785 II. "THE LITTLE NAPOLEON OF CARIBOU," Cornhill Magazine, For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when req tested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents. But once he came; he climbed the stair, He knows Phrynette is waiting there, But, ah! the nest is dark and lone, Is this the saddest time?" they said, "Haply," I said, "'tis sad to die; I know a sadder season yet! They cried, "We hear the thrushes sing, Have fallen like an emerald cloud And banished is the Winter's gloom. Come, say if Spring is sad!" they said. They said, "The Summer heat has come; The landscape quivers in the haze; The greenfinch, from the green-leafed tree, Hark, hark, the drum! The trumpets blow! The swallows chatter merrily, For what is life when love is o'er? Temple Bar. THE SADNESS OF SUMMER. Because the summer glories fail : - They said, "The Winter days are cold, There is no life in it," they said. And runs a pale and weakly round, And glimmers through the short-lived days, Their nests are on the sunlit wall. And say not this is sad!" they said. I said, "I feel the heated air Hang heavy with the breath of flowers, Nor can conceive a world more fair Than this, in these sweet summer hours! " I said, "I see the swallows wheel, This is the saddest time of all! From The Edinburgh Review. THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA.* Eriksen has lent a kind of official sanction to the claim of that dashing sea-rover to take rank as the pioneer of the Aryan race on American soil. ALTHOUGH America was no more discovered than Rome was built in a day, yet October 12, 1492, may fitly serve as His exploit, although a considerable the representative date of what has been one, fell in quite naturally with the sewell described as a process rather than quence of preceding events. The overan event. On that day Columbus first set throw of the Jarls of Norway by Harold foot on transatlantic land, and his doing Haarfagr drove those restless spirits so proved decisive for the spread west- among them who could not brook the ward of European civilization. Events, fixed order of a consolidated kingdom, to indeed, might easily have been directed seek their fortunes outside its bounds; otherwise. The incident might under and an exodus ensued more disastrous slightly altered circumstances have re- than plague or famine to many helpless mained isolated, and devoid of momentous consequences, like so many others in the history of geographical exploration; and it seemed at first to mark no more than the opening of a long series of tentative gropings after facts confirmatory of a false theory. Nevertheless, as things turned out, that solemn disembarkation of a little band of white men on the palm-fringed shore of Guanahani really typified the effective discovery of the new continent. Its effective, not its formal, discovery. Columbus, like most other innovators in the realms of knowledge and thought, had been anticipated. "Wineland the Good 99 was no creation of Norse fancy, no shimmering region between sea and sky, where The Spring and the middle Summer sat each on the lap of the breeze, but a concrete strip of coast-land, of ap proximately assignable latitude and longi. tude, washed perhaps by the same waters in which, one night of December in the year 1773, an obnoxious cargo of tea was memorably engulfed. And the recent erection at Boston of a monument to Leif 1. The Discovery of America. With some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest. By John Fiske. In 2 vols. London: 1892. 2. Narrative and Critical History of America. Edited by Justin Winsor. In 8 vols. London: 188589. 3. Christopher Columbus, and how he received and imparted the Spirit of Discovery. By Justin Winsor. London: 1890. 4. Christophe Colomb, son Origine, sa Vie, ses Voyages, sa Famille, et ses Découvertes. Etudes d'Histoire Critique. Par Henry Harrisse. Deux tomes. Paris: 1884. 5. The North Americans of Antiquity. By John T. Short. Second edition. New York: 1880. 6. Prehistoric America. By the Marquis de Nadaillac. Translated by N. d'Anvers. London: 1885. populations. One of the few tranquil episodes in its eventful history was the settlement of Iceland in 874. Thence, by stress of weather, land further west was certain, sooner or later, to be reached; and it actually fell out within two years that one Gunnbjörn found himself icebound for the winter in one of the fiords near Cape Farewell. A century and more passed, however, before the unalluring possibility of adventure in this direction was followed up. It was the outlawry for homicide of Erik the Red in 983 that led to his exploring and colonizing expedition to the frigid peninsula visited by Gunnbjörn. He made his headquarters by the upper Igaliko fiord, near the site of the modern Julianshaab, and there "upon a smooth, grassy plain may still be seen the blocks of sandstone, their chinks caulked ruins of seventeen houses built of rough up with clay and gravel," the dwellings, nine hundred years ago, of the first European settlers in the Western hemisphere. The spot was one of the few in that dismal region where nature wore now and then even the semblance of a smile; and Erik called it "Greenland," somewhat, it may be admitted, on the same advertising principle of nomenclature followed by General Choke and Mr. Scadder in the designation of the "Eden Settlement." And the name, extended from one of its choicest corners to the whole frost-bound Country, survives as if in mockery of the grim reality. From Greenland, the continent of America was attained in precisely the same casual way that Greenland itself had been attained from Iceland. Thus Bjarni Her . adventures encountered there by the vikings of old were recounted, century after century, by Icelandic firesides, but kindled no emulative zeal. Only a certain priest, named Erik Gnupsen, having been ap Greenland and Vinland in partibus infidelium," set out in 1121 to search for the more remote section of his diocese. He never returned, that the chroniclers were aware of; and the presumption is strong that he perished on the journey. julfsen, drifting under cover of a fog, in 986, outside the limits of the known world, sighted the densely wooded shore of Maine or Nova Scotia, but had not the curiosity to land, and made little of his adventure. Its significance was not, how-pointed by Pope Paschal II. “bishop of ever, lost upon Leif, son of the homicidal Erik, a thoughtful and strenuous man, not devoid of grasp upon the present and insight into the future. A trip to Norway in 998 brought about his conversion to Christianity; he carried missionaries back with him to Greenland; then, in the year 1000, equipped a "dragon ship" for a journey to the west. His first landfall was most likely somewhere in Labrador; and he named the country, from its dreary and stone-strewn aspect," Helluland," i.e., "slate land," Further south, the explorers disembarked on the sylvan shore of the so-called "Markland," plausibly identified with some part either of Cape Breton Island or of Nova Scotia; but the dense forest-growth did not encourage tarrying, and they determined to draw another lot out of the lap of the sea. This time they were in luck. A short run before a stiff north-easter brought them to a fertile strand where the waters abounded with excellent fish, fields waved yellow with maize, and wild vines, in that autumnal season, drooped under a heavy burden of grapes. They called the place accordingly "Vinland," and wintered there in great comfort. From Greenland, too, the outposts of civilization were eventually withdrawn. The native Esquimaux, known only by archæological traces to the comrades of Erik the Red, again, in course of time, migrated southward, and before the close of the fifteenth century overwhelmed the intruders into their forsaken haunts. The massive ruin, however, of what was once the cathedral church of Gardar remains, and will probably long remain, standing by the melancholy fiord of Kakortok, a conspicuous memorial of antique Christian occupation. Only in the eighteenth century the devastation was to some extent repaired by the planting of fresh settlements along the barely habitable coasts fringing the glaciated central mass of the peninsula. The Vinland of the Sagas may be located with some confidence on the shore of Massachusetts Bay. In the neighborhood of Cape Cod the fox-grape still Leif's return to Greenland with a cargo ripens freely, and Indian corn unsheaths of timber prompted sundry colonizing its tasselled ears almost spontaneously. efforts, notably an energetic one by Thor- The mildness of the winter climate, befinn Karlsefni; and since the natives, who sides, and the length of the winter days, seem to have been Algonquin Indians, which excited the comments of unaccuseagerly bartered rich furs for worthless tomed Icelanders, suggest a region cerstrips of scarlet cloth, trade with them was tainly not more inclement than New exceedingly profitable. These "Skrae- England. But material vestiges of this lings," as they are designated in the Sagas, curious adventure in colonization are were terribly afraid of the strange beasts scanty, or non-existent. Only by a stretch brought from over the sea; and the bel- of romantic credulity are we even allowed lowing of Thorfinn's bull on one occasion to suppose that the" skeleton in armor," sent them into hiding for three weeks. dug up many years ago near Fall River, Yet their hostility ended by becoming formidable, and led, in the course of twelve years, to the abandonment of this early attempt to secure a foothold for a European race on the western continent. Vinland became a dim tradition. The and sung of by Longfellow in a spirited ballad, represented the genuine remains of some slain comrade of Thorfinn or of Thorvald. The Norse discovery of America remained absolutely barren of results. The In so far [our present authority continues] as the attention of people in Europe was called to any quarter of the globe outside of the seething turbulence in which they dwelt, it was directed toward Asia. Until after 1492, 66 Europe stood with her back toward the Atlantic. What there might be out beyond that Sea of Darkness" (Mare Tenebrosum), as it used commonly to be called, was a question of little interest, and seems to have excited no speculation. In the view of medieval Europe records of it assumed, as time went on, a legendary air. They were not discredited, but just inferences from them were ignored. The performance, in fact, came to nothing, because it came too soon. There was not knowledge enough in men's minds to serve as a measure of its importance. That "the merry world was round was not even a general conviction. Indeed, the possibility of antipodal existence ranked merely as a learned extravagance the inhabited world was cut off on the west of opinion. Besides, the geographical inquisitiveness of modern times had not then begun to develop; nor, in the backward state of navigation, could much satisfaction have been procured for it, had it been as full-fledged and keen-witted as it is now. All this is admirably explained by Mr. Fiske in the able work named at the head of this article. It is learned in substance, and lucid in style; and condenses a vast amount of varied information into a skilfully constructed and agreeable narrative. None of the Icelandic references to Markland and Vinland [we read in it] betray a consciousness that these countries belong to a geographical world outside of Europe. There was not enough organized geographical knowledge for that. They were simply conceived as remote places beyond Greenland, inhabited by inferior but dangerous people. The accidental finding of such places served neither to solve any great commercial problem nor to gratify and provoke scientific curiosity. It was, therefore, not at all strange that it bore no fruit. (Vol. i., p. 257.) Moreover even if it had been realized, and could have been duly proclaimed throughout Europe, that across the broad Atlantic a new world lay open for colonization, Europe could not have taken advantage of the fact. Now and then a ship might make its way, or be blown, across the waste of waters without compass or astrolabe; but until these instruments were at hand anything like systematic ocean navigation was out of the question; and from a colonization which could only begin by creeping up into the Arctic seas and taking Greenland on the way, not much was to be expected after all. The westward tendency of the "star of empire," too, was, in the eleventh century, very far from being recognized. by this mysterious ocean, and on the south by the burning sands of Sahara; but eastward it stretched out no one knew how far, and in that direction dwelt tribes and nations which Europe, from time immemorial, had reason to fear. (Vol. i., p. 260.) The process by which the direction of outlook came to be reversed was slow and complex. First of all, the conquests of Genghis Khan cleared the way to Cathay - so China was designated from the ruling dynasty of the Khitai; and thus it came to European knowledge that the the Ptolemaic swamp country was bounded on the east, not by neither sea Nor good dry land but by a navigable ocean. The bearers |