of the coast; and an historical memoir on such voyages, from the Northmen down.

2. On the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico falling within the United States, giving copies of 48 maps from 1500 to 1846; the titles of 58 surveys (exclusive of those of the United States), between 1733 and 1851; a list of 221 books and manuscripts on the explorations since 1524; and an historical memoir of the explorations between 1492 and 1722.[132]

3. On the west coast of the United States, giving a bibliography of 230 titles.

There is another historical memoir by Dr. Kohl, with other copies of the maps of the west coast, in the Library of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, Mass.; and this also has been in the temporary custody of the Editor.[133] At the time of his death Dr. Kohl was occupied with the preparation of a history of the Search for a Northwest Passage, from Cortes to Franklin, of which only a fragment appeared in the Augsburg periodical, Ausland. It was a theme which would naturally have embraced the whole extent of his knowledge of early American discovery and cartography.[134]

The best printed enumeration of maps of the eastern coast of North America is given by Harrisse for the earlier period in his Cabots, and for a later period in his Notes sur la Nouvelle France.

PORTUGUESE CHART, 1503 (after Kohl).

The map of La Cosa (1500) still remains the earliest of these delineations, and a heliotype of it is given in another volume.[135] Harrisse has lately claimed the discovery in Italy of a Portuguese chart of 1502, showing the coast from the Gulf of Mexico to about the region of the Hudson River, which bears coast names in twenty-two places; but the full publication of the facts has not yet been made;[136] and there is no present means of ascertaining what relation it bears to a large manuscript map of the world, of Portuguese origin, preserved in the Archives at Munich, of which a part is herewith sketched from Dr. Kohl’s copy, and to which he gives the conjectural date of 1503.