The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies. Sir Daniel Wilson
to the history of the New World. From its appearance, accordingly, may be dated the systematic aim of American antiquaries and historians to find evidence of intercourse with the ancient world prior to the fifteenth century.
This influence became manifest in all ways; and abundant traces of the novel idea are to be found in the popular literature of the time. It seemed as though the adventurous spirit of the early Greenland explorers had revived, as in the days of the first Vinlanders, as told in the Saga of Eric the Red: “About this time there began to be much talk at Brattahlid, to the effect that Vinland the Good should be explored; for it was said that country must be possessed of many good qualities. And so it came to pass that Karlsefne and Snorri fitted out their ship for the purpose of going in search of that country.” Only the modern Vinlanders who follow in their wake have had for their problem to—
Sail up the current of departed time
And seek along its banks that vanished clime
By ancient Scalds in Runic verse renowned,
Now like old Babylon no longer found.[4]
The indomitable race that emerged from the Scandinavian peninsula, and the islands and shores of the Baltic, and overran and conquered the deserted Roman world, supplied the maritime energy of Europe from the fifth to the tenth century; and colonised northern Italy with the element to which we must assign the rise of its great maritime republics, including the one that was to furnish the discoverer of America in the fifteenth century. Genoese and Spaniards could not have made for themselves a home either in Greenland or Iceland. Had the Northmen of the tenth century been less hardy, they would probably have prosecuted their discoveries, and found more genial settlements, such as have since then proved the centres of colonisation for the Anglo-American race. But of their actual discovery of some portion of the mainland of North America, prior to the eleventh century, there can be no reasonable doubt. The wonder rather is that after establishing permanent settlements both in Iceland and Greenland, their southern explorations were prosecuted with such partial and transient results. The indomitable Vikings were conquering fresh territories on the coasts and islands of the North Sea, and giving a new name to the fairest region of northern Gaul wrested by the Northmen from its Frank conquerors. The same hardy supplanters were following up such acquisitions by expeditions to the Mediterranean that resulted in the establishment of their supremacy over ancient historic races there, and training leaders for later crusading adventure.
The voyage from Greenland, or even from Iceland, to the New England shores was not more difficult than from the native fiords of the Northmen to the Atlantic seaboard, or to the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean. Everywhere they left their record in graven runes. At Maeshowe in the Orkneys, on Holy Island in the Firth of Clyde, and at Kirk Michael, Kirk Andreas, and Kirk Braddon, on the Isle of Man; or as the relic of a more ancient past, on the marble lion of the Piræus, now at the arsenal of Venice: their runic records are to be seen graven in the same characters as those which have been recovered during the present century from their early settlements beyond the Atlantic. Numerous similar inscriptions from the homes of the Northmen are furnished in Professor George Stephens’ Old Northern Runic Monuments, which perpetuate memorials of the love of adventure of those daring rovers, and the pride they took in their expeditions to remote and strange lands. Intensified at a later stage by religious fervour, the same spirit emboldened them as leaders in the Crusades; and some of their runic inscriptions tell of adventurous pilgrimages to the Holy Land. An Icelandic rover is designated on his rune-stone Rafn Hlmrckfari as a successful voyager to Ireland. Norwegian and Danish bautastein frequently preserve the epithet of Englandsfari for the leaders of expeditions to the British Isles, or more vaguely refer to their adventures in “the western parts.” King Sigurd of Norway proudly blazoned the title of Jórsolafari as one who had achieved the pilgrimage to Jerusalem; and the literate memorials of the Northmen of Orkney, recovered in 1861, on the opening of the famous Maeshowe Tumulus, include those of a band of Crusaders, or Jerusalem-farers, who, in 1153, followed Earl Ragnvald to the Holy Land.
The inscribed rune-stones brought from the sites of the ancient Norse colonies in Greenland, and now deposited in the Royal Museum of Northern Antiquities, at Copenhagen, are simple personal or sepulchral inscriptions. But they are graven in the northern runes, and as such constitute monuments of great historical value: furnishing indisputable evidence of the presence of European colonists beyond the Atlantic centuries before that memorable 12th of October 1492, on which the eyes of the wistful gazers from the deck of the “Santa Maria” were gladdened with their first glimpse of what they believed to be the India of the far east: the Cipango in search of which they had entered on their adventurous voyage.
The colonies of Greenland, after being occupied, according to Norwegian and Danish tradition, from the tenth to the fifteenth century, were entirely forgotten. The colonists are believed to have been exterminated by the native Eskimo. The very locality chosen for their settlements was so completely lost sight of that, when an interest in their history revived, and expeditions were sent out to revisit the scene of early Norse colonisation beyond the Atlantic, much time was lost in a fruitless search on the coast lying directly west from Iceland. Towards the middle of the seventeenth century, an oar drifted to the Iceland coast, a relic, as was believed, of the long-lost colony of Greenland, bearing this inscription in runic characters: oft var ek dasa dur ek dro thick—Oft was I weary when I drew thee; but it was not till the close of the century that the traditions of the old Greenlanders began to excite attention. Many a Norse legend pictured the enviable delights of the fabled Hesperian region discovered within the Arctic circle, yet meriting by the luxuriance of its fertile valleys its name of Greenland; and the fancies and legendary traditions that gradually displaced the history of the old colony, had been interwoven by the poet Montgomery with the tale of self-sacrificing labours of Moravian Missionaries, in the cantos of his Greenland epic, long before the Antiquitates Americanæ issued from the Copenhagen press.
The narrations of ancient voyagers, and their explorations in the New World, as brought to light in 1835 by the Copenhagen volume on pre-Columbian America, were too truthful in their aspect to be slighted; and too fascinating in their revelations of a long-forgotten intercourse between the Old World and the New, to be willingly subjected to incredulous analysis. From the genuine literary memorials of older centuries, sufficient evidence could be gleaned to place beyond question, not only the discovery and colonisation of Greenland by Eric the Red—apparently in the year 985—but also the exploration of southern lands, some of which must have formed part of the American continent. The manuscripts whence those narratives are derived are of various dates, and differ widely in value; but of the genuineness and historical significance of the oldest of them, no doubt can be entertained. The accounts which some of them furnish are so simple, and devoid of anything extravagant or improbable, that the internal evidence of truthfulness is worthy of great consideration. The exuberant fancy of the Northmen, which revels in their mythology and songs, would have constructed a very different tale had it been employed in the invention of a southern continent, or earthly Paradise fashioned from the dreams of Icelandic and Greenland rovers.
The narrative attaches itself to genuine Icelandic history; and furnishes a coherent, and seemingly unexaggerated account of a voyage characterised by nothing that is supernatural; and little that is even romantic. Eric Thorvaldsson, more commonly referred to as Erikr Rauthi, or Eric the Red, a banished Icelandic jarl, made his way to the Greenland coast and effected a settlement at Igalikko, or Brattalid, as it was at first called, from whence one of the runic inscriptions now in the Copenhagen museum was taken. Before the close of the century, if not in the very year a.d. 1000, in which St. Olaf was introducing Christianity into Norway, Leif, or Leiv Ericson, a son of the first coloniser of Greenland, appears to have accidentally discovered the American mainland. The story, current in Norwegian and Icelandic tradition, and repeated with additions and variations in successive Sagas, most frequently ascribes to Leif an actual exploratory voyage in quest of southern lands already reported to have been seen by Bjarni Herjulfson. But the Sagas from whence the revived story of Vinland is derived are of different dates, and very varying degrees of credibility. Of those, the narrative in which the name of Bjarni Herjulfson first appears occurs in a manuscript of the latter part of the fourteenth century; and exhibits both amplifications and inconsistencies abundantly justifying its rejection