The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies. Sir Daniel Wilson
faith: since to assert that there were inhabited lands on the opposite side of the globe would be to maintain that there were nations not descended from Adam, it being impossible for them to have passed the intervening ocean.
It may naturally excite a smile to thus find the very ethnological problem of this nineteenth century thus dogmatically produced four centuries earlier to prove that America was an impossibility. But in reality this ethnological problem long continued in all ways to affect the question. Among the various evidences which Columbus adduced in confirmation of his belief in the existence of a continent beyond the Atlantic, was the report brought to him by his own brother-in-law, Pedro Correa, that the bodies of two dead men had been cast ashore on the island of Flores, differing essentially from any known race, “very broad-faced, and diverse in aspect from Christians”; and, in truth, the more widely they differed from all familiar Christian humanity, the more probable did their existence appear to the men of that fifteenth century. Hence Shakespeare’s marvellous creation of his Caliban. Upwards of a century and half had then elapsed since Columbus returned with the news of a world beyond the Western Ocean; yet still to the men of Shakespeare’s day, the strange regions of which Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Gomara, Lane, Harriot, and Raleigh wrote, seemed more fitly occupied by Calibans, and the like rude approximations to humanity, than by men and women in any degree akin to ourselves. Othello indeed only literally reproduces Raleigh’s account of a strange people on the Caoro, in Guiana. He had not, indeed, himself got sight of those marvellous Ewaipanoma, though anxious enough to do so. Their eyes, as reported, were in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts. But the truth could not be doubted, since every child in the provinces of Arromaia and Canuri affirmed the same. The founder of Virginia, assuredly one of the most sagacious men of that wise Elizabethan era, and with all the experience which travel supplies, reverts again and again to this strange new-world race, as to a thing of which he entertained no doubt. The designation of Shakespeare’s Caliban, is but an anagram of the epithet which Raleigh couples with the specific designation of those monstrous dwellers on the Caoro. “To the west of Caroli,” he says, “are divers nations of Cannibals, and of those Ewaipanoma without heads.” Of “such men, whose head stood in their breasts,” Gonsalo, in The Tempest, reminds his companions, as a tale which every voyager brings back “good warrant of”; and so it was in all honesty that Othello entertained Desdemona with the story of his adventures:—
Of moving accidents by flood and field …
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.
The idea of an island-world lying in some unexplored ocean, apart from the influences which affect humanity at large, with beings, institutions, and a civilisation of its own, had been the dream of very diverse minds. When indeed we recall what the rude Norse galley of Eric the Red must have been; and what the little “Pinta” and the “Nina” of Columbus—the latter with a crew of only twenty-four men—actually were; and remember, moreover, that the pole-star was the sole compass of the earlier explorer; there seems nothing improbable in the assumption that the more ancient voyagers from the Mediterranean, who claimed to have circumnavigated Africa, and were familiar with the islands of the Atlantic, may have found their way to the great continent which lay beyond. Vague intimations, derived seemingly from Egypt, encouraged the belief in a submerged island or continent, once the seat of arts and learning, afar on the Atlantic main. The most definite narrative of this vanished continent is that already referred to as recorded in the Timæus of Plato, on the authority of an account which Solon had received from an Egyptian priest. According to the latter the temple-records of the Nile preserved the traditions of times reaching back far beyond the infantile fables of the Greeks. Yet, even these preserved some memory of deluges and convulsions by which the earth had been revolutionised. In one of them the vast Island of Atlantis—a continent larger than Libya and Asia conjoined—had been engulfed in the ocean which bears its name. This ocean-world of fancy or tradition, Plato revived as the seat of his imaginary commonwealth; and it had not long become a world of fact when Sir Thomas More made it anew the seat of his famous Utopia, the exemplar of “the best state and form of a public weale.” “Unfortunately,” as the author quaintly puts it, “neither we remembered to inquire of Raphael, the companion of Amerike Vespuce on his third voyage, nor he to tell us in what part of the new world Utopia is situate”: and so there is no reason why we should not locate the seat of this perfect commonwealth within the young Canadian Dominion, so soon as it shall have merited this by the attainment of such Utopian perfectibility in its polity.
But it is not less curious to note the tardiness with which, after the discovery of the New World had been placed beyond question, its true significance was comprehended even by men of culture, and abreast of the general knowledge of their time. Peter Giles, indeed, citizen of Antwerp, and assumed confidant of “Master More,” writes with well-simulated grief to the Right Hon. Counsellor Hierome Buslyde, “as touching the situation of the island, that is to say, in what part of the world Utopia standeth, the ignorance and lack whereof not a little troubleth and grieveth Master More”; but as he had allowed the opportunity of ascertaining this important fact to slip by, so the like uncertainty long after mystified current ideas regarding the new-found world. Ere the “Flowers of the Forest” had been weeded away on Flodden Hill, the philosophers and poets of the liberal court of James IV. of Scotland had learned in some vague way of the recent discovery; and so the Scottish poet, Dunbar, reflecting on the King’s promise of a benefice still unfulfilled, hints in his poem “Of the world’s instabilitie,” that even had it come “fra Calicut and the new-found Isle” that lies beyond “the great sea-ocean, it might have comen in shorter while.” Upwards of twenty years had passed since the return of the great discoverer from his adventurous voyage; but the Novus Orbis was then, and long afterwards continued to be, an insubstantial fancy; for after nearly another twenty years had elapsed, Sir David Lindsay, in his Dreme, represents Dame Remembrance as his guide and instructor in all heavenly and earthly knowledge; and among the rest, he says:—
She gart me clearly understand
How that the Earth tripartite was in three;
In Afric, Europe, and Asie;
the latter being in the Orient, while Africa and Europe still constituted the Occident, or western world. Many famous isles situated in “the ocean-sea” also attract his notice; but “the new-found isle” of the elder poet had obviously faded from the memory of that younger generation.
Another century had nearly run its course since the eye of Columbus beheld the long-expected land, when, in 1590, Edmund Spenser crossed the Irish Channel, bringing with him the first three books of his Faerie Queen; in the introduction to the second of which he thus defends the verisimilitude of that land of fancy in which the scenes of his “famous antique history” are laid:—
Who ever heard of th’ Indian Peru?
Or who in venturous vessel measured
The Amazon, huge river, now found true?
Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever view?
Yet all these were, when no man did them know,
Yet have from wisest ages hidden been;
And later times things more unknowne shall show.
Why then should witless man so much misween
That nothing is but that which he hath seen?
What if within the moon’s fair shining sphere;
What if in every other star unseen,
Of other worlds he happily should hear?
He wonder would much more; yet such to some appear.
Raleigh, the discoverer of Virginia, was Spenser’s special friend, his “Shepherd of the Ocean,” the patron under whose advice the poet visited England with the first instalment of the Epic, which he dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, “to live with the eternity of her Fame.” Yet it is obvious that to Spenser’s fancy this western continent was then scarcely more substantial