Читать книгу The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West - F.A.S. M.A. Robert E. Anderson - Страница 5

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1 Norse Discovery.—By glancing at a map of the north Atlantic, the reader will at once see that the natural approach from Europe to the Western Continent was by Iceland and Greenland—especially in those early days when ocean navigation was unknown. Iceland is nearer to Greenland than to Norway; and Greenland is part of America. But in Iceland there were Celtic settlers in the early centuries; and even King Arthur, according to the history of Geoffrey of Monmouth, sailed north to that "Ultima Thule." During the ninth century a Christian community had been established there under certain Irish monks. This early civilization, however, was destined to become presently extinct.

It was in A. D. 875, i. e., during the reign of Alfred the Great in England, that the Norse earl, Ingolf, led a colony to Iceland. More strenuous and savage than the Christian Celts whom they found there, the latter with their preaching monks soon sailed to the south, and left the Northmen masters of the island. The Norse colony under Ingolf was strongly reenforced by Norwegians who took refuge there to avoid the tyranny of their king, Harold, the Fair-haired. Ingolf built the town Ingolfshof, named after him, and also Reikiavik, afterward the capital, named from the "reek" or steam of its hot springs. So important did this colony become that in the second generation the population amounted to 60,000.

Ingolf was admired by the poet James Montgomery (not to be confounded with Robert, whom Macaulay criticized so severely), who in 1819 thus wrote of him and his island:

There on a homeless soil his foot he placed,

Framed his hut-palace, colonized the waste,

And ruled his horde with patriarchal sway

—Where Justice reigns, 'tis Freedom to obey....

And Iceland shone for generous lore renowned,

A northern light when all was gloom around.

The next year after Ingolf had come to Iceland, Gunnbiorn, a hardy Norseman, driven in his ship westerly, sighted a strange land.... About half a century later, judging by the Icelandic sagas, we learn that a wind-tossed vessel was thrown upon a coast far away which was called "Mickle Ireland" (Irland it Mikla)—[Winsor's Hist. America, i, 61].

Gunnbiorn's discovery was utilized by Erik the Red, another sea-rover, in A. D. 980, who sailed to it and, after three years' stay, returned with a favorable account—giving it the fair name Greenland. The Norse established two centers of population on Greenland. It is now believed that after doubling Cape Farewell, they built their first town near that head and the second farther north. The former, Eystribygd (i. e., "Easter Bigging"), developed into a large colony, having in the fourteenth century 190 settlements, with a cathedral and eleven churches, and containing two cities and three or four monasteries. The second town, Westribygd (i. e., "Wester Bigging") had grown to ninety settlements and four churches in the same time.

The germ and root of that civilization (afterward extinct, as we shall see) was due to Leif the son of Red Erik, who visited Norway, the mother-country, at the very close of the tenth century.

Remains of a Norse Church at Katortuk, Greenland.

He found that the king and people there had enthusiastically embraced the new religion, Christianity. Leif presently shared their fervor, and decided to reject Woden, Thor, and the other gods of old Scandinavia. A priest was told off to accompany Leif back to Greenland, and preach the new faith. It was thus that a Christian civilization first found footing in arctic America.

The ruins of those early Christian churches (see illustration above) form most interesting objects in modern Greenland; near the chief ruin is a curious circular group of large stones.

The poet of "Greenland," to whom we have already referred, quotes from a Danish chronicle to the effect that, in the golden age of the colony, there were a hundred parishes to form the bishopric; and that the see was ruled by seventeen bishops from A. D. 1120 to 1408. Bishop Andrew is the last mentioned, ordained in 1408 by the Archbishop of Drontheim.

From the same authority we learn that according to some of the annals "the best wheat grew to perfection in the valleys; the forests were extensive; flocks and herds were numerous and very large and fat." The Cloister of St. Thomas was heated by pipes from a warm spring, and attached to the cloister was a richly cultivated garden.

After Leif, son of Erik, had introduced Christianity into Greenland, his next step was to extend the Norse civilization still farther within the American continent. News had reached him of a new land, with a level coast, lying nine days' sailing southwest of Greenland. Picking thirty-five men, Leif started for further exploration. One part of the new country was barren and rocky, therefore Leif named it Helluland (i. e., "Stone Land"), which appears to have been Newfoundland. Farther south they found a sandy shore, backed by a level forest country, which Leif named Markland (i. e., "Wood Land"), identified with Nova Scotia. After two days' sail, according to the saga account, having landed and explored the new continent along the banks of a river, they resolved to winter there. In one of these explorations a German called Tyrker found some grapes on a wild vine, and brought a specimen for the admiration of Leif and his party. This country was therefore named Vinland (i. e., "Wine Land"), and is identified with New England, part of Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.[2]

Our Greenland poet thus refers to Leif's landing:

Wineland the glad discoverers called that shore,

And back the tidings of its riches bore;

But soon return'd with colonizing bands.

Map of Vinland

The Norsemen founded a regular settlement in Vinland, establishing there a Christian community related to that of Greenland. Leif's brother, Korvald, explored the interior in all directions. With the natives, who are called "Skraelings" in the sagas, they traded in furs; these people, who seemed dwarfish to the Norsemen, used leathern boats and were no doubt Eskimos:

A stunted, stern, uncouth, amphibious stock.

The principal settler in Vinland was Thorfinn, an Icelander, who had married a daughter-in-law of Erik the Red. She persuaded Thorfinn to sail to the new country in order to make a permanent settlement there. In the year 1007 A. D. he sailed with 160 men, having live stock and other colonial equipments. After three years he returned to Greenland, his wife having given birth to a son during their first year in Vinland. From this son, Snorre, it is claimed by some Norwegian historians, that Thorwaldsen, the eminent Danish sculptor is descended. After the time of Thorfinn, the settlement in Vinland continued to flourish, having a good export trade in timber with Greenland. In 1121 A. D. according to the Icelandic saga, the bishop, Erik Upsi, visited Vinland, that country being, like Iceland and Greenland, included in his bishopric. The last voyage to Vinland for timber, according to the sagas, was in 1347.

Professor Horsford, of Cambridge, Mass., finds the site of Norumbega, mentioned in various old maps, on the River Charles, near Waltham, Mass., and maintains that town to be identical with Vinland of the Norsemen. To prove his belief in this theory, the professor built a tower commemorating the Norse discoveries. He argued that Norumbega was a corruption by the Indians of the word Norvegr a Norse form of "Norway."

The abandonment of Vinland by the Norse settlers may be compared with that of Gosnold's expedition to the same region near the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Gosnold was sent to plant an English colony in America, after the failure of Sir Walter Raleigh's settlement at Roanoke (North Carolina); and the coast explored corresponded exactly to that which the Norse settlers had named Vinland, lying between the sites of Boston and New York. He gave the name Cape Cod to that promontory, and also named the islands Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and the Elizabeth group. Selecting one of these for settling a colony, he built on it a storehouse and fort. The scheme, however, failed, owing to the threats of the natives and the scarcity of supplies, and all the colonists sailed from Massachusetts, just as the Norse settlers had done many generations previously.

The expedition of Gosnold to Vinland, however, bore good fruit, from the favorable report of the new country which he made at home. The merchants of Bristol fitted out two ships under Martin Pring, and in the first voyage a great part of Maine (lying north of Massachusetts) was explored, and the coast south to Martha's Vineyard, where Gosnold had been. This led to profitable traffic with the natives, and three years later Pring made a more complete survey of Maine.

Vinland was also the scene of the famous landing of the Mayflower, bringing its Puritans from England. It was in Cape Cod Bay that she was first moored. After exploring the new country, just as Leif Erikson had done so many generations previously, they chose a place on the west side of the bay and named the little settlement "Plymouth," after the last English port from which they had sailed. Farther north, still in Vinland, they soon founded two other towns, "Salem" and "Boston." Those three settlements have ever since been important centers of energy and intelligence in Massachusetts, as well as memorials of the Norse occupation of Vinland.

On the occasion of a public statue being erected in Boston, Mass., to the memory of Leif Erikson, a committee of the Massachusetts Historical Society formally decided thus: "It is antecedently probable that the Northmen discovered America in the early part of the eleventh century."

Prof. Daniel Wilson, in his learned work Prehistoric Man (ii, 83, 85), thus gives his opinion as to the Norse colony:

With all reasonable doubt as to the accuracy of details, there is the strongest probability in favor of the authenticity of the American Vinland.

The Dighton Stone in the Taunton River, Massachusetts.

Of the Norse colonies in Greenland there are some undoubted remains, one being a stone inscription in runes, proving that it was made before the Reformation, when that mode of writing was forbidden by law. The stone is four miles beyond Upernavik. The inscription, according to Professor Rask, runs thus:

Erling the son of Sigvat, and Enride Oddsoen,

Had cleared the place and raised a mound

On the Friday after Rogation-day;

—date either 1135 or 1170.

Rafn, the celebrated Danish archeologist, states as the result of many years' research, that America was repeatedly visited by the Icelanders in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries; that the estuary of the St. Lawrence was their chief station; that they had coasted southward to Carolina, everywhere introducing some Christian civilization among the natives.

The Dighton Stone. Fig. 2.

A supposed rock memorial of the Norsemen is the Dighton Stone in the Taunton River, Massachusetts; one of its sentences, according to Professor Rafn, being:

"Thorfinn with 151 Norse seafaring men took possession of this land."

The figures and letters (whether runic or merely Indian) inscribed on the Dighton Rock have been copied by antiquaries at the following dates: 1680, 1712, 1730, 1768, 1788, 1807, 1812. The above illustration (Fig. 2) shows the last mentioned.

There have been many probable traces of ancient Norsemen found in America, besides those already given. At Cape Cod, in the last generation, a number of hearth-stones were found under a layer of peat. A more famous relic was the skeleton dug up in Fall River, Mass., with an ornamental belt of metal tubes made from fragments of flat brass; there were also some arrow-heads of the same material. Longfellow, the New England poet, naturally had his attention directed to this discovery (made, 1831), and founded on it his ballad The Skeleton in Armor, connecting it with the Round Tower at Newport. The latter, according to Professor Rafn, "was erected decidedly not later than the twelfth century."

I was a Viking old,

My deeds, though manifold,

No Skald in song has told

No Saga taught thee!...

Far in the Northern Land

By the wild Baltic's strand

I with my childish hand

Tamed the ger-falcon.

Oft to his frozen lair

Tracked I the grisly bear,

While from my path the hare

Fled like a shadow.

Scarce had I put to sea

Bearing the maid with me—

Fairest of all was she

Among the Norsemen!

Three weeks we westward bore,

And when the storm was o'er,

Cloud-like we saw the shore

Stretching to leeward;

There for my lady's bower,

Built I this lofty tower

Which to this very hour

Stands looking seaward!

Sir Clements Markham, of the Royal Geographical Society, believes that the Norse settlers in Greenland were driven from their settlements there by Eskimos coming, not from the interior of America, but from West Siberia along the polar regions, by Wrangell Land [v. Journal, R, G. S., 1865, and Arctic Geography, 1875].

There was much curiosity from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century as to the site of the lost colonies of Greenland which had so long flourished. In 1568 and 1579 the King of Denmark sent two expeditions, the latter in charge of an Englishman, but no traces were found. At the beginning of the eighteenth century some light was thrown upon the problem by a missionary called Egede, who first described the ruins and relics observable on the west coast. By the success of his preaching among the Greenlanders for fifteen years, assisted by other gospel missionaries, the Moravians were induced to found their settlements in the country, principally in the southwest.

It seems probable that in early times the climate of Iceland was milder than it now is. Columbus, some fifteen years before his great voyage across the Atlantic, sailed to this northern "Thule," and reports that there was no ice. If so, it is surely possible that Greenland also may have been greener and more attractive than during the recent centuries. Why should it not at one time have been fully deserving of the name by which we still know it? Some would explain the change in climatic conditions by the closing in of icepacks. At present Greenland is buried deep under a vast, solid ice-cap from which only a few of the highest peaks protrude to show the position of the submerged mountains, but at former periods, according to geologists, there were gardens and farms flourishing under a genial climate. Others suppose that, were the ice removed, we should see an archipelago of elevated islands.

2. Celtic Discovery of America.—We have already glanced at the fact that when the Norsemen first seized Iceland they found that island inhabited by Irish Celts. These Christianized Celts made way before the savage invaders, who did not accept the Catholic religion till about the close of the tenth century. Sailing south, those dispossessed Irish probably joined their brother Celts who had already long held a district on the eastern coast of North America, which some Norse skippers called "White Man's Land," and also Irland-it-Mikla (i. e., "Mickle Ireland"). Professor Rafn places this district on the coast of Carolina. A learned memoir, published 1851, attempts to prove that the mysterious "mound-builders" of the Ohio Valley were of the same race as the settlers on Mickle Ireland, and related to the "white-bearded men" who established an extinct civilization in Mexico. A French antiquary, 1875, identified Mickle Ireland with Ontario and Quebec. Beauvois, in his Elysée trans-atlantique, derives the name Labrador from the Innis Labrada, an island mentioned in an ancient Irish romance.[3] Another Irish discoverer was St. Brandan,[4] Abbot of Cluainfert, Ireland (died May 16, 577), who was told that far in the ocean lay an island which was the land promised to the saints. St. Brandan set sail in company with seventy-five monks, and spent seven years upon the ocean in two voyages, discovering this island and many others equally marvelous, including one which turned out to be the back of a huge fish, upon which they celebrated Easter.[5]

Among the Celtic claimants for discovery we must also include the Welsh, who lay stress upon certain resemblances between their language and the dialects of the native Americans. A better argument is the historical account taken from their annals about the expedition of Prince Madoc, son of a Welsh chieftain, who sailed due west in the year 1170, after the rumor of the Norse discoveries had reached Britain. He landed on a vast and fertile continent where he settled 120 colonists. On his return to Wales he fitted out a second fleet of ten ships, but the annals give no report of the result. Several writers state that the place of landing was near the Gulf of Mexico: Hakluyt connecting the discovery with Mexico (1589) and again with the West Indies (edition of 1600). In the seventeenth century some authors wished to substantiate the story of Prince Madoc, in order that the British claim to America should antedate the Spanish claim through Columbus. Prince Madoc is, to most readers, only known by Southey's poem.[6]

3. Basque Discovery of America.—Who are the Basque people? A curious race of Spanish mountaineers, who have been as great a puzzle to ethnologists and historians as their language has been to philologists and scholars. We know, however, that in former times they were nearly all seamen, making long voyages to the north for whale and Newfoundland cod fishing. They have produced excellent navigators; and possibly preceded Columbus in discovering America. Sebastian, the lieutenant of Magellan, was one of the Basque race. Magellan did not live to complete his famous voyage, therefore Sebastian was the first actual circumnavigator of our globe.

François Michel, in his work Le Pays Basque, says that the Basque sailors knew the coasts of Newfoundland a century before the time of Columbus; and that it was from one of these ocean mariners that he first learned the existence of a continent beyond the Atlantic. Other arguments are derived from comparing the peculiarities of the Basque tongue with those of the American dialects. Whitney, an American scholar, concludes that "No other dialect of the Old World so much resembles the American languages in structure as the Basque."

4. Jewish Discovery of America.—There is one claim for the discovery of America, which, though quite improbable, if not impossible, has been upheld and sanctioned by many scholarly works in several languages. It is argued that the red Indians represent the ten "Lost Tribes" of the Hebrew people who had been deported to Assyria and Media (v. Extinct Civilizations of the East, p. 109). The theory was first started by some Spanish priest-missionaries, and has since been defended by many learned divines both in England and America, one leading argument being certain similarities in the languages. Catlin (v. Smithsonian Report, 1885) enumerates many analogies which he found among the Western Indians. The most authoritative statement is that of Lord Kingsborough in the well-known Mexican Antiquities (1830-'48), chiefly in Vol. VII. Some writers actually quote a statement made in the Mormon Bible! Leading New England divines, like Mayhew and Cotton Mather, espoused the cause with similar faith, as well as Roger Williams and William Penn.

5. The Italian Discovery of America.—Not through Columbus the Genoese, or Amerigo Vespucci, the Florentine, although they were certainly Italians, but by two Venetians, Nicolo and Antonio Zeno. In A. D. 1380 or 1390 these brothers Zeni were shipwrecked in the North Atlantic, and, when staying in Frislanda, made the acquaintance of a sailor who, after twenty-six years' absence, had returned, giving them the following report:

"Being driven west in a gale, he found an island with civilized inhabitants, who had Latin books, but could not speak Norse, and whose country was called Estotiland, while a region on the mainland, farther south, to which he had also gone, was called Drogeo. Here he had met with cannibals. Still farther south was a great country with towns and temples."

The two brothers Zeni finally conveyed this account to another brother in Venice, together with a map of those distant regions, but these documents remained neglected till 1558, when a descendant compiled a book to embody the information, accompanied by a map, now famous as "the Zeno map."

Humboldt, with reference to this map, remarks that it is singular that the name Frislanda should have been applied by Columbus to an island south of Iceland. Washington Irving (in his Life of Columbus) explains the book by a desire to appeal to the national pride of Italy, since, if true, the discovery of the brothers would antedate that of Columbus by a century.

Malte-Brun, the distinguished geographer, distinctly accepted the Zeni narrative as true, and believed that it was by colonists from Greenland that the Latin books had reached Estotiland. Another strong advocate afterward appeared in Mr. Major, an official in the map department of the British Museum, who believed that much of the map in question represented genuine information of the fourteenth century, mixed with some spurious parts inserted by the younger Zeno. Mr. Major's paper on The Site of the Lost Colony of Greenland Determined, and the pre-Columbian Discoveries of America Confirmed, appeared in R. Geog. Soc. Journal, 1873; v. also Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., 1874. Nordenskjöld also accepted the chief results of this Italian discovery, and as an arctic explorer of experience, his opinion carries weight. Mercator and Hugo Grotius were also believers in the Zeni account.