The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies. Sir Daniel Wilson
by Norse voyagers of the tenth century, as told in more than one of their old Sagas. But until such evidence is forthcoming, the legendary Atlantis must remain a myth, and pre-Columbian America be still credited with a self-achieved progress.
| [1] | Popular Science Monthly, xxviii. 296. |
| [2] | Races of Man (Bohn), p. 445. |
| [3] | The Alphabet, ii. 10. |
II
THE VINLAND OF THE NORTHMEN
The idea that the western hemisphere was known to the Old World, prior to the ever-memorable voyage of Columbus four centuries ago, has reproduced itself in varying phases, not only in the venerable Greek legend of the lost Atlantis; and the still vaguer myth of the Garden of the Hesperides on the far ocean horizon, the region of the setting sun; but in mediæval fancies and mythical epics. The Breton, in The Earthly Paradise of William Morris—
Spoke of gardens ever blossoming
Across the western sea, where none grew old,
E’en as the books at Micklegarth had told;
And said moreover that an English knight
Had had the Earthly Paradise in sight;
And heard the songs of those that dwelt therein;
But entered not; being hindered by his sin.
A legend of mediæval hagiology tells of the Island of St. Brandon, the retreat of an Irish hermit of the sixth century. Another tale comes down to us from the time of the Caliph Walid, and the invincible Musa, of the “Seven Islands” whither the Christians of Gothic Spain fled under the guidance of their seven bishops, when, in the eighth century, the peninsula passed under the yoke of the victorious Saracens. The Eyrbyggja Saga has a romantic story of Biorn Ashbrandsson, who narrowly escapes in a tempest raised by his enemy, with the aid of one skilled in the black art. After undergoing many surprising adventures, he is finally discovered by voyagers, “in the latter days of Olaf the Saint,” in a strange land beyond the ocean, the chief of a warlike race speaking a language that seemed to be Irish. Biorn warned the voyagers to depart, for the people had evil designs against them. But before they sailed, he took a gold ring from his hand, and gave it to Gudleif, their leader, along with a goodly sword; and commissioned him to give the sword to Kiartan, the son of Thurid, wife of an Iceland thane at Froda, of whom he had been enamoured; and the gold ring to his mother. This done, he warned them that no man venture to renew the search for what later commentators refer to as White Man’s Land. In equally vague form the fancy of lands beyond the ocean perpetuated itself in an imaginary island of Brazil that flitted about the charts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with ever-varying site and proportions, till it vanished in the light of modern exploration.
A more definite character has been given to the tale of Madoc, a Welsh prince of the twelfth century. Southey wove into an elaborate epic this legend of the son of Owen Gwyneth, king of North Wales, who, circa a.d. 1170, sailed into the unknown west in search of a resting-place beyond reach of his brother Yorwerth, then ridding himself of all rivals to the throne. He found a home in the New World, returned to Wales for additional colonists to join the pioneer band; and setting sail with them, vanished beyond the western horizon, and was heard of no more. The poet, while adapting it to the purpose of his art, was not without faith in the genuineness of the legend which he amplified into his epic; and notes in the preface appended to it: “Strong evidence has been adduced that he (Prince Madoc) reached America; and that his posterity exist there to this day on the southern branch of the Missouri, retaining their complexion, their language, and in some degree, their arts.” But later explorations have failed to discover any “Welsh Indians” on the Missouri or its tributaries.
A small grain of fact will suffice at times for the crystallisation of vague and visionary fancies into a well-credited tradition. Before the printing-press came into play, with its perpetuation of definite records, and prosaic sifting of evidence, this was no uncommon occurrence; but even in recent times fancy may be seen transmuted into accepted fact.
When exploring the great earthworks of the Ohio valley, in 1874, I found myself on one occasion in a large Welsh settlement, a few miles from Newark, where a generation of native-born Americans still perpetuate the language of their Cymric forefathers, and conduct their religious services in the Welsh tongue. My attention was first called to this by the farmer, who had invited me to an early dinner after a morning’s digging in a mound on “The Evan’s Farm,” preceding our repast with a long Welsh grace. From him I learned that the district had been settled in 1802 by a Welsh colony; and that in two churches in neighbouring valleys—one Calvinistic Congregational and another Methodist—the entire services are still conducted in their mother tongue. Such a perpetuation of the language and traditions of the race, in a quiet rural district, only required time and the confusion of dates and genealogies by younger generations, to have engrafted the story of Prince Madoc on the substantial basis of a genuine Welsh settlement. Southey’s epic was published in 1805, within three years after this Welsh immigration to the Ohio valley. The subject of the poem naturally gave it a special attraction for American readers; and it was speedily reprinted in the United States, doubtless with the same indifference to the author’s claim of copyright as long continued to characterise the ideas of literary ethics beyond the Atlantic. But the idea of a Welsh Columbus of the twelfth century was by no means received with universal favour there. Southey quoted at a long-subsequent date a critical pamphleteer who denounced the author of Madoc as having “meditated a most serious injury against the reputation of the New World by attributing its discovery and colonisation to a vagabond Welsh prince; this being a most insidious attempt against the honour of America, and the reputation of Columbus!”
It is inevitable that America should look back to the Old World when in search of some elements of civilisation, and for the diversities of race and language traceable throughout the western hemisphere. The early students of the sculptured monuments and hieroglyphic records of Mexico, Central America, and Peru, naturally turned to Egypt as their probable source; though mature reflection has dissipated much of the reasoning based on superficial analogies. The gradations from the most primitive picture-writing of the Indian savage to ideography and abbreviated symbolism, are so clearly traceable in the various stages of progress, from the rude forest tribes to the native centres of civilisation in Central and Southern America, that no necessity remains for assuming any foreign source for their origin.
That the world beyond the Atlantic had remained through unnumbered centuries apart from Europe and the old East, until that memorable year 1492, is indisputable; and there was at one time a disposition to resent any rivalry with the grand triumph of Columbus; as though patriotic spirit and national pride demanded an unquestioning faith in that as the sole link that bound America to the Old World. But the same spirit stimulated other nations to claim precedence of Spain and the great Genoese; and for this the Scandinavian colonists of Iceland had every probability in their favour. They had navigated the Arctic Ocean with no other compass than the stars; and the publication in 1845, by the Danish antiquaries, of the Grenlands Historiske Mindesmærker recalled minute details of their settlements in the inhospitable region of the western hemisphere to which they gave the strange misnomer of Greenland. But the year 1837 may be regarded as marking an epoch in the history of ante-Columbian research. The issue in that earlier year of the Antiquitates Americanæ, sive scriptores septentrionales rerum ante-Columbiarum in America, by the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries, under the editorship of Professor Charles Christian Rafn, produced a revolution, alike in the form and the reception of illustrations of ante-Columbian American history. The publication of that work gave a fresh interest to the vaguest intimations of a dubious past; while it superseded them by tangible disclosures, which, though modern in comparison with such mythic antiquities as the Atlantis of Plato’s Dialogues, nevertheless