The Discovery of America Part 16

[Sidenote: Summary of the argument.]

To sum up the argument:--we have in Eric the Red's Saga, as copied by Hauk Erlendsson, a doc.u.ment for the existence of which we are required to account. That doc.u.ment contains unmistakable knowledge of some things which mediaeval Europeans could by no human possibility have learned, except through a visit to some part of the coast of North America further south than Labrador or Newfoundland. It tells an eminently probable story in a simple, straightforward way, agreeing in its details with what we know of the North American coast between Point Judith and Cape Breton. Its general accuracy in the statement and grouping of so many remote details is proof that its statements were controlled by an exceedingly strong and steady tradition,--altogether too strong and steady, in my opinion, to have been maintained simply by word of mouth. These Icelanders were people so much given to writing that their historic records during the Middle Ages were, as the late Sir Richard Burton truly observed, more complete than those of any other country in Europe.[257] It is probable that the facts mentioned in Hauk's doc.u.ment rested upon some kind of a written basis as early as the eleventh century; and it seems quite clear that the constant tradition, by which all the allusions to Vinland and the Skraelings are controlled, had become established by that time. The data are more scanty than we could wish, but they all point in the same direction as surely as straws blown by a steady wind, and their c.u.mulative force is so great as to fall but little short of demonstration. For these reasons it seems to me that the Saga of Eric the Red should be accepted as history; and there is another reason which might not have counted for much at the beginning of this discussion, but at the end seems quite solid and worthy of respect. The narrative begins with the colonization of Greenland and goes on with the visits to Vinland. It is unquestionably sound history for the first part; why should it be anything else for the second part? What shall be said of a style of criticism which, in dealing with one and the same doc.u.ment, arbitrarily cuts it in two in the middle and calls the first half history and the last half legend?

which accepts its statements as serious so long as they keep to the north of the sixtieth parallel, and dismisses them as idle as soon as they pa.s.s to the south of it? Quite contrary to common sense, I should say.

[Footnote 257: Burton, _Ultima Thule_, London, 1875, i. 237.]

[Sidenote: Absurd speculations of zealous antiquarians.]

[Sidenote: There is no reason for supposing that the Northmen founded a colony in Vinland.]

[Sidenote: No archaeological remains of the Northmen have been found south of Davis strait.]

The only discredit which has been thrown upon the story of the Vinland voyages, in the eyes either of scholars or of the general public, has arisen from the eager credulity with which ingenious antiquarians have now and then tried to prove more than facts will warrant. It is peculiarly a case in which the judicious historian has had frequent occasion to exclaim, Save me from my friends! The only fit criticism upon the wonderful argument from the Dighton inscription is a reference to the equally wonderful discovery made by Mr. Pickwick at Cobham;[258]

and when it was attempted, some sixty years ago, to prove that Governor Arnold's old stone windmill at Newport[259] was a tower built by the Northmen, no wonder if the exposure of this rather laughable notion should have led many people to suppose that the story of Leif and Thorfinn had thereby been deprived of some part of its support. But the story never rested upon any such evidence, and does not call for evidence of such sort. There is nothing in the story to indicate that the Northmen ever founded a colony in Vinland, or built durable buildings there. The distinction implicitly drawn by Adam of Bremen, who narrates the colonization of Iceland and Greenland, and then goes on to speak of Vinland, not as colonized, but simply as discovered, is a distinction amply borne out by our chronicles. Nowhere is there the slightest hint of a colony or settlement established in Vinland. On the contrary, our plain, business-like narrative tells us that Thorfinn Karlsefni tried to found a colony and failed; and it tells us why he failed. The Indians were too many for him. The Northmen of the eleventh century, without firearms, were in much less favourable condition for withstanding the Indians than the Englishmen of the seventeenth; and at the former period there existed no cause for emigration from Norway and Iceland at all comparable to the economic, political, and religious circ.u.mstances which, in a later age, sent thousands of Englishmen to Virginia and New England. The founding of colonies in America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was no pastime; it was a tale of drudgery, starvation, and bloodshed, that curdles one's blood to read; more attempts failed than succeeded. a.s.suredly Thorfinn gave proof of the good sense ascribed to him when he turned his back upon Vinland. But if he or any other Northman had ever succeeded in establis.h.i.+ng a colony there, can anybody explain why it should not have stamped the fact of its existence either upon the soil, or upon history, or both, as unmistakably as the colony of Greenland? Archaeological remains of the Northmen abound in Greenland, all the way from Immartinek to near Cape Farewell; the existence of one such relic on the North American continent has never yet been proved. Not a single vestige of the Northmen's presence here, at all worthy of credence, has ever been found. The writers who have, from time to time, mistaken other things for such vestiges, have been led astray because they have failed to distinguish between the different conditions of proof in Greenland and in Vinland. As Mr. Laing forcibly put the case, nearly half a century ago, "Greenland was a colony with communications, trade, civil and ecclesiastical establishments, and a considerable population," for more than four centuries. "Vinland was only visited by flying parties of woodcutters, remaining at the utmost two or three winters, but never settling there permanently.... To expect here, as in Greenland, material proofs to corroborate the doc.u.mentary proofs, is weakening the latter by linking them to a sort of evidence which, from the very nature of the case,--the temporary visits of a s.h.i.+p's crew,--cannot exist in Vinland, and, as in the case of Greenland, come in to support them."[260]

[Footnote 258: See _Pickwick Papers_, chap. xi. I am indebted to Mr. Tillinghast, of Harvard University Library, for calling my attention to a letter from Rev. John Lathrop, of Boston, to Hon. John Davis, August 10, 1809, containing George Was.h.i.+ngton's opinion of the Dighton inscription. When President Was.h.i.+ngton visited Cambridge in the fall of 1789, he was shown about the college buildings by the president and fellows of the university. While in the museum he was observed to "fix his eye" upon a full-size copy of the Dighton inscription made by the librarian, James Winthrop. Dr. Lathrop, who happened to be standing near Was.h.i.+ngton, "ventured to give the opinion which several learned men had entertained with respect to the origin of the inscription." Inasmuch as some of the characters were thought to resemble "oriental" characters, and inasmuch as the ancient Phoenicians had sailed outside of the Pillars of Hercules, it was "conjectured" that some Phoenician vessels had sailed into Narragansett bay and up the Taunton river. "While detained by winds, or other causes now unknown, the people, it has been conjectured, made the inscription, now to be seen on the face of the rock, and which we may suppose to be a record of their fortunes or of their fate."

"After I had given the above account, the President smiled and said he believed the learned gentlemen whom I had mentioned were mistaken; and added that in the younger part of his life his business called him to be very much in the wilderness of Virginia, which gave him an opportunity to become acquainted with many of the customs and practices of the Indians. The Indians, he said, had a way of writing and recording their transactions, either in war or hunting. When they wished to make any such record, or leave an account of their exploits to any who might come after them, they sc.r.a.ped off the outer bark of a tree, and with a vegetable ink, or a little paint which they carried with them, on the smooth surface they wrote in a way that was generally understood by the people of their respective tribes. As he had so often examined the rude way of writing practised by the Indians of Virginia, and observed many of the characters on the inscription then before him so nearly resembled the characters used by the Indians, he had no doubt the inscription was made long ago by some natives of America."

_Proceedings of Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society_, vol. x. p.

115. This pleasant anecdote shows in a new light Was.h.i.+ngton's accuracy of observation and unfailing common-sense. Such inscriptions have been found by the thousand, scattered over all parts of the United States; for a learned study of them see Garrick Mallery, "Pictographs of the North American Indians,"

_Reports of Bureau of Ethnology_, iv. 13-256. "The voluminous discussion upon the Dighton rock inscription," says Colonel Mallery, "renders it impossible wholly to neglect it.... It is merely a type of Algonquin rock-carving, not so interesting as many others.... It is of purely Indian origin, and is executed in the peculiar symbolic character of the Kekeewin," p. 20. The characters observed by Was.h.i.+ngton in the Virginia forests would very probably have been of the same type. Judge Davis, to whom Dr. Lathrop's letter was addressed, published in 1809 a paper maintaining the Indian origin of the Dighton inscription.

A popular error, once started on its career, is as hard to kill as a cat. Otherwise it would be surprising to find, in so meritorious a book as Oscar Peschel's _Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen_, Stuttgart, 1877, p. 82, an unsuspecting reliance upon Rafn's ridiculous interpretation of this Algonquin pictograph. In an American writer as well equipped as Peschel, this particular kind of blunder would of course be impossible; and one is reminded of Humboldt's remark, "Il est des recherches qui ne peuvent s'executer que pres des sources memes." _Examen critique_, etc., tom. ii. p. 102.

In old times, I may add, such vagaries were usually saddled upon the Phoenicians, until since Rafn's time the Northmen have taken their place as the pack-horses for all sorts of antiquarian "conjecture."]

[Footnote 259: See Palfrey's _History of New England_, vol. i.

pp. 57-59; Mason's _Reminiscences of Newport_, pp. 392-407.

Laing (_Heimskringla_, pp. 182-185) thinks the Yankees must have intended to fool Professor Rafn and the Royal Society of Antiquaries at Copenhagen; "Those sly rogues of Americans,"

says he, "dearly love a quiet hoax;" and he can almost hear them chuckling over their joke in their club-room at Newport. I am afraid these Yankees were less rogues and more fools than Mr. Laing makes out.]

[Footnote 260: Laing, _Heimskringla_, vol. i. p. 181.]

[Sidenote: If the Northmen had founded a successful colony, they would have introduced domestic cattle into the North American fauna;]

[Sidenote: and such animals could not have vanished and left no trace of their existence.]

The most convincing proof that the Northmen never founded a colony in America, south of Davis strait, is furnished by the total absence of horses, cattle, and other domestic animals from the soil of North America until they were brought hither by the Spanish, French, and English settlers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If the Northmen had ever settled in Vinland, they would have brought cattle with them, and if their colony had been successful, it would have introduced such cattle permanently into the fauna of the country.

Indeed, our narrative tells us that Karlsefni's people "had with them all kinds of cattle, having the intention to settle in the land if they could."[261] Naturally the two things are coupled in the narrator's mind. So the Portuguese carried livestock in their earliest expeditions to the Atlantic islands;[262] Columbus brought horses and cows, with vines and all kinds of grain, on his second voyage to the West Indies;[263] when the French, under Baron Lery, made a disastrous attempt to found a colony on or about Cape Breton in 1518, they left behind them, upon Sable island, a goodly stock of cows and pigs, which throve and multiplied long after their owners had gone;[264] the Pilgrims at Plymouth had cattle, goats, and swine as early as 1623.[265]

In fact, it would be difficult to imagine a community of Europeans subsisting anywhere for any length of time without domestic animals. We have seen that the Northmen took pains to raise cattle in Greenland, and were quick to comment upon the climate of Vinland as favourable for pasturage. To suppose that these men ever founded a colony in North America, but did not bring domestic animals thither, would be absurd.

But it would be scarcely less absurd to suppose that such animals, having been once fairly introduced into the fauna of North America, would afterward have vanished without leaving a vestige of their presence. As for the few cattle for which Thorfinn could find room in his three or four dragon-s.h.i.+ps, we may easily believe that his people ate them up before leaving the country, especially since we are told they were threatened with famine. But that domestic cattle, after being supported on American soil during the length of time involved in the establishment of a successful colony (say, for fifty or a hundred years), should have disappeared without leaving abundant traces of themselves, is simply incredible. Horses and kine are not dependent upon man for their existence; when left to themselves, in almost any part of the world, they run wild and flourish in what naturalists call a "feral"

state. Thus we find feral horned cattle in the Falkland and in the Ladrone islands, as well as in the ancient Chillingham Park, in Northumberland; we find feral pigs in Jamaica; feral European dogs in La Plata; feral horses in Turkestan, and also in Mexico, descended from Spanish horses.[266] If the Northmen had ever founded a colony in Vinland, how did it happen that the English and French in the seventeenth century, and from that day to this, have never set eyes upon a wild horse, or wild cattle, pigs, or hounds, or any such indication whatever of the former presence of civilized Europeans? I do not recollect ever seeing this argument used before, but it seems to me conclusive. It raises against the hypothesis of a Norse colonization in Vinland a presumption extremely difficult if not impossible to overcome.[267]

[Footnote 261: "Their hofdhu medh ser allskonar fenadh, thviat their aetlodhu at byggja landit, ef their maetti that," i. e., "illi omne pecudum genus sec.u.m habuerunt, nam terram, si liceret, coloniis frequentare cogitarunt." Rafn, p. 57.]

[Footnote 262: Major, _Prince Henry the Navigator_, p. 241.]

[Footnote 263: Irving's _Life of Columbus_, New York, 1828, vol. i. p. 293.]

[Footnote 264: _Histoire chronologique de la Nouvelle France_, pp. 40, 58; this work, written in 1689 by the Recollet friar Sixte le Tac, has at length been published (Paris, 1888) with notes and other original doc.u.ments by Eugene Reveillaud. See, also, Laet, _Novus...o...b..s_, 39.]

[Footnote 265: John Smith, _Generall Historie_, 247.]

[Footnote 266: Darwin, _Animals and Plants under Domestication_, London, 1868, vol. i pp. 27, 77, 84.]

[Footnote 267: The views of Professor Horsford as to the geographical situation of Vinland and its supposed colonization by Northmen are set forth in his four monographs, _Discovery of America by Northmen--address at the unveiling of the statue of Leif Eriksen_, etc., Boston, 1888; _The Problem of the Northmen_, Cambridge, 1889; _The Discovery of the Ancient City of Norumbega_, Boston, 1890; _The Defences of Norumbega_, Boston, 1891. Among Professor Horsford's conclusions the two princ.i.p.al are: 1. that the "river flowing through a lake into the sea" (Rafn, p. 147) is Charles river, and that Leif's booths were erected near the site of the present Cambridge hospital; 2. that "Norumbega"--a word loosely applied by some early explorers to some region or regions somewhere between the New Jersey coast and the Bay of Fundy--was the Indian utterance of "Norbega" or "Norway;" and that certain stone walls and dams at and near Watertown are vestiges of an ancient "city of Norumbega," which was founded and peopled by Northmen and carried on a more or less extensive trade with Europe for more than three centuries.

With regard to the first of these conclusions, it is perhaps as likely that Leif's booths were within the present limits of Cambridge as in any of the numerous places which different writers have confidently a.s.signed for them, all the way from Point Judith to Cape Breton. A judicious scholar will object not so much to the conclusion as to the character of the arguments by which it is reached. Too much weight is attached to hypothetical etymologies.

With regard to the Norse colony alleged to have flourished for three centuries, it is pertinent to ask, what became of its cattle and horses? Why do we find no vestiges of the burial-places of these Europeans? or of iron tools and weapons of mediaeval workmans.h.i.+p? Why is there no doc.u.mentary mention, in Scandinavia or elsewhere in Europe, of this transatlantic trade? etc., etc. Until such points as these are disposed of, any further consideration of the hypothesis may properly be postponed.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Ruins of the church at Kakortok.]

[Sidenote: Further fortunes of the Greenland colony.]

[Sidenote: Bishop Eric's voyage in search of Vinland, 1121.]

[Sidenote: The s.h.i.+p from Markland, 1347.]

As for the colony in Greenland, while its population seems never to have exceeded 5,000 or 6,000 souls, it maintained its existence and its intercourse with Europe uninterruptedly from its settlement in 986, by Eric the Red, for more than four hundred years. Early in the fourteenth century the West Bygd, or western settlement, near G.o.dthaab, seems to have contained ninety farmsteads and four churches; while the East Bygd, or eastern settlement, near Julianeshaab, contained one hundred and ninety farmsteads, with one cathedral and eleven smaller churches, two villages, and three or four monasteries.[268] Between Tunnudliorbik and Igaliko fiords, and about thirty miles from the ruined stone houses of Brattahlid, there now stands, imposing in its decay, the simple but ma.s.sive structure of Kakortok church, once the "cathedral" church of the Gardar bishopric, where the Credo was intoned and censers swung, while not less than ten generations lived and died. About the beginning of the twelfth century there was a movement at Rome for establis.h.i.+ng new dioceses in "the islands of the ocean;" in 1106 a bishop's see was erected in the north of Iceland, and one at about the same time in the Faeroes. In 1112, Eric Gnupsson,[269] having been appointed by Pope Paschal II. "bishop of Greenland and Vinland _in partibus infidelium_,"

went from Iceland to organize his new diocese in Greenland. It is mentioned in at least six different vellums that in 1121 Bishop Eric "went in search of Vinland."[270] It is nowhere mentioned that he found it, and Dr. Storm thinks it probable that he perished in the enterprise, for, within the next year or next but one, the Greenlanders asked for a new bishop, and Eric's successor, Bishop Arnold, was consecrated in 1124.[271] After Eric there was a regular succession of bishops appointed by the papal court, down at least to 1409, and seventeen of these bishops are mentioned by name. We do not learn that any of them ever repeated Eric's experiment of searching for Vinland. So far as existing Icelandic vellums know, there was no voyage to Vinland after 1121. Very likely, however, there may have been occasional voyages for timber from Greenland to the coast of the American continent, which did not attract attention or call for comment in Iceland. This is rendered somewhat probable from an entry in the "Elder Skalholt Annals," a vellum written about 1362. This informs us that in 1347 "there came a s.h.i.+p from Greenland, less in size than small Icelandic trading-vessels. It was without an anchor. There were seventeen men on board, and they had sailed to Markland, but had afterwards been driven hither by storms at sea."[272] This is the latest mention of any voyage to or from the countries beyond Greenland.

[Footnote 268: Laing, _Heimskringla_, i. 141. A description of the ruins may be found in two papers in _Meddelelser om Gronland_, Copenhagen, 1883 and 1889.]

[Footnote 269: Sometimes called Eric Uppsi; he is mentioned in the Landnama-bok as a native of Iceland.]

[Footnote 270: Storm, _Islandske Annaler_, Christiania, 1888; Reeves, _The Finding of Wineland the Good_, London, 1890, pp.

79-81.]

[Footnote 271: Storm, in _Aarbger for Nordisk Oldkyndighed_, 1887, p. 319.]

[Footnote 272: Reeves, _op. cit._ p. 83. In another vellum it is mentioned that in 1347 "a s.h.i.+p came from Greenland, which had sailed to Markland, and there were eighteen men on board."

As Mr. Reeves well observes: "The nature of the information indicates that the knowledge of the discovery had not altogether faded from the memories of the Icelanders settled in Greenland. It seems further to lend a measure of plausibility to a theory that people from the Greenland colony may from time to time have visited the coast to the southwest of their home for supplies of wood, or for some kindred purpose. The visitors in this case had evidently intended to return directly from Markland to Greenland, and had they not been driven out of their course to Iceland, the probability is that this voyage would never have found mention in Icelandic chronicles, and all knowledge of it must have vanished as completely as did the colony to which the Markland visitors belonged."]

[Sidenote: The Greenland colony attacked by Eskimos.]

If the reader is inclined to wonder why a colony could be maintained in southern Greenland more easily than on the coasts of Nova Scotia or Ma.s.sachusetts, or even why the Northmen did not at once abandon their fiords at Brattahlid and come in a flock to these pleasanter places, he must call to mind two important circ.u.mstances. First, the settlers in southern Greenland did not meet with barbarous natives, but only with vestiges of their former presence. It was not until the twelfth century that, in roaming the icy deserts of the far north in quest of seals and bearskins, the Norse hunters encountered tribes of Eskimo using stone knives and whalebone arrow-heads;[273] and it was not until the fourteenth century that we hear of their getting into a war with these people. In 1349 the West Bygd was attacked and destroyed by Eskimos; in 1379 they invaded the East Bygd and wrought sad havoc; and it is generally believed that some time after 1409 they completed the destruction of the colony.

[Footnote 273: Storm, _Monumenta historica Norvegiae_, p. 77.]

[Sidenote: Queen Margaret's monopoly, and its baneful effects.]

Secondly, the relative proximity of Greenland to the mother country, Iceland, made it much easier to sustain a colony there than in the more distant Vinland. In colonizing, as in campaigning, distance from one's base is sometimes the supreme circ.u.mstance. This is ill.u.s.trated by the fact that the very existence of the Greenland colony itself depended upon perpetual and untrammelled exchange of commodities with Iceland; and when once the source of supply was cut off, the colony soon languished. In 1380 and 1387 the crowns of Norway and Denmark descended upon Queen Margaret, and soon she made her precious contribution to the innumerable swarm of instances that show with how little wisdom the world is ruled. She made the trade to Greenland, Iceland, and the Faeroe isles "a royal monopoly which could only be carried on in s.h.i.+ps belonging to, or licensed by, the sovereign.... Under the monopoly of trade the Icelanders could have no vessels, and no object for sailing to Greenland; and the vessels fitted out by government, or its lessees, would only be ready to leave Denmark or Bergen for Iceland at the season they ought to have been ready to leave Iceland to go to Greenland. The colony gradually fell into oblivion."[274] When this prohibitory management was abandoned after 1534 by Christian III., it was altogether too late. Starved by the miserable policy of governmental interference with freedom of trade, the little Greenland colony soon became too weak to sustain itself against the natives whose hostility had, for half a century, been growing more and more dangerous. Precisely when or how it perished we do not know. The latest notice we have of the colony is of a marriage ceremony performed (probably in the Kakortok church), in 1409, by Endrede Andrea.s.son, the last bishop.[275] When, after three centuries, the great missionary, Hans Egede, visited Greenland, in 1721, he found the ruins of farmsteads and villages, the population of which had vanished.

[Footnote 274: Laing, _Heimskringla_, i. 147. It has been supposed that the Black Death, by which all Europe was ravaged in the middle part of the fourteenth century, may have crossed to Greenland, and fatally weakened the colony there; but Vigfusson says that the Black Death never touched Iceland (_Sturlunga Saga_, vol. i. p. cxxix.), so that it is not so likely to have reached Greenland.]