AMERICA.
defunct races of bygone days. On this supposition,
whence came the successive shoals of invaders? To
this question no direct answer can be given. We
can only scan the various routes by which, pre-
viously to what we call the discovery of A., the old
world was most likely to people the American
continent. To begin with the natural routes on the
side of the Pacific—Behring’s Strait, the Aleutian
Isles, and the Polynesian Archipelagoes—we can
hardly conceive anything but barbarism having been
conducted to A. by any one of them. The country
which stretches back from Behring’s Strait to the
Kolyma, may be asserted to be, without exception,
the most inhospitable portion even of Siberia;
and, moreover, the strait itself has more prob-
ably been a channel of migration from America
than from Asia, the Tchuktchi of the latter regard-
ing themselves rather as a branch, than as the
stem, of the Tchuktchi of the former. With respect,
again, both to the Aleutian Isles and the Polyne-
sian Archipelagoes, the successive stepping-stones in
either series, instead of being presumed to have been
so many halts for Asiatic Columbuses and Magellans,
must rather be viewed as each a mother-country to
a new colony, as each a point of departure for a
fresh swarm. Thus would the ever-aggravating
blight of isolation —exemplified even in the old
world among the Laplanders, the Kamtchadales,
and the Hottentots —prepare at each remove a
deeper and deeper barbarism to land at last on
the western shores of A. Further, if civilisation,
as certainly appears to have been the -case,
ever did find its way to A., it must have come
directly and immediately from the old world, and
that under circumstances and conditions of by no
means a favourable character. In remote times,
such accidental, or, to speak more correctly,
unintentional visits of KEuropeans and Asiatics
may have occurred, as we know to have actually
taken place in more modern days. Japanese junks
have repeatedly been driven, by stress of weather,
across the Pacific to the new world; and again,
on the Atlantic, the easterly trades, within eight
years after Columbus’s earliest voyage, wafted the
unconscious Portuguese to Brazil, during their second
voyage to India—the very first, in fact, which they
had attempted by steering clear of the headlands of
Africa. Such incidents, however frequently they
might have happened, were much more likely to
civilise existing communities than to found new
ones; and it is at least a curious fact, that the only
aboriginal nations which could be regarded as in
any sense civilised at the date of the Spanish con-
quest, pointed in their traditions to such events as
we have endeavoured to describe. Mexico and Peru
had each had its Cecrops, or semi-divine eciviliser
—the former referring him to the east across the
Atlantic, and the latter to the west, across the
Pacific. How far such hypotheses may account
for the admitted facts, we are mnot left altogether
to conjecture. Isolated individuals of our own
nation have enabled us to bring the light of the
present to bear on the past. When we consider
what William Adams achieved in Japan, two
hundred years ago, and what John Young and
James Brooke have, more recently, effected in the
Sandwich Islands and in Borneo, we can perhaps
the more easily understand certain undeniable
traces and traditions of aboriginal civilisation.
Discovery.— Whatever may have been the kind
and degree of aboriginal civilisation, A. was not
destined to be the perpetual inheritance of the red
man. New actors were to appear on the scene,
before whom the old possessors were in a great
measure to pass away.
Previously to the times of Columbus, Europeans
had certainly visited A. The Scandinavians, after
having colonised Iceland in 875 A.D., and Greenland
in 983, had, by the year 1000, discovered A. as
far down as 41° 30’ N. lat.,, a point near to New
Bedford, in the state of Massachusetts. These
Scandinavians afterwards settled in the neighbour-
hood—the mother-country, most probably through
the intervention of Iceland and Greenland, main-
taining an intercourse with the colony down to
the 14th c. But these enterprises do not appear
to have left any special impress on the character or
prospects of the new continent, being more akin,
perhaps, to similar incidents of yet earlier ages, than
to the long-meditated and well-matured scheme of
the illustrious Genoese. Subsequently to the Scandi-
navian discovery, and previous to that of Columbus,
A. is believed by some to have been visited by a
Welsh prince. In Cardoc’s Historie of Cambria it
is stated that Madoe, son of Owen Gwynnedd,
prince of Wales, set sail westward in 1170 with a
small fleet, and after a voyage of several weeks,
landed in a region totally different both in its inha-
bitants and productions from Europe. Madoc is
supposed to have reached the coast of Virginia,
Neither this, however, if true, nor the earlier Scandi-
navian expeditions, can be said even to have formed
a connecting-link between the A. of the red man
and the A. of his white brother. Even if the north-
men had possessed resources worthy of their heroic
courage, the old world was not yet ripe for the
appropriation of the new.
At the end of the 15th c., however, science and
politics were alike strengthening Kurope for its
task. The mariner’s compass and the astrolabe
had facilitated long voyages out of sight of land ;
while, in almost every country of Christendom,
various causes were consolidating government, and
promoting the growth of population—a position
which derives, perhaps, its best illustration from the
fact that the capture of Granada—the last foothold
of the Moslem in Spain—preceded by only a few
months the discovery of A.
Columbus (q.v) set out on his great enterprise to
discover A. under the patronage of the crown of
Spain, on Friday, the 3d of August 1492 ; at which
date, properly speaking, begins the deeply interest-
ing history of A. Had the Atlantic been broader,
or had not the easterly trades wafted Columbus
almost on a parallel from the Canaries to the
Bahamas, he must have failed in his bold attempt;
and, in fact, those same easterly trades, assisted by a
still nearer approach of the two continents, speedily
proved their own value in this respect by carrying
the Portuguese, without their own consent, to the
shores of Brazil. Nay, Columbug’s discovery of A.,
if not so accidental, was quite as unintentional as
that of the Portuguese. It was towards the Kast
that his hopes directed his western course, hopes
whose supposed fulfilment still lives in the misap-
plication to the new world of the terms Indian and
Indies. Much of our subsequent knowledge of
America has been owing to the same desire of
reaching the E. Indies that led to its discovery.
The gorgeous East was the aim alike of Dayvis,
Baffin, and Hudson at the north, and of Magellan,
Schouten, and Lemaire at the south, to say
nothing of the earlier enterprise of Balboa on
the Isthmus of Darien; while, under a similar
impulse, the French of Canada were ascending
lake after lake as nature’s ready-made highway to
the same goal. Even to more recent times may
these remarks be applied. =~ While the eastern
coasts of Africa, and the upper shores of Asia, as
not bearing on the grand question of oriental
traffic, were comparatively neglected and forgotten,
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