Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 14

CHAPTER VII.

WAS COLUMBUS IN THE NORTH?

[Sidenote: Columbus supposed to have sailed beyond Iceland, 1477.]

There is, in the minds of some inquirers into the early discovery of America, no more pivotal incident attaching to the career of Columbus than an alleged voyage made to the vicinity of what is supposed to have been Iceland, in the a.s.signed year of 1477. The incident is surrounded with the confusion that belongs to everything dependent on Columbus's own statements, or on what is put forth as such.

Our chief knowledge of his voyage is in the doubtful Italian rendering of the _Historie_ of 1571, where, citing a memoir by Columbus himself on the five habitable zones, the translator or adapter of that book makes the Admiral say that "in February, 1477, he sailed a hundred leagues beyond the island Tile, which lies under the seventy-third parallel, and not under the sixty-third, as some say." The only evidence that he saw Tile, in sailing beyond it, is in what he further says, that he was able to ascertain that the tide rose and fell twenty-six fathoms, which observation necessitates the seeing of some land, whether Tile or not.

[Sidenote: Inconsistencies in the statement.]

There is no land at all in the northern Atlantic under 73. Iceland stretches from 64 to 67; Jan Mayen is too small for Columbus's further description of the island, and is at 71, and Spitzbergen is at 76.

What Columbus says of the English of Bristol trading at this island points to Iceland; and it is easy, if one will, to imagine a misprint of the figures, an error of calculation, a carelessness of statement, or even the disappearance, through some cataclysm, of the island, as has been suggested.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MAP OF OLAUS MAGNUS, 1539.

[From Dr. Brenner's Essay.]]

Humboldt in his _Cosmos_ quotes Columbus as saying of this voyage near Thule that "the sea was not at that time covered with ice," and he credits that statement to the same _Tratado de las Cinco Zonas Habitables_ of Columbus, and urges in proof that Finn Magnusen had found in ancient historical sources that in February, 1477, ice had not set in on the southern coast of that island.

[Sidenote: Thyle.]

Speaking of "Tile," the same narrative adds that "it is west of the western verge of Ptolemy [that is, Ptolemy's world map], and larger than England." This expression of its size could point only to Iceland, of all islands in the northern seas.

There are elements in the story, however, not easily reconcilable with what might be expected of an experienced mariner; and if the story is true in its main purpose, there is little more in the details than the careless inexactness, which characterizes a good many of the well-authenticated a.s.severations of Columbus.

[Sidenote: The Zeni's Frisland.]

Again the narrative says, "It is true that Ptolemy's Thule is where that geographer placed it, but that it is now called Frislande." Does this mean that the Zeni story had been a matter of common talk forty years after the voyage to their Frisland had been made, and eighty-four years before a later scion of the family published the remarkable narrative in Venice, in 1558? It is possible that the maker of the _Historie_ of 1571, in the way in which it was given to the world, had interpolated this reference to the Frisland of the Zeni to help sustain the credit of his own or the other book.

A voyage undertaken by Columbus to such high lat.i.tudes is rendered in all respects doubtful, to say the least, from the fact that in 1492 Columbus detailed for the eyes of his sovereigns the unusual advantages of the harbors of the new islands which he had discovered, and added that he was ent.i.tled to express such an opinion, because his exploration had extended from Guinea on the south to England on the north. It was an occasion when he desired to make his acquaintance seem as wide as the facts would warrant, and yet he does not profess to have been farther north than England. A hundred leagues, moreover, beyond Iceland might well have carried him to the upper Greenland coast, but he makes no mention of other land being seen in those high lat.i.tudes.

[Sidenote: Thyle and Iceland.]

Thyle and Iceland are made different islands in the Ptolemy of 1486, which, if it does not prove that Iceland was not then the same as Thyle in the mind of geographers, shows that geographical confusion still prevailed at the north. It may be further remarked that Munoz and others have found no time in Columbus's career to which this voyage to the north could so easily pertain as to a period anterior to his going to Portugal, and consequently some years before the 1477 of the _Historie_.

[Sidenote: The English in Iceland.]

[Sidenote: Kolno.]

[Sidenote: The Zeni.]

A voyage to Iceland was certainly no new thing. The English traded there, and a large commerce was maintained with it by Bristol, and had been for many years. A story grew up at a later day, and found expression in Gomara and Wytfliet, that in 1476, the year before this alleged voyage of Columbus, a Danish expedition, under the command of the Pole Kolno, or Skolno, had found in these northern regions an entrance to the straits of Anian, which figure so constantly in later maps, and which opened a pa.s.sage to the Indies; but there seems to be no reason to believe that it had any definite foundation, and it could hardly have been known to Columbus. It is also easy to conjecture that Columbus had been impelled to join some English trading vessel from Bristol, through mere nautical curiosity, and even been urged by reports which may have reached him of the northern explorations of the Zeni, long before the accounts were printed. But if he knew anything, he either treasured it up as a proof of his theories, not yet to be divulged,--why is not clear,--or, what is vastly more probable, it never occurred to him to a.s.sociate any of these dim regions with the coasts of Marco Polo's Cathay.

[Sidenote: Madoc.]

There was no lack of stories, even at this time, of venturesome voyages west along the lat.i.tude of England and to the northwest, and of these tales Columbus may possibly have heard. Such was the story which had been obscurely recorded, that Madoc, a Welsh chieftain, in the later years of the twelfth century had carried a colony westerly. Nor can it be positively a.s.serted that the Estotiland and Drogeo of the Zeni narrative, then lying in the cabinet of an Italian family unknown, had ever come to his knowledge.

There are stories in the _Historie_ of reports which had reached him, that mariners sailing for Ireland had been driven west, and had sighted land which had been supposed to be Tartary, which at a later day was thought to be the Baccalaos of the Cortereals.

[Sidenote: Bresil, or Brazil, Island.]

The island of Bresil had been floating about the Atlantic, usually in the lat.i.tude of Ireland, since the days when the maker of the Catalan planisphere, in 1375, placed it in that sea, and current stories of its existence resulted, at a later day (1480), in the sending from Bristol of an expedition of search, as has already been said.

[Sidenote: Did Columbus land on Thule?]

Finn Magnusen among the Scandinavian writers, and De Costa and others among Americans, have thought it probable that Columbus landed at Hualfiord, in Iceland. Columbus, however, does not give sufficient ground for any such inference. He says he went beyond Thule, not to it, whatever Thule was, and we only know by his observations on the tides, that he approached dry land.

[Sidenote: Bishop Magnus in Iceland.]

Laing, in his introduction to the _Heimskringla_, says confidently that Columbus "came to Iceland from Bristol, in 1477, on purpose to gain nautical information,"--an inference merely,--"and must have heard of the written accounts of the Norse discoveries recorded in" the _Codex Flatoyensis_. Laing says again that as Bishop Magnus is known to have been in Iceland in the spring of 1477, "it is presumed Columbus must have met and conversed with him"!

A great deal turns on this purely imaginary conversation, and the possibilities of its scope.

[Sidenote: The Norse in Iceland.]

[Sidenote: Eric the Red.]

[Sidenote: Greenland.]

The listening Columbus might, indeed, have heard of Irish monks and their followers, who had been found in Iceland by the first Norse visitors, six hundred years before, if perchance the traditions of them had been preserved, and these may even have included the somewhat vague stories of visits to a country somewhere, which they called Ireland the Great. Possibly, too, there were stories told at the firesides of the adventures of a sea-rover, Gunnbiorn by name, who had been driven westerly from Iceland and had seen a strange land, which after some years was visited by Eric the Red; and there might have been wondrous stories told of this same land, which Eric had called Greenland, in order to lure settlers, where there is some reason to believe yet earlier wanderers had found a home.

[Sidenote: _Heimskringla._]

[Sidenote: Position of Greenland.]

[Sidenote: Thought to be a part of Europe.]

There mightpossibly have been shown to Columbus an old ma.n.u.script chronicle of the kings of Norway, which they called the _Heimskringla_, and which had been written by Snorre Sturlason in the thirteenth century; and if he had turned the leaves with any curiosity, he could have read, or have had translated for him, accounts of the Norse colonization of Greenland in the ninth century. Where, then, was this Greenland? Could it possibly have had any connection with that Cathay of Marco Polo, so real in the vision of Columbus, and which was supposed to lie above India in the higher lat.i.tudes? As a student of contemporary cartography, Columbus would have answered such a question readily, had it been suggested; for he would have known that Greenland had been represented in all the maps, since it was first recognized at all, as merely an extended peninsula of Scandinavia, made by a southward twist to enfold a northern sea, in which Iceland lay. One certainly cannot venture to say how far Columbus may have had an acquaintance with the cartographical repertories, more or less well stocked, as they doubtless were, in the great commercial centres of maritime Europe, but the knowledge which we to-day have in detail could hardly have been otherwise than a common possession among students of geography then. We comprehend now how, as far back as 1427, a map of Claudius Clavus showed Greenland as this peninsular adjunct to the northwest of Europe,--a view enforced also in a map of 1447, in the Pitti palace, and in one which Nordenskiold recently found in a Codex of Ptolemy at Warsaw, dated in 1467. A few years later, and certainly before Columbus could have gone on this voyage, we find a map which it is more probable he could have known, and that is the engraved one of Nicholas Donis, drawn presumably in 1471, and later included in the edition of Ptolemy published at Ulm in 1482. The same European connection is here maintained. Again it is represented in the map of Henricus Martellus (1489-90), in a way that produced a succession of maps, which till long after the death of Columbus continued to make this Norse colony a territorial appendage of Scandinavian Europe, betraying not the slightest symptom of a belief that Eric the Red had strayed beyond the circle of European connections.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CLAUDIUS CLAVUS, 1427.

[From Nordenskiold's _Studien_.]]

[Ill.u.s.tration: BORDONE, 1528.

[Greenland is the Northernmost Peninsula of N. W. Europe.]]

[Sidenote: Made a Part of Asia.]

It is only when we get down to the later years of Columbus's life that we find, on a Portuguese chart of 1503, a glimmer of the truth, and this only transiently, though the conception of the mariners, upon which this map was based, probably a.s.sociated Greenland with the Asiatic main, as Ruysch certainly did, by a bold effort to reconcile the Norse traditions with the new views of his time, when he produced the first engraved map of the discoveries of Columbus and Cabot in the Roman Ptolemy of 1508.

[Sidenote: Again made a part of Europe.]