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Brazil Island.

Another fleeting insular vision of this pseudo-geographical realm was a smaller body of floating land, very inconstant in position, which is always given some form of the name that, in later times, got a constant shape in the word Brazil. We can trace it back into the portolanos of the middle of the fourteenth century; and it had not disappeared as a survival twenty or thirty years ago in the admiralty charts of Great Britain. The English were sending out expeditions from Bristol in search of it even while Columbus was seeking countenance for his western schemes; and Cabot, at a little later day, was instrumental in other searches.

Travelers in the Orient.

Foremost among the travelers who had excited the interest of Toscanelli, and whose names he possibly brought for the first time to the attention of Columbus, were Marco Polo, Sir John Mandeville, and Nicolas de Conti.

MODERN EASTERN ASIA, WITH THE OLD AND NEW NAMES. [From Yule's Cathay.

Marco Polo,

It is a question to be resolved only by critical study as to what was the language in which Marco Polo first dictated, in a Genoese prison in 1298, the original narrative of his experiences in Cathay. The inquiry has engaged the attention of all his editors, and has invited the critical sagacity of D'Avezac. There seems little doubt that it was written down in French.

EASTERN ASIA, CATALAN MAP, 1375. [From Yule's Cathay, vol. i.]

MARCO POLO. [From an original at Rome.]

There are no references by Columbus himself to the Asiatic travels of Marco Polo, but his acquaintance with the marvelous book of the Venetian observer may safely be assumed. The multiplication of texts of the Milione following upon his first dictation, and upon the subsequent revision in 1307, may not, indeed, have caused it to be widely known in various manuscript forms, be it in Latin or Italian. Nor is it likely that Columbus could have read the earliest edition which was put in type, for it was in German in 1477; but there is the interesting possibility that this work of the Nuremberg press may have been known to Martin Behaim, a Nuremberger then in Lisbon, and likely enough to have been a familiar of Columbus. The fact that there is in the Biblioteca Colombina at Seville a copy of the first Latin printed edition (1485) with notes, which seem to be in Columbus's handwriting, may be taken as evidence, that at least in the later years of his study the inspiration which Marco Polo could well have been to him was not wanting; and the story may even be true as told in Navarrete, that Columbus had a copy of this famous book at his side during his first voyage, in 1492.

At the time when Humboldt doubted the knowledge of Columbus in respect to Marco Polo, this treasure of the Colombina was not known, and these later developments have shown how such a question was not to be settled as Humboldt supposed, by the fact that Columbus quoted Æneas Sylvius upon Cipango, and did not quote Marco Polo.

Sir John Mandeville.

Neither does Columbus refer to the journey and strange stories of Sir John Mandeville, whose recitals came to a generation which was beginning to forget the stories of Marco Polo, and which, by fostering a passion for the marvelous, had readily become open to the English knight's bewildering fancies. The same negation of evidence, however, that satisfied Humboldt as respects Marco Polo will hardly suffice to establish Columbus's ignorance of the marvels which did more, perhaps, than the narratives of any other traveler to awaken Europe to the wonders of the Orient. Bernaldez, in fact, tells us that Columbus was a reader of Mandeville, whose recital was first printed in French at Lyons in 1480, within a few years after Columbus's arrival in Portugal.

Nicolo di Conti.

It was to Florence, in Toscanelli's time, not far from 1420, that Nicolo di Conti, a Venetian, came, after his long sojourn of a quarter of a century in the far East. In Conti's new marvels, the Florentine scholar saw a rejuvenation of the wonders of Marco Polo. It was from Conti, doubtless, that Toscanelli got some of that confidence in a western voyage which, in his epistle to Columbus, he speaks of as derived from a returned traveler.

Pope Eugene IV., not far from the time of the birth of Columbus, compelled Conti to relate his experiences to Poggio Bracciolini. This scribe made what he could out of the monstrous tales, and translated the stories into Latin. In this condition Columbus may have known the narrative at a later day. The information which Conti gave was eagerly availed of by the cosmographers of the time, and Colonel Yule, the modern English writer on ancient Cathay, thinks that Fra Mauro got for his map more from Conti than that traveler ventured to disclose to Poggio.

Toscanelli's death, 1482.

Toscanelli, at the time of writing this letter to Columbus, had long enjoyed a reputation as a student of terrestrial and celestial phenomena. He had received, in 1463, the dedication by Regiomontanus of his treatise on the quadrature of the circle. He was, as has been said, an old man of seventy-seven when Columbus opened his correspondence with him. It was not his fate to live long enough to see his physical views substantiated by Diaz and Columbus, for he died in 1482.

Columbus confers with others.

In two of the contemporary writers, Bartholomew Columbus is credited with having incited his brother Christopher to the views which he developed regarding a western passage, and these two were Antonio Gallo and Giustiniani, the commentator of the Psalms. It has been of late contended by H. Grothe, in his Leonardo da Vinci (Berlin, 1874), that it was at this time, too, when that eminent artist conducted a correspondence with Columbus about a western way to Asia. But there is little need of particularizing other advocates of a belief which had within the range of credible history never ceased to have exponents. The conception was in no respect the merit of Columbus, except as he grasped a tradition, which others did not, and it is strange, that Navarrete in quoting the testimony of Ferdinand and Isabella, of August 8, 1497, to the credit of the discovery of Columbus, as his own proper work, does not see that it was the venturesome, and as was then thought foolhardy, deed to prove the conception which those monarchs commended, and not the conception itself.

Columbus writes out reasons for his belief.

We learn from the Historie that its writer had found among the papers of Columbus the evidence of the grounds of his belief in the western passage, as under varying impressions it had been formulated in his mind. These reasons divide easily into three groups: First, those based on deductions drawn from scientific research, and as expressed in the beliefs of Ptolemy, Marinus, Strabo, and Pliny; second, views which the authority of eminent writers had rendered weightier, quoting as such the works of Aristotle, Seneca, Strabo, Pliny, Solinus, Marco Polo, Mandeville, Pierre d'Ailly, and Toscanelli; and third, the stories of sailors as to lands and indications of lands westerly.

From these views, instigated or confirmed by such opinions, Columbus gradually arranged his opinions, in not one of which did he prove to be right, except as regards the sphericity of the earth; and the last was a belief which had been the common property of learned men, and at intervals occupying even the popular mind, from a very early date.

Sphericity of the earth.

Transmission of the belief in it.

The conception among the Greeks of a plane earth, which was taught in the Homeric and Hesiodic poems, began to give place to a crude notion of a spherical form at a period that no one can definitely determine, though we find it taught by the Pythagoreans in Italy in the sixth century before Christ. The spherical view and its demonstration passed down through long generations of Greeks, under the sanction of Plato and their other highest thinkers. In the fourth century before Christ, Aristotle and others, by watching the moon's shadow in an eclipse, and by observing the rising and setting of the heavenly bodies in different latitudes, had proved the roundness of the earth to their satisfaction; Eratosthenes first measured a degree of latitude in the third century; Hipparchus, in the second century, was the earliest to establish geographical positions; and in the second century of the Christian era Ptolemy had formulated for succeeding times the general scope of the transmitted belief. During all these centuries it was perhaps rather a possession of the learned. We infer from Aristotle that the view was a novelty in his time; but in the third century before Christ it began to engage popular attention in the poem of Aratus, and at about 200 BC Crates is said to have given palpable manifestation of the theory in a globe, ten feet in diameter, which he constructed.

The belief passed to Italy and the Latins, and was sung by Hyginus and Manilius in the time of Augustus. We find it also in the minds of Pliny, Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid. So the belief became the heirloom of the learned throughout the classic times, and it was directly coupled in the minds of Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Strabo, Seneca, and others with a conviction, more or less pronounced, of an easy western voyage from Spain to India.

Seneca's Medea.

Cosmas.

Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Pierre d'Ailly.

No one of the ancient expressions of this belief seems to have clung more in the memory of Columbus than that in the Medea of Seneca; and it is an interesting confirmation that in a copy of the book which belonged to his son Ferdinand, and which is now preserved in Seville, the passage is scored by the son's hand, while in a marginal note he has attested the fact that its prophecy of a western passage had been made good by his father in 1492. Though the opinion was opposed by St. Chrysostom in the fourth century, it was taught by St. Augustine and Isidore in the fifth. Cosmas in the sixth century was unable to understand how, if the earth was a sphere, those at the antipodes could see Christ at his coming. That settled the question in his mind. The Venerable Bede, however, in the eighth century, was not constrained by any such arguments, and taught the spherical theory. Jourdain, a modern French authority, has found distinct evidence that all through the Middle Ages the belief in the western way was kept alive by the study of Aristotle; and we know how the Arabs perpetuated the teachings of that philosopher, which in turn were percolated through the Levant to Mediterranean peoples. It is a striking fact that at a time when Spain was bending all her energies to drive the Moor from the Iberian peninsula, that country was also engaged in pursuing those discoveries along the western way to India which were almost a direct result of the Arab preservation of the cosmographical learning of Aristotle and Ptolemy. A belief in an earth-ball had the testimony of Dante in the twelfth century, and it was the well-known faith of Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and the schoolmen, in the thirteenth. It continued to be held by the philosophers, who kept alive these more recent names, and came to Columbus because of the use of Bacon which Pierre d'Ailly had made.

The belief in the sphericity of the earth carried with it of necessity another—that the east was to be found in the west. Superstition, ignorance, and fear might magnify the obstacles to a passage through that drear Sea of Darkness, but in Columbus's time, in some learned minds at least, there was no distrust as to the accomplishment of such a voyage beyond the chance of obstacles in the way.

ALBERTUS MAGNUS. [From Reusner's Icones.]

The belief opposed by the Church.

It is true that in this interval of very many centuries there had been lapses into unbelief. There were long periods, indeed, when no one dared to teach the doctrine. Whenever and wherever the Epicureans supplanted the Pythagoreans, the belief fell with the disciples of Pythagoras. There had been, during the days of St. Chrysostom and other of the fathers, a decision of the Church against it. There were doubtless, as Humboldt says, conservers, during all this time, of the traditions of antiquity, since the monasteries and colleges—even in an age when to be unlearned was more pardonable than to be pagan—were of themselves quite a world apart from the dullness of the masses of the people.

Pierre D'Ailly's Imago Mundi.

Roger Bacon's Opus Majus.

A hundred years before Columbus, the inheritor of much of this conservation was the Bishop of Cambray, that Pierre d'Ailly whose Imago Mundi (1410) was so often on the lips of Columbus, and out of which it is more than likely that Columbus drank of the knowledge of Aristotle, Strabo, and Seneca, and to a degree greater perhaps than he was aware of he took thence the wisdom of Roger Bacon. It was through the Opus Majus (1267) of this English philosopher that western Europe found accessible the stories of the "silver walls and golden towers" of Quinsay as described by Rubruquis, the wandering missionary, who in the thirteenth century excited the cupidity of the Mediterranean merchants by his accounts of the inexhaustible treasures of eastern Asia, and which the reader of to-day may find in the collections of Samuel Purchas.

Pierre d'Ailly's position in regard to cosmographical knowledge was hardly a dominant one. He seems to know nothing of Marco Polo, Bacon's contemporary, and he never speaks of Cathay, even when he urges the views which he has borrowed from Roger Bacon, of the extension of Asia towards Western Europe.

Any acquaintance with the Imago Mundi during these days of Columbus in Portugal came probably through report, though possibly he may have met with manuscripts of the work; for it was not till after he had gone to Spain that D'Ailly could have been read in any printed edition, the first being issued in 1490.

Rotundity and gravitation.

The theory of the rotundity of the earth carried with it one objection, which in the time of Columbus was sure sooner or later to be seized upon. If, going west, the ship sank with the declivity of the earth's contour, how was she going to mount such an elevation on her return voyage?—a doubt not so unreasonable in an age which had hardly more than the vaguest notion of the laws of gravitation, though some, like Vespucius, were not without a certain prescience of the fact.

Size of the earth.

By the middle of the third century before Christ, Eratosthenes, accepting sphericity, had by astronomical methods studied the extent of the earth's circumference, and, according to the interpretation of his results by modern scholars, he came surprisingly near to the actual size, when he exceeded the truth by perhaps a twelfth part. The calculations of Eratosthenes commended themselves to Hipparchus, Strabo, and Pliny. A century later than Eratosthenes, a new calculation, made by Posidonius of Rhodes, reduced the magnitude to a globe of about four fifths its proper size. It was palpably certain to the observant philosophers, from the beginning of their observations on the size of the earth, that the portion known to commerce and curiosity was but a small part of what might yet be known. The unknown, however, is always a terror. Going north from temperate Europe increased the cold, going south augmented the heat; and it was no bold thought for the naturalist to conclude that a north existed in which the cold was unbearable, and a south in which the heat was too great for life. Views like these stayed the impulse for exploration even down to the century of Columbus, and magnified the horrors which so long balked the exploration of the Portuguese on the African coast. There had been intervals, however, when men in the Indian Ocean had dared to pass the equator.

Unknown regions.

Strabo and Marinus on the size of the earth.

Therefore it was before the age of Columbus that, east and west along the temperate belt, men's minds groped to find new conditions beyond the range of known habitable regions. Strabo, in the first century before Christ, made this habitable zone stretch over 120 degrees, or a third of the circumference of the earth. The corresponding extension of Marinus of Tyre in the second century after Christ stretched over 225 degrees. This geographer did not define the land's border on the ocean at the east, but it was not unusual with the cosmographers who followed him to carry the farthest limits of Asia to what is actually the meridian of the Sandwich Islands. On the west Marinus pushed the Fortunate Islands (Canaries) two degrees and a half beyond Cape Finisterre, failing to comprehend their real position, which for the westernmost, Ferro, is something like nine degrees beyond the farther limits of the main land.

Ptolemy's view.

The belt of the known world running in the direction of the equator was, in the conception of Ptolemy, the contemporary of Marinus, about seventy-nine degrees wide, sixteen of these being south of the equatorial line. This was a contraction from the previous estimate of Marinus, who had made it over eighty-seven degrees.

Toscanelli's view.

Toscanelli reduced the globe to a circumference of about 18,000 miles, losing about 6,000 miles; and the untracked ocean, lying west of Lisbon, was about one third of this distance. In other words, the known world occupied about 240 of the 360 degrees constituting the equatorial length. Few of the various computations of this time gave such scant dimensions to the unknown proportion of the line. The Laon globe, which was made ten or twelve years later than Toscanelli's time, was equally scant. Behaim, who figured out the relations of the known to the unknown circuit, during the summer before Columbus sailed on his first voyage, reduced what was known to not much more than a third of the whole. It was the fashion, too, with an easy reliance on their genuineness, to refer to the visions of Esdras in support of a belief in the small part—a sixth—of the surface of the globe covered by the ocean.

LAON GLOBE. [After D'Avezac.]

Views of Columbus.

The problem lay in Columbus's mind thus: he accepted the theory of the division of the circumference of the earth into twenty-four hours, as it had come down from Marinus of Tyre, when this ancient astronomer supposed that from the eastern verge of Asia to the western extremity of Europe there was a space of fifteen hours. The discovery of the Azores had pushed the known limit a single hour farther towards the setting sun, making sixteen hours, or two thirds of the circumference of 360 degrees. There were left eight hours, or one hundred and twenty degrees, to represent the space between the Azores and Asia. This calculation in reality brought the Asiatic coast forward to the meridian of California, obliterating the width of the Pacific at that latitude, and reducing by so much the size of the globe as Columbus measured it, on the assumption that Marinus was correct. This, however, he denied. If the Historie reports Columbus exactly, he contended that the testimony of Marco Polo and Mandeville carried the verge of Asia so far east that the land distance was more than fifteen hours across; and by as much as this increased the distance, by so much more was the Asiatic shore pushed nearer the coasts of Europe. "We can thus determine," he says, "that India is even neighboring to Spain and Africa."

Length of a degree.

The calculation of course depended on what was the length of a degree, and on this point there was some difference of opinion. Toscanelli had so reduced a degree's length that China was brought forward on his planisphere till its coast line cut the meridian of the present Newfoundland.

Quinsay.

We can well imagine how this undue contraction of the size of the globe, as the belief lay in the mind of Columbus, and as he expressed it later (July 7, 1503), did much to push him forward, and was a helpful illusion in inducing others to venture upon the voyage with him. The courage required to sail out of some Iberian port due west a hundred and twenty degrees in order to strike the regions about the great Chinese city of Quinsay, or Kanfu, Hangtscheufu, and Kingszu, as it has been later called, was more easily summoned than if the actual distance of two hundred and thirty-one degrees had been recognized, or even the two hundred and four degrees necessary in reality to reach Cipango, or Japan. The views of Toscanelli, as we have seen, reduced the duration of risk westward to so small a figure as fifty-two degrees. So it had not been an unusual belief, more or less prominent for many generations, that with a fair wind it required no great run westward to reach Cathay, if one dared to undertake it. If there were no insurmountable obstacles in the Sea of Darkness, it would not be difficult to reach earlier that multitude of islands which was supposed to fringe the coast of China.

Asiatic islands.

Cipango.

Spanish and Portuguese explorations.

It was a common belief, moreover, that somewhere in this void lay the great island of Cipango—the goal of Columbus's voyage. Sometimes nearer and sometimes farther it lay from the Asiatic coast. Pinzon saw in Rome in 1491 a map which carried it well away from that coast; and if one could find somewhere in the English archives the sea-chart with which Bartholomew Columbus enforced the views of his brother, to gain the support of the English king, it is supposed that it would reveal a somewhat similar location of the coveted island. Here, then, was a space, larger or smaller, as men differently believed, interjacent along this known zone between the ascertained extreme east in Asia and the accepted most distant west at Cape St. Vincent in Spain, as was thought in Strabo's time, or at the Canaries, as was comprehended in the days of Ptolemy. What there was in this unknown space between Spain and Cathay was the problem which balked the philosophers quite as much as that other uncertainty, which concerned what might possibly be found in the southern hemisphere, could one dare to enter the torrid heats of the supposed equatorial ocean, or in the northern wastes, could one venture to sail beyond the Arctic Circle. These curious quests of the inquisitive and learned minds of the early centuries of the Christian era were the prototypes of the actual explorations which it was given in the fifteenth century to the Spaniards and Portuguese respectively to undertake. The commercial rivalry which had in the past kept Genoa and Venice watchful of each other's advantage had by their maritime ventures in the Atlantic passed to these two peninsular nations, and England was not long behind them in starting in her race for maritime supremacy.

Sea of Darkness.

It was in human nature that these unknown regions should become those either of enchantment or dismay, according to personal proclivities. It is not necessary to seek far for any reason for this. An unknown stretch of waters was just the place for the resorts of the Gorgons and to find the Islands of the Blest, and to nurture other creations of the literary and spiritual instincts, seeking to give a habitation to fancies. It is equally in human nature that what the intellect has habilitated in this way the fears, desires, and superstitions of men in due time turn to their own use. It was easy, under the stress of all this complexity of belief and anticipation, for this supposable interjacent oceanic void to teem in men's imaginations with regions of almost every imaginable character; and when, in the days of the Roman republic, the Canaries were reached, there was no doubt but the ancient Islands of the Blest had been found, only in turn to pass out of cognizance, and once more to fall into the abyss of the Unknown.

Story of Atlantis.

Land of the Meropes.

Saturnian continent.

There are, however, three legends which have come down to us from the classic times, which the discovery of America revived with new interest in the speculative excursions of the curiously learned, and it is one of the proofs of the narrow range of Columbus's acquaintance with original classic writers that these legends were not pressed by him in support of his views. The most persistent of these in presenting a question for the physical geographer is the story of Atlantis, traced to a tale told by Plato of a tradition of an island in the Atlantic which eight thousand years ago had existed in the west, opposite the Pillars of Hercules; and which, in a great inundation, had sunken beneath the sea, leaving in mid ocean large mud shoals to impede navigation and add to the terrors of a vast unknown deep. There have been those since the time of Gomara who have believed that the land which Columbus found dry and inhabited was a resurrected Atlantis, and geographers even of the seventeenth century have mapped out its provinces within the usual outline of the American continents. Others have held, and some still hold, that the Atlantic islands are but peaks of this submerged continent. There is no evidence to show that these fancies of the philosopher ever disturbed even the most erratic moments of Columbus, nor could he have pored over the printed Latin of Plato, if it came in his way, till its first edition appeared in 1483, during his stay in Portugal. Neither do we find that he makes any references to that other creation, the land of the Meropes, as figured in the passages cited by Ælian some seven hundred years after Theopompus had conjured up the vision in the fourth century before Christ. Equally ignorant was Columbus, it would appear, of the great Saturnian continent, lying five days west from Britain, which makes a story in Plutarch's Morals.

Earlier voyages on the Atlantic.

Phœnicians.

Carthaginians.

Romans.

We deal with a different problem when we pass from these theories and imaginings of western lands to such records as exist of what seem like attempts in the earliest days to attain by actual exploration the secret of this interjacent void. The Phœnicians had passed the Straits of Gibraltar and found Gades (Cadiz), and very likely attempted to course the Atlantic, about 1100 years before the birth of Christ. Perhaps they went to Cornwall for tin. It may have been by no means impossible for them to have passed among the Azores and even to have reached the American islands and main, as a statement in Diodorus Siculus has been interpreted to signify. Then five hundred years later or more we observe the Carthaginians pursuing their adventurous way outside the Pillars of Hercules, going down the African coast under Hanno to try the equatorial horrors, or running westerly under Hamilko to wonder at the Sargasso sea. Later, the Phœnicians seem to have made some lodgment in the islands off the coasts of northwestern Africa. The Romans in the fourth century before Christ pushed their way out into the Atlantic under Pytheas and Euthymenes, the one daring to go as far as Thule—whatever that was—in the north, and the other to Senegal in the south. It was in the same century that Rome had the strange sight of some unknown barbarians, of a race not recognizable, who were taken upon the shores of the German Ocean, where they had been cast away. Later writers have imagined—for no stronger word can be used—that these weird beings were North American Indians, or rather more probably Eskimos. About the same time, Sertorius, a Roman commander in Spain, learned, as already mentioned, of some salubrious islands lying westward from Africa, and gave Horace an opportunity, in the evil days of the civil war, to picture them as a refuge.

When the Romans ruled the world, commerce lost much of the hazard and enterprise which had earlier instigated international rivalry. The interest in the western ocean subsided into merely speculative concern; and wild fancy was brought into play in depicting its horrors, its demons and shoals, with the intermingling of sky and water.

Knowledge of such early attempts.

Maps XVth cent.

Genoese voyages, 1291.

It is by no means certain that Columbus knew anything of this ancient lore of the early Mediterranean people. There is little or nothing in the early maps of the fifteenth century to indicate that such knowledge was current among those who made or contributed to the making of such of these maps as have come down to us. The work of some of the more famous chart makers Columbus could hardly have failed to see, or heard discussed in the maritime circles of Portugal; and indeed it was to his own countrymen, Marino Sanuto, Pizignani, Bianco, and Fra Mauro, that Portuguese navigators were most indebted for the broad cartographical treatment of their own discoveries. At the same time there was no dearth of legends of the venturesome Genoese, with fortunes not always reassuring. There was a story, for instance, of some of these latter people, who in 1291 had sailed west from the Pillars of Hercules and had never returned. Such was a legend that might not have escaped Columbus's attention even in his own country, associating with it the names of the luckless Tedisio Doria and Ugolino Vivaldi in their efforts to find a western way to India. Harrisse, however, who has gone over all the evidence of such a purpose, fails to be satisfied.

These stories of ocean hazards hung naturally about the seaports of Portugal.

Antillia.

Galvano tells us of such a tale concerning a Portuguese ship, driven west, in 1447, to an island with seven cities, where its sailors found the people speaking Portuguese, who said they had deserted their country on the death of King Roderigo. This is the legend of Antillia, already referred to.

Islands seen.

Columbus recalled, when afterwards at the Canaries on his first voyage, how it was during his sojourn in Portugal that some one from Madeira presented to the Portuguese king a petition for a vessel to go in quest of land, occasionally seen to the westward from that island. Similar stories were not unknown to him of like apparitions being familiar in the Azores. A story which he had also heard of one Antonio Leme having seen three islands one hundred leagues west of the Azores had been set down to a credulous eye, which had been deceived by floating fields of vegetation.

The Basques.

There was no obstacle in the passing of similar reports around the Bay of Biscay from the coasts of the Basques, and the story might be heard of Jean de Echaide, who had found stores of stockfish off a land far oceanward—an exploit supposed to be commemorated in the island of Stokafixia, which stands far away to the westward in the Bianco map of 1436. All these tales of the early visits of the Basques to what imaginative minds have supposed parts of the American coasts derive much of their perennial charm from associations with a remarkable people. There is indeed nothing improbable in a hardy daring which could have borne the Basques to the Newfoundland shores at almost any date earlier than the time of Columbus.

Newfoundland banks possibly visited.

Fructuoso, writing as late as 1590, claimed that a Portuguese navigator, João Vaz Cortereal, had sailed to the codfish coast of Newfoundland as early as 1464, but Barrow seems to be the only writer of recent times who has believed the tale, and Biddle and Harrisse find no evidence to sustain it.

Tartary supposed to be seen.

There is a statement recorded by Columbus, if we may trust the account of the Historie, that a sailor at Santa Maria had told him how, being driven westerly in a voyage to Ireland, he had seen land, which he then thought to be Tartary. Some similar experiences were also told to Columbus by Pieter de Velasco, of Galicia; and this land, according to the account, would seem to have been the same sought at a later day by the Cortereals (1500).

Dubious pre-Columbian voyages.

It is not easy to deal historically with long-held traditions. The furbishers of transmitted lore easily make it reflect what they bring to it. To find illustrations in any inquiry is not so difficult if you select what you wish, and discard all else, and the result of this discriminating accretion often looks very plausible. Historical truth is reached by balancing everything, and not by assimilating that which easily suits. Almost all these discussions of pre-Columbian voyagings to America afford illustrations of this perverted method. Events in which there is no inherent untruth are not left with the natural defense of probability, but are proved by deductions and inferences which could just as well be applied to prove many things else, and are indeed applied in a new way by every new upstart in such inquiries. The story of each discoverer before Columbus has been upheld by the stock intimation of white-bearded men, whose advent is somehow mysteriously discovered to have left traces among the aborigines of every section of the coast.

OCEANIC CURRENTS. [From Reclus's Amérique Boréale.]

Traces of a western land in drift.

There was another class of evidence which, as the Historie informs us, served some purpose in bringing conviction to the mind of Columbus. Such were the phenomenal washing ashore on European coasts of unknown pines and other trees, sculptured logs, huge bamboos, whose joints could be made into vessels to hold nine bottles of wine, and dead bodies with strange, broad faces. Even canoes, with living men in them of wonderful aspects, had at times been reported as thrown upon the Atlantic islands. Such events had not been unnoticed ever since the Canaries and the Azores had been inhabited by a continental race, and conjectures had been rife long before the time of Columbus that westerly winds had brought these estrays from a distant land—a belief more comprehensible at that time than any dependence upon the unsuspected fact that it was the oceanic currents, rather, which impelled these migratory objects.

Gulf Stream.

It required the experiences of later Spanish navigators along the Bahama Channel, and those of the French and English farther north upon the Banks of Newfoundland, before it became clear that the currents of the Atlantic, grazing the Cape of Good Hope and whirling in the Gulf of Mexico, sprayed in a curling fringe in the North Atlantic. This in a measure became patent to Sir Humphrey Gilbert sixty or seventy years after the death of Columbus.

If science had then been equal to the microscopic tasks which at this day it imposes on itself, the question of western lands might have been studied with an interest beyond what attached to the trunks of trees, carved timbers, edible nuts, and seeds of alien plants, which the Gulf Stream is still bringing to the shores of Europe. It might have found in the dust settling upon the throngs of men in the Old World, the shells of animalcules, differing from those known to the observing eye in Europe, which, indeed, had been carried in the upper currents of air from the banks of the Orinoco.

Influence of Portuguese discoveries upon Columbus.

Ephemerides of Regiomontanus.

Once in Portugal, Columbus was brought in close contact with that eager spirit of exploration which had survived the example of Prince Henry and his navigators. If Las Casas was well informed, these Portuguese discoveries were not without great influence upon the Genoese's receptive mind. He was now where he could hear the fresh stories of their extending acquaintance with the African coast. His wife's sister, by the accepted accounts, had married Pedro Correa, a navigator not without fame in those days, and a companion in maritime inquiry upon whom Columbus could naturally depend—unless, as Harrisse decides, he was no navigator at all. Columbus was also at hand to observe the growing skill in the arts of navigation which gave the Portuguese their preëminence. He had not been long in Lisbon when Regiomontanus gave a new power in astronomical calculations of positions at sea by publishing his Ephemerides, for the interval from 1475 to 1506, upon which Columbus was yet to depend in his eventful voyage.

Martin Behaim.

The most famous of the pupils of this German mathematician was himself in Lisbon during the years of Columbus's sojourn. We have no distinct evidence that Martin Behaim, a Nuremberger, passed any courtesies with the Genoese adventurer, but it is not improbable that he did. His position was one that would attract Columbus, who might never have been sought by Behaim. The Nuremberger's standing was, indeed, such as to gain the attention of the Court, and he was thought not unworthy to be joined with the two royal physicians, Roderigo and Josef, on a commission to improve the astrolabe. Their perfected results mark an epoch in the art of seamanship in that age.

SAMPLES OF THE TABLES OF REGIOMONTANUS, 1474–1506.

THE AFRICAN COAST, 1478. [From Nordenskiöld's Facsimile Atlas.]

Guinea coast, 1482.

The Congo reached, 1484.

It was a new sensation when news came that at last the Portuguese had crossed the equator, in pushing along the African coast. In January, 1482, they had said their first mass on the Guinea coast, and the castle of San Jorge da Mina was soon built under the new impulse to enterprise which came with the accession of João II. In 1484 they reached the Congo, under the guidance of Diogo Cam, and Martin Behaim was of his company.

MARTIN BEHAIM.

These voyages were not without strong allurements to the Genoese sailor. He is thought to have been a participant in some of the later cruises. The Historie claims that he began to reason, from his new experiences, that if land could be discovered to the south there was much the same chance of like discoveries in the west. But there were experiences of other kinds which, in the interim, if we believe the story, he underwent in the north.