Sea Thoughts - 5

Sea Thoughts - 5

So much for the outposts of the Old World. Of the New World, about the possibility of

which Columbus is beginning to dream as he sails the Mediterranean, there was no

knowledge and hardly any thought. Though new in the thoughts of Columbus, it was very

old in itself; generations of men had lived and walked and spoken and toiled there, ever

since men came upon the earth; sun and shower, the thrill of the seasons, birth and life

and death, had been visiting it for centuries and centuries. And it is quite possible that,

long before even the civilisation that produced Columbus was in its dawn, men from the

Old World had journeyed there. There are two very old fragments of knowledge which

indicate at least the possibility of a Western World of which the ancients had knowledge.

There is a fragment, preserved from the fourth century before Christ, of a conversation

between Silenus and Midas, King of Phrygia, in which Silenus correctly describes the

Old World—Europe, Asia, and Africa—as being surrounded by the sea, but also

describes, far to the west of it, a huge island, which had its own civilisation and its own

laws, where the animals and the men were of twice our stature, and lived for twice our

years. There is also the story told by Plato of the island of Atlantis, which was larger than

Africa and Asia together, and which in an earthquake disappeared beneath the waves,

producing such a slime upon the surface that no ship was able to navigate the sea in that

place. This is the story which the priests of Sais told to Solon, and which was embodied

in the sacred inscriptions in their temples. It is strange that any one should think of this

theory of the slime who had not seen or heard of the Sargasso Sea—that great bank of

floating seaweed that the ocean currents collect and retain in the middle of the basin of

the North Atlantic.

The Egyptians, the Tartars, the Canaanites, the Chinese, the Arabians, the Welsh, and the

Scandinavians have all been credited with the colonisation of America; but the only race

from the Old World which had almost certainly been there were the Scandinavians. In the

year 983 the coast of Greenland was visited by Eric the Red, the son of a Norwegian

noble, who was banished for the crime of murder. Some fifteen years later Eric's son Lief

made an expedition with thirty-five men and a ship in the direction of the new land. They

came to a coast where there were nothing but ice mountains having the appearance of

slate; this country they named Helluland—that is, Land of Slate. This country is our

Newfoundland. Standing out to sea again, they reached a level wooded country with

white sandy cliffs, which they called Markland, or Land of Wood, which is our Nova

Scotia. Next they reached an island east of Markland, where they passed the winter, and

as one of their number who had wandered some distance inland had found vines and

grapes, Lief named the country Vinland or Vine Land, which is the country we call New

England. The Scandinavians continued to make voyages to the West and South; and

finally Thorfinn Karlsefne, an Icelander, made a great expedition in the spring of 1007

with ships and material for colonisation. He made much progress to the southwards, and

the Icelandic accounts of the climate and soil and characteristics of the country leave no

doubt that Greenland and Nova Scotia were discovered and colonised at this time.

It must be remembered, however, that then and in the lifetime of Columbus Greenland

was supposed to—be a promontory of the coast of Europe, and was not connected in

men's minds with a western continent. Its early discovery has no bearing on the

significance of Columbus's achievement, the greatness of which depends not on his

having been the first man from the Old World to set foot upon the shores of the New, but

on the fact that by pure faith and belief in his own purpose he did set out for and arrive in

a world where no man of his era or civilisation had ever before set foot, or from which no

wanderer who may have been blown there ever returned. It is enough to claim for him the

merit of discovery in the true sense of the word. The New World was covered from the

Old by a veil of distance, of time and space, of absence, invisibility, virtual nonexistence;

and he discovered it.