CHAPTER XX.

ANTE-COLUMBIAN TRACES: COLONIZATION.

THE year 1492 marks in many important respects the close of the Old World's ancient, the beginning of its modern history. But for the native of the Transatlantic hemisphere it is the dawn of all definite annals. It constitutes for America what the era of Julius Cæsar's landing is for Britain: the lifting of the veil behind which lay unrecorded centuries of national story, and the admission into the great family of nations of those who there, isolated and apart, had through unnumbered generations enacted the drama of history.

In previous chapters some attempt has been made to look upon that past, which, though relatively speaking so modern, is nevertheless remoter from all our preconceived ideas and sympathies than the old Roman world. The fifteenth century is, in fact, as ancient for America as the first century is for Britain, or B.C. 2000 for Egypt. No wonder, therefore, that every glimpse of a fancied memorial of ante-Columbian relations with the Old World should present a fascinating charm to the American archaeologist; or that even a pardonable credulity should occasionally be exercised in the reception of any apparent evidence of such intrusive antiquities disclosing themselves among relics of aboriginal native arts. 'He who calls what has vanished back into being enjoys a bliss like that of creating;" so says the great Niebuhr,

himself foremost among those who have revelled in this bliss of resuscitating the long-buried past. But to the impulse which such a generous ambition awakens has been added the no less influential stimulus of national pride and emulation, both in the Old and the New World. To such combined motives we owe in an especial manner, not only the Antiquitates Americanæ, and the Grönland's Historiske Mindesmærker of the Danish antiquaries; but also a singular harvest reaped on American soil, from the novel impetus to which the former of these publications has given rise. The idea of ancient intercourse between America and Europe is not indeed of such recent growth. It mingles with the very earliest study of Mexican antiquities, and was indeed inseparable from that recognition of the American race, as in the strictest meaning of the term of one blood with the whole human family, which has only been seriously challenged within very recent years. One favourite idea, accordingly, long found acceptance, which traced the peopling of the American continent to the long-sought ten tribes of Israel; and discovered in the Indian languages Hebrew words and idioms, and in native customs relics of the ancient Jewish ceremonial rites. Still older traces have been sought in the lost Island of Atlantis ; in the obscure allusions of Herodotus, Plato, Seneca, Pliny, and other classical writers, to mythic islands or continents in that Atlantic Ocean which swept away in undefined vastness beyond the western verge of their world; in the Ophir, to which the ships of Tyre, manned by servants of Hiram, “ that had knowledge of the sea," sailed for gold and algum trees, for Solomon's great works; in the Antilla mentioned by Aristotle as a Carthaginian discovery; and in that other obscure island which Diodorus Siculus assigns to the same Carthaginian voyagers, as a secret reserved for their own behoof,

should fate ever compel them to abandon their African homes.

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Again, the probabilities of undesigned intrusion of early colonists on the New World, from the eastern shores of the Atlantic, find confirmation from various independent sources. According to Pliny, Hanno preceded Vasco de Gama by some two thousand years in the sage of the Cape, reaching the coast of Arabia through the Straits of Gibraltar. Again, in obedience to the commands of Pharaoh-Necho, cir. B.C. 600, Phoenician voyagers effected the circumnavigation of the African continent in the opposite direction: sailing from a port on the Red Sea, and reaching the Nile through the Pillars of Hercules. The account of the latter voyage is given by Herodotus with circumstantial minuteness ; and the cautious Humboldt has looked with sufficient favour on such narratives to induce him to credit the Phoenician and Carthaginian circumnavigations of Africa. This granted, it follows from such prolonged Atlantic voyages, not only that Madeira, the Canary, and Cape Verde Islands, but even the Azores, may have been among the Carthaginian discoveries referred to by Aristotle. Humboldt, indeed, assigns reasons entirely satisfactory to his own mind for believing that the Canary Islands at least were known, not only to the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, but also to the Greeks and Romans, and, as he adds, "perhaps even to the Etruscans. Northward to the Tin Islands of the English Channel, as well as southward beyond Cape Verde, across the stormy Bay of Biscay and the Gulf of Guinea, the ancient voyagers of Tyre and Carthage sailed into the wide waste of the Atlantic; and from our knowledge of the winds. and currents of that ocean, it is manifestly no inconceivable thing that some of those venturous voyagers should have been driven out of their course, and landed

on more than one point of the American continent. To such an accidental landing America may be said to owe its name. Pedro Alvares de Cabral, sailing in command of a Portuguese fleet in the last year of the fifteenth century, on the eastern route just rediscovered by Vasco de Gama, was carried by the equatorial current so far to the west of his intended course that he found himself unexpectedly in sight of land, in 10° s. latitude, thereby discovering Brazil. The king of Portugal thereupon despatched the Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the coast, prepared a map of it, and thereby achieved the honour, more justly due to Columbus, of giving his name to the new continent. So recently as 1833 the wreck of a Japanese junk on the coast of Oregon showed how, in like manner, across the wider waste of the Pacific, the natives of the Old World may have been borne to plant the germs of a new population, or to leave the memorials of Asiatic civilisation on American shores.

It is not, therefore, altogether without reason that the obscure and vague references of classic writers to lands lying beyond the Pillars of Hercules have had an exaggerated value assigned to them. The conviction of some ancient intercourse between the Old World and the New has furnished a fruitful theme for speculation, almost from the year in which the Genoese voyager achieved his long-cherished dream of discovery. It has only required the asserted recovery of Egyptian, Phoenician, or Punic traces of graphic or plastic art, to revive the faith in an American commonwealth old as that Atlantis which the Egyptian priesthood told of to Solon as even then among the things of an ancient past.

Such speculations have been discussed in all their changing forms, and investigated with loving enthusiasm, though ever proving intangible when pressed to any

practical deduction. In Humboldt's Researches is engraved a fragment of a supposed inscription copied by Ranson Bueno, a Franciscan monk, from a block of granite which he discovered in a cavern in the mountain chain between the Orinoco and the Amazon. Unfortunately, Humboldt was unable to inspect it for himself. Possibly it would have proved only the natural markings on a block of graphic granite. He remarks of the copy furnished him by the monk: "Some resemblance to the Phoenician alphabet may be discovered in these characters, but I much doubt whether the good monk, who seemed to be but little interested about this pretended inscription, had copied it very carefully." Not much could be made out of "Phoenician" characters heralded in this fashion. But the appearance in 1837 of the Antiquitates Americana, sive scriptores septentrionales rerum ante-Columbiarum in America, issued by the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries at Copenhagen, under the learned editorship of Professor Charles Christian Rafn, produced an entire revolution, alike in the form and the reception of illustrations of ante-Columbian American history. While the publication of that work gave a fresh interest to the vaguest intimations of a dubious past, it seemed to supersede them by tangible disclosures, which, though "but of yesterday" in comparison with such mythic antiquities as the Egyptian Atlantis, nevertheless added some five centuries to the history of the New World. From the appearance of the Antiquitates Americana, accordingly, may be dated the systematic resolve of American antiquaries and historians to find evidence of intercourse with the ancient world prior to that recent year of the fifteenth century in which the ocean revealed its great secret to Columbus.

From the literary memorials of the old Norsemen, thus brought to light, we glean sufficient evidence to place