History of the United States Volume I Part 7

Mr. Edward John Payne is doubtless correct in maintaining, in his "History of the New World called America," that the backwardness of the American aborigines was largely due to their lack of animals suitable for draft or travel or producing milk or flesh good for food. From the remotest antiquity Asiatics had the horse, a.s.s, ox and cow, camel and goat--netting ten times the outfit in useful animals which the Peruvians, Mexicans, or Indians enjoyed.

The vegetable kingdom of Old America was equally restricted, which also helps explain its low civilization. At the advent of the Europeans the continent was covered with forests. Then, though a few varieties may have since given out and some imported ones run wild, the undomesticated plants and trees were much as now. Not so the cultivated kinds. The Indians were wretched husbandmen, nor had the Mound-builders at all the diversity of agricultural products so familiar to us. Tobacco, Indian corn, cocoa, sweet potatoes, potatoes, the custard apple, the Jerusalem artichoke, the guava, the pumpkin and squash, the papaw and the pineapple, indigenous to North America, had been under cultivation here before Columbus came, the first four from most ancient times. The manioc or tapioca-plant, the red-pepper plant, the marmalade plum, and the tomato were raised in South America before 1500. The persimmon, the cinchona tree, millet, the Virginia and the Chili strawberry are natives of this continent, but have been brought under cultivation only within the last three centuries.

The four great cereals, wheat, rye, oats, and rice, const.i.tuting all our main food crops but corn, have come to us from Europe. So have cherries, quinces, and pears, also hops, currants, chestnuts, and mushrooms. The banana, regarded by von Humboldt as an original American fruit, modern botanists derive from Asia. With reference to apples there may be some question. Apples of a certain kind flourished in New England so early after the landing of the Pilgrims that it is difficult to suppose the fruit not to have been indigenous to this continent. Champlain, in 1605 or 1606, found the Indians about the present sites of Portland, Boston, and Plymouth in considerable agricultural prosperity, with fields of corn and tobacco, gardens rich in melons, squashes, pumpkins, and beans, the culture of none of which had they apparently learned from white men. Mr. Payne's generalization, that superior food-supply occasioned the Old World's primacy in civilization, and also that of the Mexicans and Peruvians here, seems too sweeping, yet it evidently contains large truth.

PART FIRST

THE FORE-HISTORY

PERIOD I.

DISCOVERY AND SETTLEMENT

1492-1660

CHAPTER I.

COLUMBUS

[1000]

There is no end to the accounts of alleged discoveries of America before Columbus. Most of these are fables. It is, indeed, nearly certain that hardy Basque, Breton, and Norman fishermen, adventuring first far north, then west, had sighted Greenland and Labrador and become well acquainted with the rich fis.h.i.+ng-grounds about Newfoundland and the Saint Lawrence Gulf. Many early charts of these regions, without dates and hitherto referred to Portuguese navigators of a time so late as 1500, are now thought to be the work of these earlier voyagers. They found the New World, but considered it a part of the Old.

Important, too, is the story of supposed Norse sea-rovers. .h.i.ther, derived from certain Icelandic ma.n.u.scripts of the fourteenth century. It is a pleasing narrative, that of Lief Ericson's sail in 1000-1001 to h.e.l.luland, Markland, and at last to Vineland, and of the subsequent tours by Thorwald Ericson in 1002, Thorfinn Karlsefne, 1007-1009, and of Helge and Finnborge in 1011, to points still farther away. Such voyages probably occurred. As is well known, h.e.l.luland has been interpreted to be Newfoundland; Markland, Nova Scotia; and Vineland, the country bordering Mount Hope Bay in Bristol, R. I. These identifications are possibly correct, and even if they are mistaken, Vineland may still have been somewhere upon the coast of what is now the United States.

In the present condition of the evidence, however, we have to doubt this. No scholar longer believes that the writing on Dighton Rock is Norse, or that the celebrated Skeleton in Armor found at Fall River was a Northman's, or that the old Stone Mill at Newport was constructed by men from Iceland. Even if the ma.n.u.scripts, composed between three and four hundred years after the events which they are alleged to narrate, are genuine, and if the statements contained in them are true, the latter are far too indefinite to let us be sure that they are applicable to United States localities.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Dighton Rock]

[l260]

But were we to go so far as to admit that the Northmen came here and began the settlements ascribed to them, they certainly neither appreciated nor published their exploits. Their colony, wherever it was, endured but for a day, and it, with its locality, speedily pa.s.sed from knowledge in Scandinavia itself. America had not yet, in effect, been discovered.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Old Stone Mill at Newport, R. I.]

[1300]

We must remember that long anterior to Columbus's day unbia.s.sed and thoughtful men had come to believe the earth to be round. They also knew that Europe const.i.tuted but a small part of it. In the year 1260 the Venetian brothers Niccolo and Maffeo Polo made their way to China, the first men from Western Europe ever to travel so far. They returned in 1269, but in 1271 set out again, accompanied by Niccolo's son, a youth of seventeen. This son was the famous Marco Polo, whose work, "The Wonders of the World," reciting his extended journeys through China and the extreme east and southeast of Asia, and his eventful voyage home by sea, ending in 1295, has come down to our time, one of the most interesting volumes in the world. Friar Orderic's eastern travels in 1322-1330, as appropriated by Sir John Mandeville, were published before 1371.

Columbus knew these writings, and the reading and re-reading of them had made him an enthusiast. In Polo's book he had learned of Mangi and Far Cathay, with their thousands of gorgeous cities, the meanest finer than any then in Europe; of their abounding mines pouring forth infinite wealth, their n.o.ble rivers, happy populations, curious arts, and benign government. Polo had told him of Cambalu (Peking), winter residence of the Great Khan, Kublai--Cambalu with its palaces of marble, golden-roofed, its guard of ten thousand soldiers, its imperial stables containing five thousand elephants, its unnumbered army, navy, and merchant marine; of oxen huge as elephants; of richest spices, nuts large as melons, canes fifteen yards long, silks, cambrics, and the choicest furs; and of magic c.i.p.ango (j.a.pan), island of pearls, whose streets were paved with gold.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Globus Martini Behaim Narinbergensis 1492.]

[1456]

Columbus believed all this, and it cooperated with his intense and even bigoted religious faith to kindle in him an all-consuming ambition to reach this distant Eden by sea, that he might carry the Gospel to those opulent heathen and partake their unbounded temporal riches in return.

Poor specimen of a saint as Columbus is now known to have been, he believed himself divinely called to this grand enterprise.

Christopher Columbus, or Christobal Colon, as he always signed himself after he entered the service of Spain, was born in Genoa about 1456.

Little is certainly known of his early life. His father was a humble wool-carder. The youth possessed but a sorry education, spite of his few months at the University of Pavia. At the age of fourteen he became a sailor, knocking about the world in the roughest manner, half the time practically a pirate. In an all-day's sea fight, once, his s.h.i.+p took fire and he had to leap overboard; but being a strong swimmer he swam, aided by an oar, eight leagues to land.

[1470]

From 1470 to 1484 we find him in Portugal, the country most interested and engaged then in ocean-going and discovery. Here he must have known Martin Behem, author of the famous globe, finished in 1492, whereon Asia is exhibited as reaching far into the same hemisphere with Europe.

Prince Henry of Portugal earnestly patronized all schemes for exploration and discovery, and the daughter, Philippa, of one of his captains, Perestrello, Columbus married. With her he lived at Porto Santo in the Madeiras, where he became familiar with Correo, her sister's husband, also a distinguished navigator. The islanders fully believed in the existence of lands in the western Atlantic. West winds had brought to them strange woods curiously carved, huge cane-brakes like those of India described by Ptolemy, peculiarly fas.h.i.+oned canoes, and corpses with skin of a hue unknown to Europe or Africa.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Prince Henry of Portugal--"The Navigator." From an old print.]

[1475-1484]

Reflecting on these things, studying Perestrello's and Correo's charts and accounts of their voyages, corresponding with Toscanelli and other savans, himself an adept in drawing maps and sea-charts, for a time his occupation in Lisbon, cruising here and there, once far northward to Iceland, and talking with navigators from every Atlantic port, Columbus became acquainted with the best geographical science of his time.

This had convinced him that India could be reached by sailing westward.

The theoretical possibility of so doing was of course admitted by all who held the earth to be a sphere, but most regarded it practically impossible, in the then condition of navigation, to sail the necessary distance. Columbus considered the earth far smaller than was usually thought, a belief which we find hinted at so early as 1447, upon the famous mappe-Monde of the Pitti Palace in Florence, whereon Europe appears projected far round to the northwest. Columbus seems to have viewed this extension as a sort of yoke joining India to Scandinavia by the north. He judged that Asia, or at least c.i.p.ango, stretched two-thirds of the way to Europe, India being twice as near westward as eastward. Thirty or forty days he deemed sufficient for making it.

Toscanelli and Behem as well as he held this belief; he dared boldly to act upon it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Queen Isabella of Spain.]

But to do so required resources. There are indications that Columbus at some time, perhaps more than once, urged his scheme upon Genoa and Venice. If so it was in vain. Nor can we tell whether such an attempt, if made, was earlier or later than his plea before the court of Portugal, for this cannot be dated. The latter was probably in 1484.

King John II. was impressed, and referred Columbus's scheme to a council of his wisest advisers, who denounced it as visionary. Hence in 1485 or 1486 Columbus proceeded to Spain to lay his project before Ferdinand and Isabella.

On the way he stopped at a Franciscan convent near Palos, begging bread for himself and son. The Superior, Marchena, became interested in him, and so did one of the Pinzons--famous navigators of Palos. The king and queen were at the time holding court at Cordova, and thither Columbus went, fortified with a recommendation from Marchena. The monarchs were engrossed in the final conquest of Granada, and Columbus had to wait through six weary and heart-sickening years before royal attention was turned to his cause. It must have been during this delay that he despatched his brother Bartholomew to England with an appeal to Henry VII. Christopher had brought Alexander Geraldinus, the scholar, and also the Archbishop of Toledo, to espouse his mission, and finally, at the latter's instance, Ferdinand, as John of Portugal had done, went so far as to convene, at Salamanca, a council of reputed scholars to pa.s.s judgment upon Columbus and his proposition. By these, as by the Portuguese, he was declared a misguided enthusiast. They were too much behind the age even to admit the spherical figure of the earth.

According to Scripture, they said, the earth is flat, adding that it was contrary to reason for men to walk heads downward, or snow and rain to ascend, or trees to grow with their roots upward.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Columbus begging at the Franciscan Convent.]

[1484-1492]

The war for Granada ended, Santangel and others of his converts at court secured Columbus an interview with Isabella, but his demands seeming to her arrogant, he was dismissed. Nothing daunted, the hero had started for France, there to plead as he had pleaded in Portugal and Spain already, when to his joy a messenger overtook him with orders to come once more before the queen.

Fuller thought and argument had convinced this eminent woman that the experiment urged by Columbus ought to be tried and a contract was soon concluded, by which, on condition that he should bear one-eighth the expense of the expedition, the public chest of Castile was to furnish the remainder. The story of the crown jewels having been pledged for this purpose is now discredited. If such pledging occurred, it was earlier, in prosecuting the war with the Moors. The whole sum needed for the voyage was about fifty thousand dollars. Columbus was made admiral, also viceroy of whatever lands should be discovered, and he was to have ten per cent of all the revenues from such lands. For his contribution to the outfit he was indebted to the Pinzons.

This arrangement was made in April or May, 1492, and on the third of the next August, after the utmost difficulty in s.h.i.+pping crews for this sail into the sea of darkness, Columbus put out from Palos with one hundred and twenty men, on three s.h.i.+ps. These were the Santa Maria, the Nina, and the Pinta. The largest, the Santa Maria, was of not over one hundred tons, having a deck-length of sixty-three feet, a keel of fifty-one feet, a draft of ten feet six inches, and her mast-head sixty feet above sea-level. She probably had four anchors, with hemp cables.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Embarkation of Christopher Columbus at Palos. From an old print.]

From Palos they first bore southward to the Canary Islands, into the track of the prevalent east winds, then headed west, for c.i.p.ango, as Columbus supposed, but really toward the northern part of Florida. When a little beyond what he regarded the longitude of c.i.p.ango, noticing the flight of birds to the southwest, he was induced to follow these, which accident made his landfall occur at Guanahani (San Salvador), in the Bahamas, instead of the Florida coast.

Near midnight, between October 11th and 12th, Columbus, being on the watch, descried a light ahead. About two o'clock on the morning of the 12th the lookout on the Pinta distinctly saw land through the moonlight.

When it was day they went on sh.o.r.e. The 12th of October, 1492, therefore, was the date on which for the first time, so far as history attests with a.s.surance, a European foot pressed the soil of this continent. Adding nine days to this to translate it into New Style, we have October 21st as the day answering to that on which Columbus first became sure that his long toil and watching had not been in vain.

[1493-1500]

The admiral having failed to note its lat.i.tude and longitude, it is not known which of the Bahamas was the San Salvador of Columbus, whether Grand Turk Island, Cat (the present San Salvador), Watling, Mariguana, Acklin, or Samana, though the last named well corresponds with his description. Mr. Justin Winsor, however, and with him a majority of the latest critics, believes that Watling's Island was the place. Before returning to Spain, Columbus discovered Cuba, and also Hayti or Espagnola (Hispaniola), on the latter of which islands he built a fort.

In a second voyage, from Cadiz, 1493-1496, the great explorer discovered the Lesser Antilles and Jamaica. In a third, 1498-1500, he came upon Trinidad and the mainland of South America, at the mouth of the Orinoco.

This was later by thirteen months and a week than the Cabots' landfall at Labrador or Nova Scotia, though a year before Amerigo Vespucci saw the coast of Brazil. It was during this third absence that Columbus, hated as an Italian and for his undeniable greed, was superseded by Bobadilla, who sent him and his brother home in chains. Soon free again, he sets off in 1502 upon a fourth cruise, in which he reaches the coast of Honduras.