Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery

to have sailed bey

umbus than an alleged voyage made to the vicinity of what is supposed to have been Iceland, in the assigned year of 1477. The inciden

the Admiral say that "in February, 1477, he sailed a hundred leagues beyond the island Tile, which lies under the seventy-third parallel, and not under the sixty-third, as some say." The only evidence that he sa

cies in the

and is at 71°, and Spitzbergen is at 76°. What Columbus says of the English of Bristol trading at this island points to Iceland; and it is easy, if one will, to imagine

LAUS MAG

Brenner'

," and he credits that statement to the same Tratado de las Cinco Zonas Habitables of Columbus, and urges in proof that Finn M

yl

of Ptolemy [that is, Ptolemy's world map], and larger than England." This expres

enced mariner; and if the story is true in its main purpose, there is little more in the details than the

ni's F

alk forty years after the voyage to their Frisland had been made, and eighty-four years before a later scion of the family published the remarkable narrative in Venice, in 1558? It is possible that

had discovered, and added that he was entitled to express such an opinion, because his exploration had extended from Guinea on the south to England on the north. It was an occasion when he desired to make his acquaintance seem as wide as the facts would

and Ic

hers, shows that geographical confusion still prevailed at the north. It may be further remarked that Mu?oz and others have found no time in Columbus's career to w

lish in

ln

Ze

gions an entrance to the straits of Anian, which figure so constantly in later maps, and which opened a passage to the Indies; but there seems to be no reason to believe that it had any definite foundation, and it could hardly have been known to Columbus. It is also easy to conjecture that Columbus had been impelled to join some English trading vessel from Bristol, through mere nautical curiosit

do

ave heard. Such was the story which had been obscurely recorded, that Madoc, a Welsh chieftain, in the later years of the twelfth century had carried a colony westerly. No

ling for Ireland had been driven west, and had sighted land which had been supposed t

or Brazi

en the maker of the Catalan planisphere, in 1375, placed it in that sea, and current stories of its existence re

bus land

s landed at Hualfiord, in Iceland. Columbus, however, does not give sufficient ground for any such inference. He says he wen

agnus in

nformation,"-an inference merely,-"and must have heard of the written accounts of the Norse discoveries recorded in" the Codex Flatoyensis. Laing sa

ly imaginary conversation, and

se in I

the

enl

omewhat vague stories of visits to a country somewhere, which they called Ireland the Great. Possibly, too, there were stories told at the firesides of the adventures of a sea-rover, Gunnbiorn by name, who had been driven westerly from Iceland and had seen a stran

skri

n of Gr

be a part

nted in all the maps, since it was first recognized at all, as merely an extended peninsula of Scandinavia, made by a southward twist to enfold a northern sea, in which Iceland lay. One certainly cannot venture to say how far Columbus may have had an acquaintance with the cartographical repertories, more or less well stocked, as they doubtless were, in the great commercial centres of maritime Europe, but the knowledge which we to-day have in detail could hardly have been otherwise than a common possession among students of geography then. We comprehend now how, as far back as 1427, a map of Claudius Clavus showed Greenland as this peninsular adjunct to the northwest of Europe,-a view enforced also in a map of 1447, in the Pitti palace, and in one which Nord

S CLAVU

enski?ld's

ONE,

orthernmost Peninsu

Part

h the conception of the mariners, upon which this map was based, probably associated Greenland with the Asiatic main, as Ruysch certainly did, by a bold effort to reco

e a part

onnection with any country lying beyond the Atlantic; for it was not till after his death that any general conception of it associated with the Asiatic main arose. It is quite certain, however, that as the conception began to prevail, after the discovery of the South Sea by Balboa, in 1513, that an int

5. The map was originally engraved to show "Gronlandia" as a European peninsula, but apparently, at a later stage, the word Gronlandia was cut in the corner be

divers

who still united Greenland with Scandinavia, as was done in the Zeno map of 1558. By this time, however, the southern geographers had begun to doubt, and after 1540 we find Labrador and Greenland put i

s death when the question was raised of its having any other connection than with Europe, and Columbus could have learned in Iceland

ry of V

in the records as the leading Norse historian made it, of the story of the discovery of Vinland. There he would have read, "Leif also found V

an views o

ius's m

nsmitted view then held in the north from the interpretation of the Norse sagas in the light of later knowledge. This testimony is that the "America" of the Spaniards, including Terra Florida and the "Albania" of the English, was a territory south of the Norse region and beyond a separating water, very likely that of Davis' Straits. The map of Sigurd Stephanius of this date (1570) puts Vinland north of the Straits of Belle Isle, and makes it end at t

TEPHANIU

ous

nto script came at a time when, in addition to the inevitable transformations of long oral tradition, there was superadded the romancing spirit then rife in the north, and which had come to them from the south of Europe. The result of this blending of confused tradition with the romancing of the period of the written preservation has thrown, even among the Scandinavians themselves, a shade of doubt, more or less intense at times, which envelops the saga re

Flatoy

Eri

seventeenth century, and there is no evidence of its being known before. Of course it is possible that copies may have been in the hands of learned Icelanders at the time of Columbus's supposed voyage to the north, and he may have heard of it, or have had parts of it read to him. The collection is recognized by Scandinavian writers as being the most confused and incongruous of similar records; and it is out of such romancing, traditionary, and conflicting recitals that the story of the Norse voyages

's edition o

to general Europe, had any relation to the geographical problems then under discussion. Similar views have been expressed by Wheaton and Prescott, and there is no evidence that up to the time of Columbus an acquaintance with the Vinland story had ever entered into the body of historical knowledge possessed by Europeans in general. The scant references in the manuscripts of Adam of Bremen (A. D. 1073), of Ordericus Vitalis (A. D. 1140), and of Saxo Grammaticus (A. D. 1200), were not likely to be widely comprehended, even if they were at all known,

abil

ow safely be said to have been examined by competent critics sufficiently to affirm that no arch?ological trace of the presence of the Norse here is discernible. As to such a forbidding coast as that of Labrador, there has been as yet no such familiarity with it by trained arch?ologists as to render it reasonably certain that some trace may not be found there, and on this account George Bancroft allows the possibility that the Norse may have reached that coast. There remains, th

o remember the advice of Ampère to present as doubtful w

eacherous grounds of unsupported narrative, "i

hear of the

have been presented to Columbus, whatever the effect may have bee

n the wise A

tis; and heard

pebbles of the

lieved t

her Columbus landed in Iceland or not, and whether the bruit of the Norse expeditions struck his ears elsewhere or not, the fact of his never mentioning them, when he summoned every supposable evidence to induce acceptance of his views, seems to be enough to show at least that to a mind possessed as his w