History of the United States, Volume 1 | Page 7

these regions, without dates and hitherto referred to Portuguese navigators of a time so late as 1500, are now thought to be the work of these earlier voyagers. They found the New World, but considered it a part of the Old.
Important, too, is the story of supposed Norse sea-rovers hither, derived from certain Icelandic manuscripts of the fourteenth century. It is a pleasing narrative, that of Lief Ericson's sail in 1000-1001 to Helluland, Markland, and at last to Vineland, and of the subsequent tours by Thorwald Ericson in 1002, Thorfinn Karlsefne, 1007-1009, and of Helge and Finnborge in 1011, to points still farther away. Such voyages probably occurred. As is well known, Helluland has been interpreted to be Newfoundland; Markland, Nova Scotia; and Vineland, the country bordering Mount Hope Bay in Bristol, R. I. These identifications are possibly correct, and even if they are mistaken, Vineland may still have been somewhere upon the coast of what is now the United States.
In the present condition of the evidence, however, we have to doubt this. No scholar longer believes that the writing on Dighton Rock is Norse, or that the celebrated Skeleton in Armor found at Fall River was a Northman's, or that the old Stone Mill at Newport was constructed by men from Iceland. Even if the manuscripts, composed between three and four hundred years after the events which they are alleged to narrate, are genuine, and if the statements contained in them are true, the latter are far too indefinite to let us be sure that they are applicable to United States localities.
[Illustration: Dighton Rock]
[l260]
But were we to go so far as to admit that the Northmen came here and began the settlements ascribed to them, they certainly neither appreciated nor published their exploits. Their colony, wherever it was, endured but for a day, and it, with its locality, speedily passed from knowledge in Scandinavia itself. America had not yet, in effect, been discovered.
[Illustration: The Old Stone Mill at Newport, R. I.]
[1300]
We must remember that long anterior to Columbus's day unbiassed and thoughtful men had come to believe the earth to be round. They also knew that Europe constituted but a small part of it. In the year 1260 the Venetian brothers Niccolo and Maffeo Polo made their way to China, the first men from Western Europe ever to travel so far. They returned in 1269, but in 1271 set out again, accompanied by Niccolo's son, a youth of seventeen. This son was the famous Marco Polo, whose work, "The Wonders of the World," reciting his extended journeys through China and the extreme east and southeast of Asia, and his eventful voyage home by sea, ending in 1295, has come down to our time, one of the most interesting volumes in the world. Friar Orderic's eastern travels in 1322-1330, as appropriated by Sir John Mandeville, were published before 1371.
Columbus knew these writings, and the reading and re-reading of them had made him an enthusiast. In Polo's book he had learned of Mangi and Far Cathay, with their thousands of gorgeous cities, the meanest finer than any then in Europe; of their abounding mines pouring forth infinite wealth, their noble rivers, happy populations, curious arts, and benign government. Polo had told him of Cambalu (Peking), winter residence of the Great Khan, Kublai--Cambalu with its palaces of marble, golden-roofed, its guard of ten thousand soldiers, its imperial stables containing five thousand elephants, its unnumbered army, navy, and merchant marine; of oxen huge as elephants; of richest spices, nuts large as melons, canes fifteen yards long, silks, cambrics, and the choicest furs; and of magic Cipango (Japan), island of pearls, whose streets were paved with gold.
[Illustration: Globus Martini Behaim Narinbergensis 1492.]
[1456]
Columbus believed all this, and it cooperated with his intense and even bigoted religious faith to kindle in him an all-consuming ambition to reach this distant Eden by sea, that he might carry the Gospel to those opulent heathen and partake their unbounded temporal riches in return. Poor specimen of a saint as Columbus is now known to have been, he believed himself divinely called to this grand enterprise.
Christopher Columbus, or Christobal Colon, as he always signed himself after he entered the service of Spain, was born in Genoa about 1456. Little is certainly known of his early life. His father was a humble wool-carder. The youth possessed but a sorry education, spite of his few months at the University of Pavia. At the age of fourteen he became a sailor, knocking about the world in the roughest manner, half the time practically a pirate. In an all-day's sea fight, once, his ship took fire and he had to leap overboard; but being a strong swimmer he swam, aided by an oar, eight leagues to land.
[1470]
From 1470 to 1484 we find him in