Part 4

So far it becomes apparent that the evidence, derived alike from language and from other sources, points to the isolation of the American continent through unnumbered ages. The legend of the lost Atlantis is true in this, if in nothing else, that it relegates the knowledge of the world beyond the Atlantic, by the maritime races of the Mediterranean, to a time already of hoar antiquity in the age of Socrates, or even of Solon. But at a greatly later date the Caribbean Sea was scarcely more a mystery to the dwellers on the shores of the Ægean, than was the Baltic or the North Sea. Herodotus, indeed, expressly affirms his disbelief in “a river, called by the barbarians, Eridanus, which flows into a northern sea, and from which there is a report that amber is wont to come.” Nevertheless, we learn from him of Greek traders exchanging personal ornaments and woven stuffs for the furs and amber of the North. They ascended the Dneiper as far as Gerrhos, a trading-post, forty days’ journey inland; and the tokens of their presence there have been recovered in modern times. Not only hoards of Greek coins, minted in the fifth century B.C., but older golden gryphons of Assyrian workmanship have been recovered during the present century, near Bromberg in Posen, and at Kiev on the Dneiper. As also, afar on the most northern island of the Azores, hoards of Carthaginian coins have revealed traces of the old Punic voyager there; if still more ancient voyagers from Sidon, Tyre, or Seleucia, did find their way in some forgotten century to lands that lay beyond the waste of waters which seemed to engirdle their world: similar evidence may yet be forthcoming among the traces of ancient native civilisation in Central or Southern America.

But also the carving of names and dates, and other graphic memorials of the passing wayfarer, is no mere modern custom. When the sites of Greenland settlements of the Northmen of the tenth century were discovered in our own day, the runic inscriptions left no room for doubt as to their former presence there. By like evidence we learn of them in southern lands, from their runes still legible on the marble lion of the Piræus, since transported to its later site in the arsenal of Venice. At Maeshowe in Orkney, in St. Molio’s Cave on the Clyde, at Kirk Michael in the Isle of Man, and on many a rock and stone by the Baltic, the sea-rovers from the north have left enduring evidence of their wanderings. So was it with the Roman. From the Moray Firth to the Libyan desert, and from the Iberian shore to the Syrian valleys, sepulchral, legionary, and mythological inscriptions, as well as coins, medals, pottery, and works of art, mark the footprints of the masters of the world. In Italy itself Perusinian, Eugubine, Etruscan, and Greek inscriptions tell the story of a succession of races in that beautiful peninsula. It was the same, through all the centuries of Hellenic intellectual rule, back to the unrivalled inscription at Abbu Simbel. This was cut, says Dr. Isaac Taylor,[3] “when what we call Greek history can hardly be said to have commenced: two hundred years before Herodotus, the Father of History, had composed his work; a century before Athens began to rise to power. More ancient even than the epoch assigned to Solon, Thales, and the seven wise men of Greece: it must be placed in the half-legendary period at which the laws of Dracon are said to have been enacted”;—the period, in fact, from which the legend of Atlantis was professedly derived. Yet there the graven characters perpetuate their authentic bit of history, legible to this day, of the son of Theokles, sailing with his company up the Nile, when King Psamatichos came to Elephantina. So it is with Egyptians, Assyrians, Phœnicians, and with the strange forgotten Hittites, whose vast empire has vanished out of the world’s memory. The lion of the Piræus, with its graven runes, is a thing of yesterday, compared with the inscribed lion from Marash, with its Hittite hieroglyphs, now in the museum at Constantinople; for the Hittite capital, Ketesh, was captured by the Egyptian Sethos, B.C. 1340. All but the name of this once powerful people seemed to have perished. Yet the inscribed stones, by which they were to be restored to their place in history, remained, awaiting the interpretation of an enlightened age.

If then, traces of the lost Atlantis are ever to be recovered in the New World, it must be by some indubitable memorial of a like kind. Old as the legend may be, it is seen that literal graphic memorials—Assyrian, Phœnician, Khita, Egyptian, and Greek,—still remain to tell of times even beyond the epoch assigned to Solon. The antiquaries of New England have sought in vain for runic memorials of the Northmen of the tenth century; and the diligence of less trustworthy explorers for traces of ancient records has been stimulated to excess, throughout the North American continent, with results little more creditable to their honesty than their judgment. What some chance disclosure may yet reveal, who can presume to guess? But thus far it appears to be improbable that within the area north of the Gulf of Mexico, evidences of the presence of Phœnician, Greek, or other ancient historic race will now be found. Certain it is that, whatever transient visits may have been paid to North America by representatives of Old World progress, no long-matured civilisation, whether of native or foreign origin, has existed there. Through all the centuries of which definite history has anything to tell, it has remained a world apart, secure in its isolation, with languages, arts, and customs essentially native in character. The nations of the Maya stock appear to have made the greatest progress in civilisation of all the communities of Central America. They dwelt in cities adorned with costly structures dedicated to the purposes of religion and the state; and had political government, and forms of social organisation, to all appearance, the slow growth of many generations. They had, also, a well-matured system of chronology; and have left behind them graven and written records, analogous to those of ancient Egypt, which still await decipherment. Whether this culture was purely of native growth, or had its origin from the germs of an Old World civilisation, can only be determined when its secrets have been fully mastered. The region is even now very partially explored. The students of American ethnology and archæology are only awakening to some adequate sense of its importance. But there appears to have been the centre of a native American civilisation whence light was slowly radiating on either hand, before the vandals of the Spanish Conquest quenched it in blood. The civilisation of Mexico was but a borrowed reflex of that of Central America; and its picture-writing is a very inferior imitation of the ideography of the Maya hieroglyphics.

A tendency manifests itself anew to trace the metallurgy, the letters, the astronomical science, and whatever else marks the quickening into intellectual life of this American leading race, to an Asiatic or other Old World origin. The point, however, is by no means established; nor can any reason be shown why the human intellect might not be started on the same course in Central America, as in Mesopotamia or the valley of the Nile. If we assume the primary settlement of Central America by expeditions systematically carried on under the auspices of some ancient maritime power of the Mediterranean, or of an early seat of Iberian or Libyan civilisation, then they would, undoubtedly, transplant the arts of their old home to the New World. But, on the more probable supposition of wanderers, either by the Atlantic or the Pacific, being landed on its shores, and becoming the undesigned settlers of the continent, it is otherwise; and the probabilities are still further diminished if we conceive of ocean wanderers from island to island of the Pacific, at length reaching the shores of the remote continent after the traditions of their Asiatic fatherland had faded from the memory of later generations. The condition of metallurgy as practised by the Mexicans and Peruvians exhibited none of the matured phases of an inheritance from remote generations, but partook rather of the tentative characteristics of immature native art.

We are prone to overestimate the facilities by which the arts of civilisation may be transplanted to remote regions. It is not greatly more difficult to conceive of the rediscovery of some of the essential elements of human progress than to believe in the transference of them from the eastern to the western hemisphere by wanderers from either Europe or Asia. Take the average type of emigrants, such as are annually landed by thousands at New York. They come from the most civilised countries of Europe. Yet, how few among them all could be relied upon for any such intelligent comprehension of metallurgy, if left entirely to their own resources, as to be found able to turn the mineral wealth of their new home to practical account; or for astronomical science, such as would enable them to construct a calendar, and start afresh a systematic chronology. As to letters, the picture-writing of the Aztecs was the same in principle as the rude art of the northern Indians; and I cannot conceive of any reason for rejecting the assumption of its native origin as an intellectual triumph achieved by the labours of many generations. Every step is still traceable, from the rude picturings on the Indian’s grave-post or rock inscription, to the systematic ideographs of Palenque or Copan. Hieroglyphics, as the natural outgrowth of pictorial representation, must always have a general family likeness; but all attempts to connect the civilisation of Central and Southern America with that of Egypt fail, so soon as a comparison is instituted between the Egyptian calendar and any of the native American systems of recording dates and computing time. The vague year of 365 days, and the corrected solar year, with the great Sothic Cycle of 1460 years, so intimately interwoven with the religious system and historical chronology of the Egyptians, abundantly prove the correction of the Egyptian calendar by accumulated experience, at a date long anterior to the resort of the Greek astronomer, Thales, to Egypt. At the close of the fifteenth century, the Aztecs had learned to correct their calendar to solar time; but their cycle was one of only fifty-two years. The Peruvians also had their recurrent religious festivals, connected with the adjustment of their sacred calendar to solar time; but the geographical position of Peru, with Quito, its holy city, lying immediately under the equator, greatly simplified the process by which they regulated their religious festivals by the solstices and equinoxes. The facilities which their equatorial position afforded for determining the few indispensable periods in their calendar were, indeed, a doubtful advantage, for they removed all stimulus to progress. The Mexican calendar is the most remarkable evidence of the civilisation attained by that people. Humboldt unhesitatingly connected it with the ancient science of south-eastern Asia. But instead of its exhibiting any such inevitable accumulation of error as that which gave so peculiar a character to the historical chronology of the Egyptians, its computation differed less from true solar time than the unreformed Julian calendar which the Spaniards had inherited from pagan Rome. But though this suffices to show that the civilisation of Mexico was of no great antiquity, it only accords with other evidence of its borrowed character. The Mexicans stood in the same relation to Central America as the Northern Barbarians of the third and fourth century did to Italy; and the intruding Spaniard nipped their germ of borrowed civilisation in the bud. So long as the search for evidences either of a native or intruded civilisation is limited to the northern continent of America, it is equivalent to an attempt to recover the traces of Greek and Roman civilisation in transalpine Europe. The Mexican calendar stone is no more than the counterpart of some stray Greek or Roman tablet beyond the Alps; or rather, perhaps, of some Mæsogothic product of borrowed art.

We must await, then, the intelligent exploration of Central America, before any certain conclusion can be arrived at relative to the story of the New World’s unknown past. On the sculptured tablets of Palenque, Quiriqua, Chichenitza, and Uxmal, and on the colossal statues at Copan and other ancient sites, are numerous inscriptions awaiting the decipherment of the future Young or Champolion of American palæography. The whole region was once in occupation by a lettered race, having the same written characters and a common civilisation. If they owed to some apostle from the Mediterranean the grand invention of letters, which, as Bacon says, “as ships, pass through the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations and inventions, the one of the other:” then, we may confidently anticipate the recovery of some graphic memorial of the messenger, confirming the oft-recurring traditions of bearded white men who came from beyond the sea, introduced the arts of civilisation, and were reverenced as divine benefactors. It cannot be that Egyptian, Assyrian, Hittite, Phœnician, and other most ancient races, are still perpetuated by so many traces of their wanderings in the Old World; that the Northmen’s graphic runes have placed beyond all question their pre-Columbian explorations; and yet that not a single trace of Mediterranean wanderers to the lost Atlantis survives. In Humboldt’s _Researches_, a fragment of a reputed Phœnician inscription is engraved. It was 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. Humboldt recognised in it some resemblance to the Phœnician alphabet. We must remember, however, what rudely traced Phœnician characters are; and as to their transcriber, it may be presumed that he had no knowledge of Phœnician. Humboldt says of him: “The good monk seemed to be but little interested about this pretended inscription,” though, he adds, he had copied it very carefully.

* * * * *

The lost Atlantis, then, lies still in the future. The earlier studies of the monuments and prehistoric remains of the American continent seemed to point conclusively to a native source for its civilisation. From quipu and wampum, pictured grave-post and buffalo robe, to the most finished hieroglyphs of Copan or Palenque, continuous steps appear to be traceable whereby American man developed for himself the same wondrous invention of letters which ancient legend ascribed to Thoth or Mercury; or, in less mythic form, to the Phœnician Cadmus. Nor has the generally accepted assumption of a foreign origin for American metallurgy been placed as yet on any substantial basis. Gold, as I believe, was everywhere the first metal wrought. The bright nugget tempted the savage, with whom personal ornaments precede dress. It was readily fashioned into any desired shape. The same is true, though in a less degree, of copper; and wherever, as on the American continent, native copper abounds, the next step in metallurgy is to be anticipated. With the discovery of the economic use of the metals, an all-important step had been achieved, leading to the fashioning of useful tools, to architecture, sculpture, pictorial ornamentation, and so to ideography. The facilities for all this were, at least, as abundant in Central and Southern America as in Egypt. The progress was, doubtless, slow; but when the Neolithic age began to yield to that of the metallurgist, the all-important step had been taken. The history of this first step is embodied in myths of the New World, no less than of the Old. Tubal-cain, Dædalus, Hephæstus, Vulcan, Vœlund, Galant, and Wayland the Saxon smith-god, are all legendary variations of the first mastery of the use of the metals; and so, too, the New World has Quetzalcoatl, its divine instructor in the same priceless art.

It forms one of the indisputable facts of ancient history that, long before Greece became the world’s intellectual leader, the eastern Mediterranean was settled by maritime races whose adventurous enterprise led them to navigate the Atlantic. There was no greater impediment to such adventurous mariners crossing that ocean in earliest centuries before Christ, than at any subsequent date prior to the revival of navigation in the fifteenth century. It would not, therefore, in any degree, surprise me to learn of the discovery of a genuine Phœnician, or other inscription; or, of some hoard of Assyrian gryphons, or shekels of the merchant princes of Tyre “that had knowledge of the sea,” being recovered among the still unexplored treasures of the buried empire of Montezuma, or the long-deserted ruins of Central America. Such a discovery would scarcely be more surprising than that of the Punic hoards found at Corvo, the most westerly island of the Azores. Yet it would furnish a substantial basis for the legend of Atlantis, akin to that which the runic monuments of Kingiktorsoak and Igalikko supplied in confirmation of the fabled charms of a Hesperian region lying within the Arctic circle; and of the first actual glimpses of the American mainland by Norse voyagers of the tenth century, as told in more than one of their old Sagas. But until such evidence is forthcoming, the legendary Atlantis must remain a myth, and pre-Columbian America be still credited with a self-achieved progress.

[1] _Popular Science Monthly_, xxviii. 296.

[2] _Races of Man_ (Bohn), p. 445.

[3] _The Alphabet_, ii. 10.

II THE VINLAND OF THE NORTHMEN

THE idea that the western hemisphere was known to the Old World, prior to the ever-memorable voyage of Columbus four centuries ago, has reproduced itself in varying phases, not only in the venerable Greek legend of the lost Atlantis; and the still vaguer myth of the Garden of the Hesperides on the far ocean horizon, the region of the setting sun; but in mediæval fancies and mythical epics. The Breton, in _The Earthly Paradise_ of William Morris—

Spoke of gardens ever blossoming Across the western sea, where none grew old, E’en as the books at Micklegarth had told; And said moreover that an English knight Had had the Earthly Paradise in sight; And heard the songs of those that dwelt therein; But entered not; being hindered by his sin.

A legend of mediæval hagiology tells of the Island of St. Brandon, the retreat of an Irish hermit of the sixth century. Another tale comes down to us from the time of the Caliph Walid, and the invincible Musa, of the “Seven Islands” whither the Christians of Gothic Spain fled under the guidance of their seven bishops, when, in the eighth century, the peninsula passed under the yoke of the victorious Saracens. The Eyrbyggja Saga has a romantic story of Biorn Ashbrandsson, who narrowly escapes in a tempest raised by his enemy, with the aid of one skilled in the black art. After undergoing many surprising adventures, he is finally discovered by voyagers, “in the latter days of Olaf the Saint,” in a strange land beyond the ocean, the chief of a warlike race speaking a language that seemed to be Irish. Biorn warned the voyagers to depart, for the people had evil designs against them. But before they sailed, he took a gold ring from his hand, and gave it to Gudleif, their leader, along with a goodly sword; and commissioned him to give the sword to Kiartan, the son of Thurid, wife of an Iceland thane at Froda, of whom he had been enamoured; and the gold ring to his mother. This done, he warned them that no man venture to renew the search for what later commentators refer to as White Man’s Land. In equally vague form the fancy of lands beyond the ocean perpetuated itself in an imaginary island of Brazil that flitted about the charts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with ever-varying site and proportions, till it vanished in the light of modern exploration.

A more definite character has been given to the tale of Madoc, a Welsh prince of the twelfth century. Southey wove into an elaborate epic this legend of the son of Owen Gwyneth, king of North Wales, who, _circa_ A.D. 1170, sailed into the unknown west in search of a resting-place beyond reach of his brother Yorwerth, then ridding himself of all rivals to the throne. He found a home in the New World, returned to Wales for additional colonists to join the pioneer band; and setting sail with them, vanished beyond the western horizon, and was heard of no more. The poet, while adapting it to the purpose of his art, was not without faith in the genuineness of the legend which he amplified into his epic; and notes in the preface appended to it: “Strong evidence has been adduced that he (Prince Madoc) reached America; and that his posterity exist there to this day on the southern branch of the Missouri, retaining their complexion, their language, and in some degree, their arts.” But later explorations have failed to discover any “Welsh Indians” on the Missouri or its tributaries.

A small grain of fact will suffice at times for the crystallisation of vague and visionary fancies into a well-credited tradition. Before the printing-press came into play, with its perpetuation of definite records, and prosaic sifting of evidence, this was no uncommon occurrence; but even in recent times fancy may be seen transmuted into accepted fact.

When exploring the great earthworks of the Ohio valley, in 1874, I found myself on one occasion in a large Welsh settlement, a few miles from Newark, where a generation of native-born Americans still perpetuate the language of their Cymric forefathers, and conduct their religious services in the Welsh tongue. My attention was first called to this by the farmer, who had invited me to an early dinner after a morning’s digging in a mound on “The Evan’s Farm,” preceding our repast with a long Welsh grace. From him I learned that the district had been settled in 1802 by a Welsh colony; and that in two churches in neighbouring valleys—one Calvinistic Congregational and another Methodist,—the entire services are still conducted in their mother tongue. Such a perpetuation of the language and traditions of the race, in a quiet rural district, only required time and the confusion of dates and genealogies by younger generations, to have engrafted the story of Prince Madoc on the substantial basis of a genuine Welsh settlement. Southey’s epic was published in 1805, within three years after this Welsh immigration to the Ohio valley. The subject of the poem naturally gave it a special attraction for American readers; and it was speedily reprinted in the United States, doubtless with the same indifference to the author’s claim of copyright as long continued to characterise the ideas of literary ethics beyond the Atlantic. But the idea of a Welsh Columbus of the twelfth century was by no means received with universal favour there. Southey quoted at a long-subsequent date a critical pamphleteer who denounced the author of _Madoc_ as having “meditated a most serious injury against the reputation of the New World by attributing its discovery and colonisation to a vagabond Welsh prince; this being a most insidious attempt against the honour of America, and the reputation of Columbus!”