The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies. Sir Daniel Wilson
as much a world apart as if Raleigh and his adventurous crew had sailed up the blue vault of heaven, and brought back the story of another planet on which it had been their fortune to alight.
Nor had such fancies wholly vanished long after the voyage across the Atlantic had become a familiar thing. It was in 1723 that the philosophical idealist, Berkeley—afterwards Bishop of Cloyne—formulated a more definite and yet not less visionary Utopia than that of Sir Thomas More. He was about to organise “among the English in our Western plantations” a seminary which was designed to train the young American savages, make them Masters of Arts, and fit instruments for the regeneration of their own people; while the new Academy was to accomplish no less for the reformation of manners and morals among his own race. In his fancy’s choice he gave a preference, at first for Bermuda, or the Summer Islands, as the site of his college; and “presents the bright vision of an academic home in those fair lands of the West, whose idyllic bliss poets had sung, from which Christian civilisation might be made to radiate over this vast continent with its magnificent possibilities in the future history of the race of man.” It was while his mind was preoccupied with this fine ideal “of planting Arts and Learning in America” that he wrote the well-known lines:—
There shall be sung another golden age,
The rise of empire and of arts;
The good and great inspiring epic rage,
The wisest heads and noblest hearts.
Not such as Europe breeds in her decay:
Such as she bred when fresh and young,
When heavenly flame did animate her clay,
By future poets shall be sung.
Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The four first acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
Time’s noblest offspring is the last.
The visionary philosopher followed up his project so far as to transport himself—not to the Summer Islands of which Waller had sung—but to that same Rhode Island which Danish and New England antiquaries were at a later date to identify, whether rightly or not, as the Vinland of the Icelandic Sagas. One of these ancient chroniclers had chanced to note that, on the shortest day of the year in Vinland, they had the sun above the horizon at eykt and dagmat; that is at their regular evening and morning meal. Like our own term breakfast, the names were significant and allusive. The old Icelandic poet, Snorro Sturluson, author of the Edda and the Sagas of the Norwegian Kings, has left on record that at his Icelandic home eykt occurred at sunset on the first day of winter. Professor Rafn hailed this old record as the key to the latitude of Vinland. The Danish King, Frederick VI., sympathising in researches that reflected back honour on their Norse ancestry, called in the aid of the Astronomer Royal; and Professor Rafn felt authorised forthwith to instruct the Rhode Island antiquaries that the latitude of the long-lost Vinland was near Newport, in Narragansett Bay. Their response, with the authenticating engravings of the world-famous Newport stone mill, and the runes of Thorfinn on Dighton Rock, in Rafn’s learned quarto volume, have been the source of many a later comment, both in prose and rhyme.
But all this lay in a still remote future when, in 1728, Berkeley landed at Rhode Island with projects not unsuited to the dream of a Vinland the Good, where a university was to be reared as a centre of culture and regeneration for the aborigines of the New World. The indispensable prerequisite of needful funds had been promised him by the English Government; but the promised grant was never realised. Meanwhile he bought a farm, the purposed site perhaps of his beneficent centre of intellectual life for the Island state, and sojourned there for three years in pleasant seclusion, leaving behind him kindly memories that endeared him to many friends. He planned, if he did not realise many goodly Utopias; speculated on space and time, and objective idealism; and then bade farewell to Rhode Island, and to his romantic dream of regenerated savages and a renovated world. Soon after his return home the practical fruits of his quiet sojourn beyond the Atlantic appeared in the form of his Alciphron: or the Minute Philosopher; in which, in the form of a dialogue, he discusses the varied forms of speculative scepticism, at the very period when Pope was embodying in his Essay on Man the brilliant, but superficial philosophy which constituted the essence of thought for men of the world in his age. It is in antithesis to such speculations that Berkeley there advances his own theory, designed to show that all nature is the language of God, everywhere giving expressive utterance to the Divine thought.
So long as the American continent lay half revealed in its vague obscurity, as a new world lying beyond the Atlantic, and wholly apart from the old, it seemed the fitting site for imaginary Vinlands, Utopias, Summer Islands, and earthly paradises of all sorts: the scenes of a realised perfectibility beyond the reach of Europe “in her decay.” Nor was the refined metaphysical idealist the latest dreamer of such dreams. In our own century, Southey, Coleridge, and the little band of Bristol enthusiasts who planned their grand pantisocratic scheme of intellectual communism, created for themselves, with like fertile fancy, a Utopia of their own, “where Susquehana pours his untamed stream”; and many a later dreamer has striven after like ideal perfectibility in “peaceful Freedom’s undivided dale.”
| [4] | Montgomery, James, Greenland, Canto IV. |
| [5] | Mem. des Antiq. du Nord, N.S., 1888, p. 341. |
| [6] | The Finding of Wineland the Good, p. 6. |
| [7] | The Finding of Wineland the Good: the History of the Icelandic Discovery of America, edited and translated from the earliest records, by Arthur Middleton Reeves. |
| [8] | Vide Dr. Brinton, Races and Peoples, p. 215 note. |
| [9] | Arthur Middleton Reeves, Finding of Wineland the Good, p. 28. |
III
TRADE AND COMMERCE IN THE STONE AGE
The term “Stone Period” or “Stone Age” was suggested in the early years of the present century by the antiquaries of Denmark as the fitting designation of that primitive era in western Europe—with its corresponding stage among diverse peoples in widely severed regions and ages—when the use of metals was unknown. That there was a period in the history of the human race, before its Tubal-cains, Vulcans, Vœlands, or other Smith-gods appeared, when man depended on stone, bone, ivory, shells, and wood, for the raw material out of which to manufacture his implements and weapons, is now universally admitted; and is confirmed by the abundant disclosures of the drift and the caves. The simple, yet highly suggestive classification, due to Thomsen of Copenhagen, was the first scientific recognition of the fact, now established by evidence derived from periods of vastly greater antiquity than the Neolithic age of Denmark. The accumulated experience of many generations was required before men mastered the useful service of fire in the smelting of ores and the casting of metals. Nevertheless it seems probable that the knowledge of fire, and its useful service on the domestic hearth, are coeval with the existence of man as a rational being. The evidence of its practical application to the requirements for warmth and cooking carry us back to the age of cave implements, including some among the earliest known examples of man’s tool-making industry. In connection with this subject, Sir John Evans draws attention to some curious indications of the antiquity of the use of flint by the fire-producer.[10] He refers to the ingenious derivation of the word silex as given by Vincent of Beauvais, in the Speculum Naturæ, “Silex est lapis durus, sic dictus eo quod ex eo ignis exsiliat,” and he recalls a more remarkable reminiscence of the evoking of