History of the United States, Volume 1 | Page 7

Portland, Boston, and Plymouth in considerable
agricultural prosperity, with fields of corn and tobacco, gardens rich in
melons, squashes, pumpkins, and beans, the culture of none of which
had they apparently learned from white men. Mr. Payne's
generalization, that superior food-supply occasioned the Old World's
primacy in civilization, and also that of the Mexicans and Peruvians

here, seems too sweeping, yet it evidently contains large truth.

PART FIRST
THE FORE-HISTORY
PERIOD I.
DISCOVERY AND SETTLEMENT
1492-1660
CHAPTER I.
COLUMBUS
[1000]
There is no end to the accounts of alleged discoveries of America
before Columbus. Most of these are fables. It is, indeed, nearly certain
that hardy Basque, Breton, and Norman fishermen, adventuring first far
north, then west, had sighted Greenland and Labrador and become well
acquainted with the rich fishing-grounds about Newfoundland and the
Saint Lawrence Gulf. Many early charts of 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