Читать книгу Canada - Jean Newton McIlwraith - Страница 8

HOEVER first landed upon the western shores of the American continents, whether they came from China, Japan, Siberia, or from the islands of the Pacific Ocean, they did not go home and write, or have written for them, accounts of their voyages and the strange new lands they had seen. Of the earliest visitors to the eastern shores, on the other hand, there are records in plenty, some of them quite clear, others a little misty. Some describe wild men and animals, plants, mountains, rivers, and rocks, as they are now known to have really been; while in others are fairy stories about palaces of gold and crystal, about one-legged men, griffins, hobgoblins, and demons that we know never existed.

The historical tales, and also the myths of the Northmen—a name given to the natives of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark—are called sagas, and from these old stories we learn that five hundred years before America was discovered by Columbus it had been visited by the Norsemen, or Northmen. These Vikings (Sons of the Fiord) were more at home on the sea than on land, and their "dragon" ships, with high, carved bows and sterns, propelled either by oars or sails, were both stronger and faster than the caravels of Columbus. About the year 875 they had settled upon Iceland, and to sail onwards to Greenland was a shorter journey than back to their homes in Scandinavia.

986. The saga of Eric the Red tells how he killed a man in Norway and fled to Iceland, got into trouble there and fled still further, sailing away to Greenland, where, with some comrades as hardy as himself, he spent three years in exploring the coasts. At last they fixed upon a good place for a settlement, near where Juliane-shaab now stands, in a grassy valley at the head of Igaliko fiord. It was, and still is, one of the few spots that deserved the name Greenland Eric gave to it, which spread afterwards to the whole peninsula. He thought rightly that there was a great deal in a name, when one wanted to coax emigrants to a place. The first settlers from Iceland built their houses in the spot Eric had chosen, and called it Brattahlid. Other tiny villages sprang up near by in course of time, and a settlement was also planted on the west coast, so far north as Godthaab.

Eric the Red had several sons. Leif, the most famous of them, was a Christian, and brought the first priest to Greenland. The remains of a stone church built by the Norsemen can be seen at the present day, and they are said to have had several monasteries, a cathedral, and about a dozen churches for a population of five or six thousand.

Leif Ericson was much impressed by the story of one Bjarni Herjulfsson who told of losing his way in a mist while sailing between Iceland and Greenland, and of seeing land when the fog lifted, which was neither the one country nor the other, but lay further to the south and west. According to a writer of his own country, "Leif was a large man and strong, of noble aspect, prudent and moderate in all things," but he had his share of the daring spirit of his time, and though he had no mariner's compass, he made up his mind to search for this unknown country which Bjarni had seen.

1000. Thirty-five vikings sailed with Leif from Brattahlid, and truly they did find land before long, either Labrador or Newfoundland. Very desolate it looked, not like the fine wooded coast described by Bjarni, so they kept on farther to the south and came to a shore where the trees grew so thickly they named it Markland (Woodland). This was probably the coast of Cape Breton or Nova Scotia, so that Leif Ericson and his men were the first European visitors to Canada, so far as we know.

Sailing still southward, they landed at a place where many wild vines were growing, and they called it Vinland. There they spent the whole winter, which seemed mild to them after the climate of Greenland, but it was probably no further south than Massachusetts. From that time onward there were a number of expeditions from Greenland to Vinland, chiefly to bring home timber which was scarce both in Greenland and Iceland; and some of the wood-cutters spent two or three winters in the new country, hewing down the tall trees that were to make masts for their ships.

Another saga relates how a rich nobleman, called Thorfinn Karlsefni, tried to found a colony in Vinland. He took cattle there, along with his settlers, and the natives were much alarmed at the bellowing of a bull, for they knew no domestic animal except the dog. Nor did they understand the value of the costly furs they sold to the Norsemen for little strips of red cloth, just as they gave them away to later explorers for beads and trinkets. Though friendly at first, it was not long before quarrels arose between the white men and the red, and the idea of planting a colony in Vinland had to be given up, for the Norsemen had not the firearms of a later day which gave Spanish, French, and English pioneers so great an advantage over hordes of savages armed only with bows and arrows.

Early in the fifteenth century the Greenland settlements were entirely forsaken, after an existence of four hundred years. It was most likely the Eskimo who destroyed them, though the decline of the shipping trade with Norway and Denmark, and a plague called the Black Death may have helped.

Nowhere else on the western continent are there any traces of the Norsemen remaining, though the walls of an old stone mill near Newport used to be thought their work. Longfellow's poem, "The Skeleton in Armor," was written with that idea, and it gives a good picture of one of those old vikings, but neither skeleton nor tower had in truth anything to do with the Norsemen.

Greenland in their day was considered but a remote part of Europe, and therefore they had no notion of the importance of their discovery. Believing, as they did, that the earth was flat, it might extend westward without end, for aught they knew, or cared. America had been discovered again for two hundred years before those who knew of the Norse sagas began to say, "This must be the country the Northmen called Vinland."

1394. An Italian, named Zeno, wrote an account of a visit he paid to the dying Norse settlements in Greenland, but with that exception there were no visitors to America from Europe (who left cards) for about one hundred years. The nations of the older continent had too many troubles at home to spend their strength in venturing abroad; but peace brought plenty, and plenty brought the desire for luxuries that could be had only in the East. Trade revived, and India was the country every adventurer wanted to reach. Whoever should first succeed in sailing there, to bring home a shipload of silks and diamonds, of gold and silver, sapphires and pearls, would be the most famous man in all Europe.

The Portuguese, who ranked next to the old Norsemen as mariners, tried it by sailing down the coast of Africa, even so far as the cape they named "Good Hope," because they were sure they had found the right way to reach India; and they had discovered most of the islands of the Atlantic Ocean before the Pacific was known to exist. Christopher Columbus went with the Portuguese on some of their voyages, but it was learning the wonderful lesson that the earth is round which decided him to sail directly westward in order to reach that eastern "land where the spices grow."

1492. The story of his going from court to court in Europe to find a sovereign with faith enough in his enterprise to fit out vessels for him is well known. So, too, is the glory he added to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella by planting the Spanish flag upon San Salvador, one of the Bahama islands. Columbus thought it was an island off the coast of Japan which he had reached, and to the end of his life he believed that the different islands he discovered were not far from the clime he had come to seek. Therefore he called them the West Indies, and their natives, Indians.

Columbus made four voyages to the New World, but the year before he found the southern continent an English expedition had landed upon the mainland of North America. This was commanded by John Cabot, a Venetian by birth, but living with his family in Bristol, at that time the busiest seaport town of England.

Hearing the story of Columbus, and plenty of sailors' yarns besides, Master Cabot made up his mind to outdo them all. Nothing could be done without leave, in those days, so he had to get permission from Henry the Seventh before he could set out in search of new lands. He went at his own expense, and promised that one-fifth of the riches he might gain should be given to the English king.

1497. Generally two or three ships went together on these voyages into the unknown, but John Cabot sailed away to the westward with one small vessel and a crew of eighteen men, including probably his second son, Sebastian, a young man of twenty-four. They started in the beginning of May, and it was the 24th of June when they caught sight of the northern headland of Cape Breton, though they thought it was China. Cabot went ashore, and, according to the custom of discoverers, he set up the flag of the king who had sent him and took possession of the country in his name. No natives were seen, though some rude tools were found that must have been made by man.

It is not unlikely that the explorers sailed round the Gulf of St. Lawrence and out by the Straits of Belleisle, the best exit in the summer season. When they reached home, in the month of August, so great a stir did John Cabot make with the news he brought, that we are told he "dressed in silk and was called, or called himself 'the Great Admiral.'"

He and his son set out on a second trip in April of the next year, and they visited different points along the coast of North America, probably as far south as Cape Cod, but no one knows exactly, nor has any one told what became of John Cabot. His son, Sebastian, made other voyages alone, and is said to have entered the great inland sea, Hudson's Bay.

1500. The same shores touched upon by the Cabots were visited by Gaspar Cortereal in the interests of the King of Portugal. He brought back savages and white bears to Europe with him, but from his last voyage he never returned.

1504-1518. While the Spaniards were keeping up their search for gold in the south, fishermen from Normandy and Brittany were finding out the wealth more surely to be drawn in the shape of codfish from the Banks of Newfoundland. These are not land-banks but flat-topped mountains in the Atlantic Ocean whose heads come to within five hundred feet of the surface. Cape Breton was christened by Breton fishermen; but it was the Baron de Lèry who first tried to plant a colony in that region. He made a bad choice in Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia, a bleak and barren spot noted ever since for its wrecks. His settlers all died, though their cattle lived on and multiplied.

Meanwhile the King of France woke up to what his neighbours of Europe were doing in the new West, and he cried—

"Shall the kings of Spain and Portugal divide all America between them without giving me a share? I should like to see the clause in Father Adam's will that makes them his sole heirs!"

1524. Francis the First therefore sent out a sailor of Florence, called Verrazano, to take what he could, and the parts taken seem to have been those already claimed by Cortereal and the Cabots; but it is not easy to say for certain, because each man made his own map and gave to the lands he saw what names he pleased. Very curious are these old charts, showing as they do that the early visitors never dreamt what a solid bulk of continent was between them and Asia. For long years they thought they were discovering islands through which, sooner or later, the desired passage to the Indies would be found, but after all Vasco da Gama got there first by sailing round the Cape of Good Hope (1497).

The coast-line of North America was not discovered as a whole, but just a scrap here and a scrap there. We see from maps made even in the middle of the sixteenth century that South America had been sailed about, and its size and shape pretty well known while North America was still thought to consist of islands.

First Brazil, then the whole of South America, and lastly North America were named from the famous pilot and astronomer, Americus Vespucius, a friend of Columbus, who made several voyages to both continents in the early years of the sixteenth century. He did what no one before him had done—wrote about the Western Hemisphere when he came back from it—and he was also the first to speak of a New World, as distinct from the Old World which Columbus and all the others thought they had found.