America. If they did not die out, destroyed by pestilence or famine; if they were not exterminated by the Indians, but were, at last, Carved Pipes. driven away by a savage foe against whose furious onslaughts they could contend no longer even behind their earthen ramparts, their refuge was probably, if not necessarily, farther south or southwest. In New Mexico they may have made their last defence in the massive stone fortresses, which the bitter experience of the past had taught them to substitute for the earthworks they had been compelled to abandon. Thence extending southward they may, in successive ages, have found leisure, in the perpetual summer of the tropics where nature yielded a subsistence almost unsolicited, for the creation of that architecture whose ruins are as remarkable as those of any of the pre-historic races of other continents. The sculpture in the stone of those beautiful temples may be only the outgrowth of that germ of Their sculp- art shown in the carvings on the pipes which the Mound ture. Builders left on their buried altars. In these pipes a striking fidelity to nature is shown in the delineation of animals. It is reason Fig. 1, Mound Builders. 2, Central America. able to suppose that they were equally faithful in portraying their own features in their representations of the human head and face; and the similarity between these and the sculptures upon the ancient temples of Central America and Mexico is seen at a glance. There also it may be that they discovered how to fuse and combine the metals, making a harder and better bronze than the Europeans had ever seen; learned to execute work in gold and silver which the most skilled European did not SKULLS EXHUMED FROM MOUNDS. Cloth from Mounds. 33 pretend to excel; to manufacture woven stuffs of fine texture, the rude beginnings whereof are found in the fragments of coarse cloth; in objects of use and ornament wrought in metals, left among the other relics in the earlier northern homes of their race. In the art of that southern people there was nothing imitative; the works of the Mound Builders stand as distinctly original and independent of any foreign influence. Any similarity in either that can be traced to anything else is in the apparent growth of the first rude culture of the northern race into the higher civilization of that of the south. It certainly is not a violent supposition, that the people who disappeared at one period from one part of the continent, leaving behind them certain unmistakable marks of progress, had reappeared again at another time, in another place where the same marks were found in larger development. mounds. There can hardly be a doubt that there is yet something to be learned of the character of this singular people. Some recent explorers believe that they find new traces of their mode of worship and of their religious faith, and others that new facts are coming to light from a study of their skulls. Hitherto but little has been learned from this last source, so great is the difficulty of recovering any complete crania from deposits where the decay of all perishable things is so thorough. Till quite recently the number of authentic skulls, that is, of those free from all suspicion of being of later and Skulls exintrusive burial in the mounds, was less than half a dozen. humed from Their shape and capacity show no uncommon type. But those lately recovered from different places in Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa indicate, like the Neanderthall skull found in a cave in Prussia, and the Dorreby skull of the Stone Age of Denmark, a very low order of intellect.1 General H. G. Thomas, U. S. A., has exhumed from some mounds in Dakota Territory a number of skulls of the lowest type, "unlike," he says, "that of any human being to-day alive on this continent," but "like those of the great Gibbon monkey." It is easier to believe that the mounds are the burialplaces of more than one extinct race than that their builders were not far from idiots. Future explorations may shed more light upon this inquiry. Man is older on other continents than was till quite recently supposed. If 1 See Foster's Pre-historic Races of the United States, chap. vii., for collation of the evidence on these crania. 2 Sixth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, by F. B. Hayden, p. 656. older elsewhere he may, by parity of reasoning, be older here. We are permitted to go behind the Indians in looking for the earliest inhabitants of North America, wherever they may have come from or whenever they may have lived. In such an inquiry, relieved of some of the limitations which have hitherto obstructed it, we may find in the relics of an early and rude culture much to dispel the obscurity and mystery which till within four centuries have shrouded the New World in darkness. Discovery of Greenland. CHAPTER III. THE NORTHMEN IN AMERICA. DISCOVERY OF ICELAND. GREENLAND COLONIZED BY ERIC THE EARLY VOYAGES. Pre-Colum WERE these great Western continents, stretching almost from pole to pole, unknown till 1492 to the nations who had made the world's history? The pride of human knowledge has for nearly four centuries resented such an imputation. If facts were wanting, ingenious suppositions of more or less probability were made to take the place of facts. Even before Flavio Gioia introduced the use of the magnetic needle into maritime Europe some unlucky vessel may have been driven across the Atlantic and stranded upon strange bian Naviga shores; or some Phoenician navigator who understood "nightsailing" may have boldly turned his ship's head to the West, after passing the Pillars of Hercules, in search of new fields of adventure and of traffic; or some of the fearless navigators who steered into the Sea of Darkness in search of Antilia, or the Island of the Seven Bishops, may have landed for a night upon coasts which some supernatural power was supposed to guard from the intrusion of man. tion. Or it may be that the lost Tribes of Israel wandered through Asia to the Northwest coast and were the progenitors of the North American Indians and the ancient Mexicans; that the Malays crossed the Polynesian Archipelago and invaded the Western Hemisphere on the South; that a vast army of Mongols came with their elephants, whose bones are left as a witness of their invasion from Brazil to Rhode Island; that the Apostle St. Thomas preached Christianity in Peru ; or that St. Patrick sent Irish missionaries to the Isles of America. All these theories have had their advocates. men. But there was one ancient people whose warriors were the dread The North of all Europe, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, and whose long experience as pirates made them fearless and successful sailors, who, there seems no good reason for doubting, did cross the Atlantic from coast to coast, almost five hundred years before Columbus stept upon and knelt down to kiss the sands of the beach of San Salvador. The Northmen had a genius for discovering new countries by accident, and having approached and settled within a few hundred miles of the coast of the Western Continent, it would have been strange rather than otherwise if such bold rovers had not found their way thither. They made, indeed, no permanent settlement, and if it may be held as an argument against the probability of their having made the discovery at all that it is hard to find a continent, it may, with quite as much force, be urged that it is still harder to lose one, when found. But here again the Northmen are not without a parallel in their own experience, for it is certain that they discovered and held Greenland for more than four hundred years, and lost it again for more than two centuries. It was by accident the Northmen discovered Iceland; Naddod, an They discov. illustrious sea-rover, having been driven, about the year 860, er Iceland. upon its coasts by a storm. He called it Snæland Snowland. Four years later, one Gardar Svafarson was also carried thither by tempest, and finding it by circumnavigation an island, gave it the name of Gardar-hólm Gardar's Isle. His account of it was so pleasant that soon after Floki, or Flokko, another famous viking, went out to plant a colony. Not trusting to the chances which had befallen and befriended his predecessors, he took with him three ravens, which he was careful before starting to have consecrated to the gods, and to 1 There is some little discrepancy as to those first discoverers. The editor of Mallet's Northern Antiquities, Bohn's edition, puts Naddod first and Gardar second; De CostaPre-Columbian Discovery in America — gives the precedence to Gardar; while Crantz — History of Greenland - who cites as his authority "the learned Icelander, Arngrim Jonas," says Naddok (Naddod) was first driven on the coast by a storm, and that he was followed by a certain pyrate whose name was Flokko," and omits any mention whatever of Gar dar. |