Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery Part 4

But in Christendom, in the atrophy both of mental and physical activity, broken for short periods and in certain lands by the revivals of Charles the Great, of the Isaurian Emperors, of Otto I., of Alfred and his House, the practical energy of Heathen enemies,--for the Northmen were not seriously touched by Christianity till about the end of the first millennium,--was the first sign of lasting resurrection.

After the material came the spiritual revival; the whole life of the Middle Ages awoke on the conversion of the Northern nations and of Hungary; but in the abundant and brilliant energy of the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth centuries, we must recognise the offspring of the irrepressible Nors.e.m.e.n as well as of the Irish and Frank and English missionaries, who in the Dark Ages of Christendom were working out the empire of Innocent III.

In exploration, especially, it was true that theory followed achievement. Flavio Gioja, of Amalphi, did not apply the magnet to navigation--did not "give sailors the use of the magnet"--till navigation itself had begun to venture into the unknown Atlantic. The history of geographical advance in the earlier Middle Ages is thus rather a chronicle of adventure than of science.

But the Norse discoveries are not only the first, they are the leading achievements of Western travel and enterprise in the true Unknown, between the time of Constantine and the Crusades. The central fact of European expansion in the Dark Ages (from the seventh to the eleventh century) is the advance of the Vikings to the Arctic Continent and to America about the year 1000. All that precedes this on the same line is doubtful and unimportant. For, of the other voyages to the West in the sixth, the eighth, the tenth centuries, which, on Columbus' success, turned into prior claims to the finding of the New World, there is not one that deserves notice.

St. Brandon in 565, the Seven Spanish Bishops in 734, the Basques in 990 may or may not have sighted their islands of "Antillia," of "Atlantis,"

of the "Seven Cities." They cannot be verified or valued, any more than the journeys of the Enchanted Horse or the Third Calendar. We only know for certain a few unimportant, half-accidental facts, such as the visits of Irish hermits to Iceland and the Faroes during the eighth century, and the traces of their cells and chapels--in bells and ruins and crosses--found by the Northmen in the ninth.

It was in 787 that the Vikings first landed in England; by the opening of the next century they were threatening the whole coast line of Christendom, from Gallicia to the Elbe; in 874 they began to colonise Iceland; in 877 they sighted Greenland; in 922 Rolf the Ganger won his "Normandy" from Charles the Simple, by the Treaty of Clair-sur-Epte; as early as 840 was founded the first Norse or Ostman kingdom in Ireland, and in 878 the Norse earldom of the Orkneys, while about the same time the first Vikings seem to have reached the White Sea and the extreme North of Europe.

This advance is almost as rapid as that of the early Saracens; within a hundred years from the first disturbance of Danes and Northmen by the growing, all-including power of the new national kingdoms,--within three generations from Halfdan the Black,--first the flying rebels, and then the royalists in pursuit of them, had reached the farthest western and northern limits of the known world, from Finisterre in "Spanland" to Cape Farewell in Greenland, from the North Cape in Finland to the Northwest Capes of "Irland," from Novgorod or "Holmgard" in Russia to "Valland," between the Garonne and the Loire.

The chief lines of Northern advance were three--by the north-west, south-west, and north-east, but each of these divided, after a time, with important results.

The first sea-path, running by Caithness, Orkneys, Shetlands, and Faroes, reached Iceland, Greenland, and at last Vinland on the North American Continent; but from the settlements on the coasts and islands of northern Scotland, a fresh wave of pirate colonists swept down south-west into the narrow seas of St. George's Channel and beat upon the east and north and south of Ireland and the western coasts of England and of "Bretland."

The second invasion ran along the North German coast, and on reaching the Straits of Dover, fell upon both sides of the English Channel, according as the resistance was stronger or weaker in Wess.e.x or in Frankland. The advanced guard reunited with Ostmen and Orkneyers in the Scilly Isles, and in Cornwall, and pressed on to the plunder of the Bay of Biscay and its coasts. The most restless of all were not long in finding out the wealth of the Moslem Caliphate of Cordova, and trying to force their way up the Douro and the Tagus.

The expansion on this side was not to stop till it had founded, from the Norman colony on the Seine, a Norman kingdom of England, and a dominion in the Two Sicilies, but this was the work of the eleventh century, the time of organisation and settled empire.

On the third side of northern expansion, to east and north-east, there were two separate roads from the first; one taking the Baltic for its track, and dividing northwards to Finland, up the Gulf of Bothnia, eastwards to Russia and Novgorod ("Gardariki" and "Holmgard"), the other coasting along "Halogaland" to Biarmaland, along Lapland to Perm and the Archangel of later time.

Of these three lines of movement by far the most vital to our subject is the first, which is also the earliest; the second, to south and south-west, hardly gives any direct results for our story; and the third, to east and north, is mainly concerned with Russian history.

While King Alfred was yet unborn, Norse settlements had been permanently founded in the outlying points, coasts, and islands of Scotland and Ireland, and in the years of his boyhood, about 860, Nadodd the Faeroe Jarl sighted Iceland, which had been touched at by the Irish monks in 795 but was now to be first added as a lasting gain to Europe, as a new country, "Snowland"--something more than a hermitage for religious exiles from the world. Four years later (in 864) Gardar the Swede reached this new Ultima Thule, and re-named it from himself "Gardar's Holm." Yet another Viking, Raven Floke, followed the track of the first explorer in 867, before Iceland got its final name and earliest colonisation from the Nors.e.m.e.n Ingolf and Leif and the sheep-farmers of the Faroes in 874, the third year of Alfred's reign in Wess.e.x.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ANGLO-SAXON MAP. (SEE LIST OF MAPS)]

Three years later, 877-8, at the very time of the farthest Danish advance in England, when Guthrum had driven the English King into the Isle of Athelney, the Nors.e.m.e.n reached their farthest point of northern advance in Europe; Gunnbiorn sighted a new land to the north-west, which he called "White s.h.i.+rt," from its snow-fields, and which Red Eric a century later re-named Greenland--"for there is nothing like a good name to attract settlers." By this the Old World had come nearer than ever before to the discovery of a new one.

Geographically, this side of the Arctic Continent falls to the share of North America, and once its fiords had been made in their turn centres of colonisation and of further progress, the actual reaching of Newfoundland and Cape Cod was natural enough. The real voyage lay between Cape Farewell and the European mainland; it was a stormy and dangerous pa.s.sage from the Greenland Bays to Labrador, but not a long one, and, as far as can be judged from scanty records, neither so cold nor so icebound as at present.

But exploration had outrun settlement. It was not till 986, more than one hundred years after Gunnbiorn's discovery, that Eric the Red, one of the chiefs of the Iceland colonists, led a band of followers and friends into a permanent exile in the unknown land. The beginnings of several villages were made in the next few years, and the first American discoveries followed at once. About 989 one Bjarni Herjulfson, following his father from Iceland to Eric's Fiord in Greenland, was driven west by storms first to a flat, well-wooded country, then to a mountainous island, covered with glaciers. He bore away with a fresh breeze and reached his home in Eric's Fiord in four days.

But his report aroused great interest; the time had come, and the men, and Norse rovers, who after so much in the past were ready to dare anything in the future, eagerly volunteered to follow up the new route; Bjarni himself visiting Norway and telling his story, was blamed for his slackness, and when he went back to Greenland there was "much talk of finding unknown lands." In the year 1000 Leif, a son of Red Eric, started with a definite purpose of discovery. He bought Bjarni's s.h.i.+p, manned it with five and twenty men and put out. First they came to the land Bjarni had sighted last, and went on sh.o.r.e. There was no gra.s.s to be seen, but great snowy ridges far inland, "and all the way from the coast to these mountains was one field of snow, and it seemed to them a land of no profit,"--so they left, calling it h.e.l.luland, or Slate-land, perhaps the Labrador of the sixteenth century.

They put to sea again and found another land, flat and wooded, with a white sand sh.o.r.e, low-lying towards the sea. This, said Leif, we will call after its nature, Markland (Woodland). Thence driving for two days before a north-east wind, they came to an island, where they landed to wait for good weather. They tasted the dew on the gra.s.s and thought they had never known anything so sweet. Sailing on again into a sound between the island and a ness, they reached a place where a river came out of a lake; into this they towed the s.h.i.+p and anch.o.r.ed, carrying their beds out on the sh.o.r.e and setting up their tents, with a large hut in the middle, and made all ready for wintering there.

There was no want of fish food--"the largest salmon in the lake they had ever seen"--and the country seemed to them so good that they would need no fodder for cattle in the winter. There was no frost; the gra.s.s seemed fresh enough all the year round, and day and night were more equal than in Iceland or in Greenland. The crew were divided in two parts: one worked at the huts and the other explored the country, returning every night to the camp. From the wild vines found by the foragers, the whole district was called Vinland, and samples of these, enough to fill the stern boat, and of the trees and "self-sown wheat" found in the fields were taken back to Eric's Fiord. Thereafter Leif was called the Lucky, and got much wealth and fame, but Thorwald Ericson, his brother, thought he had not explored enough, and "determined to be talked about" even more than the first settler of Vinland.

He put to sea with thirty men and came straight to Leif's Booths in Vinland, where he stayed the winter. On the first signs of spring Thorwald ordered his vessel to be rigged, and sent his longboat on ahead to explore.

All alike thought the land beautiful and well-wooded; they noticed that the distance was small between the forest and the sea, that the beach was all of white sand, and that there were many islands off the sh.o.r.e and very shallow water; but they saw no trace of man or beast, except a wooden corn-barn on an island far to the west. After coasting all the summer they came back in the autumn to the booths.

The next spring Thorwald went eastwards, and "towards the north along the land they drove upon a cape and broke their keel and stayed long to repair, and called the place Keel-Ness (Kjalarness) from this." Then they sailed away eastwards along the country, everywhere thickly wooded, till at one place Thorwald drew up his s.h.i.+ps to the land and laid out gangways to the sh.o.r.e, saying, "I would gladly set up my farm here."

But now they came upon the first traces of other men; far off upon the white sandy beach three specks were sighted--three skin boats of the Skraelings or Esquimaux, with three men hiding under each. Thorwald's men captured and killed eight of them, but one escaped "to where within the fiord were several dwellings like little lumps on the ground." A heavy drowsiness now fell upon the Nors.e.m.e.n, in the Saga, till a "sudden scream came to them, and a countless host from up the fiord came in skin boats and laid themselves alongside."

The Vikings put up their s.h.i.+eld-wall along the gunwale and kept off the arrows of the Esquimaux till they had shot them all away, and "fled off as fast as they could," leaving Thorwald with a mortal wound under the arm. He had time just to bid his men "carry him to the point he had wished to dwell at, for it was true that he would stay there awhile, but with a cross at head and feet; and so died and was buried as he had said." The place was called Crossness from the dead chief, but the crew stayed all the winter and loaded the s.h.i.+p with vines and grapes, and in the spring came back to Eric in Greenland.

And now, after the first mishap, discovery became more serious--not to be undertaken but by strong and well-armed fleets. It was this that checked the expansion of these Arctic colonies; at their best they were too small to do more than hold their own against nature and the Skraeling savages in their tiny settlements along the coast, where the ice-fields have long since pushed man slowly but surely into the sea, with his painfully won patches of hay and corn and pasturage.

But the colonists would never say die till they were utterly worn out; now they only roused themselves to conquer the new lands they had found, and found disputed.

First a third son of Red Eric, Thorstein, bethought him to go to Vinland for his brother Thorwald's body. He put to sea and lost all sight of land, beating about in the ocean the whole summer, till he came back to Greenland in the first week of winter. (1004-6.)

He was followed by the greatest of the Vinland sailors, Thorfinn Karlsefne, who really took in hand the founding of a new settlement over the Western Sea. He came from Norway to Iceland soon after Thorwald's death in 1004, pa.s.sed on to Greenland about 1005, "when, as before, much was talked about a Vinland voyage," and in 1006 made ready to start with one hundred and sixty men and five women, in three s.h.i.+ps. They had with them all kinds of cattle, meaning to settle in the land if they could, and they made an agreement, Karlsefne and his people, that each should have an equal share in the gain. Leif lent them his houses in Vinland, "for he would not give them outright," and they sailed first to h.e.l.luland (Labrador), where they found a quant.i.ty of foxes, then to Markland, well-stocked with forest animals, then to an island at the mouth of a fiord, unknown before, covered with eyder ducks. They called the new discoveries Stream Island and Stream Fiord, from the current that here ran out into the sea, and sent off a party of eight men, in search of Vinland, in a stern boat. This was driven by westerly gales back to Iceland, but Thorfinn, with the rest, sailed south till he came to Leif Ericson's "river that fell into the sea from a lake, with islands lying off the mouth of the stream, low grounds covered with wheat growing wild, and rising grounds clad with vines."

Here they settled, re-named the country "Hope, from the good hope they had of it," and began to fell the wood, to pasture their cattle in the upland, and to gather the grapes.

After the first winter the Skraelings came upon them, at first to traffic with furs and sables against milk and dairy produce, and then to fight; for as neither understood the other, and the natives tried to force their way into Thorfinn's houses, and to get hold of his men's weapons, a quarrel was bound to come.

Fearing this, Karlsefne put a fence round the settlement and made all ready for battle, "and at this very time was a child born to him in the village, called Snorre, of Gudrid his wife, the widow of Thorstein Eric-son, whom he had brought with him." Then the Esquimaux came down upon them, "many more than before, and there was a battle, and Thorfinn's men won the day and saved the cattle," and their enemies fled into the forest.

Thorfinn stayed all the winter, but towards spring he grew tired of his enterprise, and returned to Greenland, "taking much goods," vines, wood for timber, and skin-wares, and so came back to Eric's Fiord in the summer of 1008.

Thus ends the story of the last serious effort to colonise Vinland, and the Saga, while giving no definite cause for this failure upon failure, seems to show that even the trifling annoyance of the Skraelings was enough to turn the scale. Natural difficulties were so immense, men were so few, that a pigmy enemy had all the power of the last straw in a load, the odd man in a council. The actual resistance of American natives to European colonists was never very serious in any part of the continent, but the distance from the starting-point and the difficulties of life in the new country were able, even in the time of Raleigh and De Soto, to keep in check men who far more readily founded and kept up European empires in the Indian seas.

So now, though on Thorfinn's return the "talk began to turn again upon a Vinland voyage, as both gainful and honourable," and a daughter of Red Eric, named Freydis, talked men over--especially two brothers, Helge and Finnboge--to a fresh attempt in the country where all the House of Eric had tried and failed; though Leif lent his booths as before, and sixty able-bodied men, besides women, were found willing to go, the colony could never be firmly planted. Freydis and her allies sailed in 1011, reached the settlement, which was now for the third time recolonised, and wintered there;--but jealousies soon broke up the camp, Helge and Finnboge were murdered with all their followers, and the rest came back in 1013 to Greenland, "where Thorfinn Karlsefne was just ready for sailing back to Norway, and it was common talk that never did a richer s.h.i.+p leave Eric's Fiord than that which he steered." It was that same Karlsefne who gave the fullest account of all his travels, concludes the Saga, but whether Thorfinn ever returned to Vinland, whether there were any more attempts to settle at Leif's Booths or elsewhere, whether the account we have of these voyages is really an Eric Saga, only telling the deeds of Red Eric and his House--for after Bjarni, almost every Vinland leader is of this family--we cannot tell. We can only fancy that all these suggestions are probable, by the side of the few additional facts known to the Norse Skalds or Bards. The first of these is, that in 983-4, Are Marson of Reykianes in Iceland was driven by storms far West to White Man's Land, where he was followed by Bjarni Asbrandson in 999, and by Gudleif Gudlangson in 1029. This was the tale of his friend Rafn, "the Limerick trader," and of Are Frode, his great-great-grandson, who called the unknown land Great Ireland.[17] True or untrue, in whatever way, this would be a later discovery than those of Eric and his sons, if the news of it did not come into Iceland or Norway till after Thorfinn Karlsefne's voyage, as is generally supposed. Again, the length of the voyage is a difficulty, and the whole matter has a doubtful look--an attempt to start a rival to the Eric Saga, by a far more brilliant success a few years earlier.

[Footnote 17: By some supposed to be S. Carolina, by others the Canaries.]

We seem to be on more certain ground in our next and last chapter of Viking exploration in the north-west, in the fragmentary notices of Greenland and Vinland voyages to the middle of the fourteenth century, and in the fairly clear and continuous account of the two Greenland settlements of the western and the eastern Bays.

We hear, for instance, of Bishop Eric going over from Eric's Fiord to Vinland in 1121; of clergy from the Eastern Bay diocese of Gardar sailing to lands in the West, far north of Vinland, in 1266; of the two Helgasons discovering a country west of Iceland in 1285; of a voyage from Greenland to Markland in 1347 by a crew of seventeen men, recorded in 1354.

Unless these are pure fabrications, they would seem to prove something of constant intercourse between the mother and daughter colonies of north-west Europe and north-east America, and something of a permanent Christian settlement of Northmen in the New Continent is made probable by a.s.suming such intercourse. Between 981-1000, both Iceland and Greenland had become "Catholic in name and Christian in surname"; in 1126 the line of Bishops of Gardar begins with Arnold, and the clergy would hardly have ventured on the Vinland voyage to convert Skraelings in an almost deserted country.

The later story of the Greenland colonies, interesting as it is, and traceable to the year 1418, is not part of the expansion but of the contraction of Europe and Christendom. And the voyages of the Zeni in 1380-95 to Greenland and the Western islands Estotiland and Drogeo, belong to another part; they are the last achievements of mediaeval discovery before Henry of Portugal begins his work, and form the natural end of an introduction to that work.

But it is curious to notice that just as the ice and the Esquimaux between them were bringing to an end the last traces of Norse settlement in the Arctic Continent, and just as all intercourse between Vinland, Greenland, Iceland, and Norway entirely ceases--at any rate to record itself--the Portuguese sailors, taking up the work of Eric and Leif and Thorfinn, on another side, were rounding Cape Verde and nearing the southern point of Africa, and so providing for the mind of Columbus suggestions which resulted in the lasting discovery of the world that the Vikings had sighted and colonised, but were not able to hold.

The Venetian, Welsh, and Arabic claims to have followed the Nors.e.m.e.n in visits to America earlier than the voyage of 1492, belong rather to the minute history of geographical controversy. It is a fairly certain fact that the north-west line of Scandinavian migration reached about A.D.

1000 to Cape Cod and the coasts of Labrador. It is equally certain that on this side the Nors.e.m.e.n never made any further advance, lasting or recorded. Against all other mediaeval discoveries of a Western Continent, one only verdict can stand:--Not Proven.

The other lines of Northern advance, though marked by equal daring and far greater military exploits, have less of original discovery. There was fighting in plenty, the giving and taking of hard knocks with every nation from Archangel to Cordova and from Limerick to Constantinople; and the Vikings, as they reached fresh ground, re-named most of the capes and coasts, the rivers and islands and countries of Europe, of North Africa, of Western Asia. Iberia became "Spanland"; Gallicia, "Jacobsland"[18]; Gallia, "Frankland"; Britannia, "England," "Scotland,"

"Bretland"; Hibernia, "Irland"; Islam, outside "Spanland," pa.s.sed into "Serkland" or Saracenland. Greece was "Grikland"; Russia, "Gardariki"; the Pillars of Hercules, the Straits of Gibraltar, were "Norva's Sound,"

which later days derived from the first Northman who pa.s.sed through them. The city of Constantine was the Great Town--"Miklagard"; Novgorod was "Holmgard," the town of all others that most touched and influenced the earlier, the Viking age, of Northern expansion. For was it not their own proudest and strongest city-state, and "Who can stand before G.o.d, or the Great Novgorod?" except the men who had built it, and would rush to sack it if it turned against them?

[Footnote 18: From St. James of Compostella.]

But all this was only the pa.s.sing of a more active race over ground which had once been well known to Rome and to Christendom, even if much of this was now being forgotten. It was only in upland Russia and in the farthest North that the Nors.e.m.e.n sensibly enlarged the Western world to east or north-east, as they did through their Iceland settlements on the north-west.

On the south and south-west no Vikings or Royalist followers of Vikings, like Sigurd the Crusader, sailed the seas beyond Norva's Sound and Serkland,[19] and as pilgrims, traders, travellers, and conquerors in the Mediterranean, their work was of course not one of exploration. They bore a foremost share in breaking down the Moslem incubus on southern Europe; they visited the Holy sites

"When sacred Hierosolyma they'd relieved And fed their eyes on Jordan's holy flood Which the dear body of Lord G.o.d had laved";[20]

they fought as Varangian body-guards in the armies of the great Byzantines, Nikephoros Phokas, John Tzimiskes, Basil II. or Maniakes; but in all this they discovered for themselves rather than for Europe.