THE BOOK OF THE OCEAN

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DRAWN BY LOUIS LOEB.ENGRAVED BY M. HAIDER.
THE MAJESTY OF THE SEA.

THE
BOOK OF THE OCEAN

BY
ERNEST INGERSOLL

AUTHOR OF “KNOCKING ROUND THE ROCKIES,”
“THE OYSTER INDUSTRIES OF THE UNITED STATES,”
“FRIENDS WORTH KNOWING,”
“WILD NEIGHBORS,”
“THE CREST OF THE CONTINENT,” ETC.

Illustrated

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1898

Copyright, 1898,
By The Century Co.

THE DE VINNE PRESS.

CONTENTS

THE BOOK OF THE OCEAN

CHAPTER I
THE OCEAN AND ITS ORIGIN

Looking at the land, we divide the surface of the earth into eastern and western hemispheres; but looking at the water, we make an opposite classification. Encircle the globe in your library with a rubber band, so that it cuts across South America from about Porto Alegre to Lima on one side, and through southern Siam and the northernmost of the Philippine Islands on the other, and you make hemispheres, the northern of which (with London at its center) contains almost all the land of the globe, while the southern (with New Zealand as its central point) is almost entirely water, Australia, and the narrow southern half of South America being the only lands of consequence in its whole area. Observing the map in this way, noticing that, besides nearly a complete half-world of water south of your rubber equator, much of the northern hemisphere also is afloat, you are willing to believe the assertion that there is almost three times as much of the outside of the earth hidden under the waves as appears above them. The estimate in round numbers is one hundred and fifty million square (statute) miles of ocean surface, as compared with about fifty million square miles of land on the globe.

To the people whose speculations in geography are the oldest that have come down to us, the earth seemed to be an island around which was perpetually flowing a river with no further shore visible. Beyond it, they thought, lay the abodes of the dead. This river, as the source of all other rivers and waters, was deified by the early Greeks and placed among their highest gods as Oceanus, whence our word “ocean.” Accompanying, or belonging to him, there grew up, in the fertile imagination of that poetic people, a large company of gods and goddesses, while men hid their absence of real knowledge by peopling the deep with quaint monsters.

“The word for ‘ocean’ (mare) in the Latin tongue means, by derivation, a desert, and the Greeks spoke of it as ‘the barren brine.’”

Over these old fables we need not linger. All the myths and guesswork that went before history represented the sea as older than the land, and told how creation began by lifting the earth above the universal waste of waters. The story in Genesis is only one of many such stories.

A QUIET SEA, AND THE SUN AT MIDNIGHT.
From a photograph.

Scientific men believe that when our planet first went circling swiftly in its orbit it was a glowing, globular mass of fiery vapors; but as time passed, the icy chill of space slowly cooled these vapors, and chemical changes steadily modified, sorted, and solidified the materials into the beginnings of the present form and character, until at last water came into existence. This must have been at first in the form of a thick envelop of heated vapors, impregnated with gases, that inwrapped the globe in a darkness lit only by its own fires.

After that, when further changes had come about,—let us picture it,—what deluges of rain were poured out of and down through those murky clouds where thunders bellowed and lightnings warred! At first all the rains that fell must have been turned to steam again; but by and by the steady downpour cooled the shaping globe so that all the water was not vaporized, but some stayed as a liquid where it fell, and this increased in amount more and more, until finally, between the hissing core of the half-hardened planet and the dense clouds which kept out all the sunlight, there rolled the heated waves of the first ocean—an ocean broken only by the earliest ridges, like chains of islands, marking the skeletons of the continents that were to follow—an ocean sending up ceaseless volumes of steam to form new clouds.

EATING AWAY THE COAST.

Yet all the while the cooling of the planet went on. Now, when any heated substance cools it contracts, and the globe as a whole is no exception to the rule; but a sphere formed of so incompressible a substance as rock can shrink only by some sort of folding or displacement of its surface. Therefore, as the cooling of our globe proceeded, explosions and swellings constantly occurred at weak points or lines on or near the surface, where the prodigious strain forced a break. That these upheavals were most prominent and extended in the northern hemisphere is shown by the fact that the great masses and heights of land are grouped there; and the trend of mountain-ranges seems to show that the range of breakage and upheaval was in general in north-and-south lines. Elsewhere, and mainly in the southern hemisphere, broad areas of perhaps stiffer crust sank downward, making the vast depressions into which poured the waters of the primeval sea, and where our oceans still sway and roll.

SURF AT FORT DUMPLING, R. I.

All these changes, however, have been in the direction of insuring more and more stability; and when the ocean water had thoroughly cooled, the very chill of its vast masses in the depths of the troughs assisted in the work, for the cold water, by more rapidly withdrawing their heat, caused the rocks beneath their basins to become denser, thicker, stronger, and consequently less liable to break or change, than were those rocks forming the foundations of the continents.

The moment it had shores to beat upon, that moment the ocean began to knock them to pieces under its pounding surf, and to grind the fragments so small that they could be drifted away, reassorted, and deposited wherever the water was sufficiently quiet to let them fall. The original rocks—chiefly granite—held the different forms of lime, magnesia, etc., to make the limestones; the silica to make the gritty sandstones; the alumina to make the clays; and so on. The sea not only was the agent to eat this old, rich crust to pieces and respread it into strata, but to sort out for us the materials to a considerable extent, laying down beds of limestone by themselves, and sandstone, shales, marl, etc., by themselves. It is probable, says Professor Shaler, that layers of rock twenty miles in thickness have thus been laid down on the gradually settling ocean floor, much of which has been raised again to form continental lands.

Hitherto we have spoken of the waters that surround the continents as if they formed one mass, as, practically, they do; but for convenience sake we may designate certain areas by separate names, which ought now to be defined. Thus the larger, more open spaces are known as oceans, and of these five are recognized, namely, Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic, and Antarctic. Parts or branches of these, more or less inclosed by land and usually comparatively shallow, are termed seas.

The Pacific Ocean is the largest, it alone covering more space than all the continents combined, having a breadth, east and west, of ten thousand miles (about the length of the Atlantic), and an area of seventy million square miles. The equator divides it into the North and South Pacific. The former is comparatively free from islands, and is inclosed northward by the approaching extremities of Alaska and Siberia; while the latter widens at the south into the boundless Antarctic Ocean. Its basin is a vast depression of fairly uniform depth, studded in the western part by island peaks,—the summits of submerged volcanic mountain-ranges. The name “Pacific,” or “Peaceful,” was given to it by Magalhaens (Magellan), its first navigator, in 1540 [(see Chapter IV)], in his joy at having escaped from the tempestuous experience he had long endured in the South Atlantic. On the whole the Pacific deserves its name as compared with the Atlantic—a fact chiefly due to its great size. The term “South Sea” was formerly much used for it, but English-speaking persons now usually mean by that phrase the island-studded district between Hawaii and Australia.

PERCÉ ROCK, IN THE GULF OF ST. LAWRENCE, SHOWING DESTRUCTION OF SHORE-ROCKS BY WATER.

The Atlantic commemorates in its name the myth of Atlas and his island. Atlas seems to have been originally, among the Greeks, the name of the Peak of Tenerife, of which they had vague information from the earlier Phenician sea-wanderers. Then this was forgotten, and in place of the fact arose a myth of a Titan who stood upon a vast island in or beyond the “Western Sea,” called Atlantis. Legends of wars with its people form a part of the nebulous hero-story of the beginnings of Athens; and it is said to have sunk out of sight long before records began. There have always been those who believed this story founded upon fact, and only a few years ago a book was printed in the United States arguing that the tale was the history of a real land; but not only is there no literary or historical evidence that Atlantis had any firmer foundation than vague memories of the Cape Verd or Canary Islands, but every evidence of the geological condition and history of the eastern shores and bed of the middle Atlantic Ocean shows that no such convulsion as the destruction of this island calls for ever took place there, or that there was ever such a land to be submerged. The Atlantic occupies a long, winding, comparatively narrow trough, that measures about ten thousand miles north and south, from the ice of the Antarctic to the ice of the Arctic ocean, and has only a few islets south of Iceland, the Faroes and the Shetlands, which rise from a plateau stretching from Labrador to Great Britain, the higher points of which were probably above the water within comparatively recent geological times, possibly since man appeared upon the globe. The average depth of the Atlantic south of this ridge is about thirteen thousand feet, but greater depths are found along the African and American coasts, on each side of a long submerged ridge from which rise the isolated islands of Cape Verd, St. Helena, and Tristan da Cunha. The width from Norway to Greenland is only about eight hundred miles, but between Montevideo and Cape Town it is thirty-six hundred miles, and the average width is about three thousand miles. The shape and situation of the Atlantic make it the most stormy of the three great oceans, and it is the one where the phenomena of tides, currents, etc., are most prominently manifested, as we shall see. It is also the most frequented and best known, because it has been necessary to study it for the benefit of commerce.

The Indian Ocean is simply the extension of the vast southern water-zone northward of parallel 40°, south latitude, where, from the Cape of Good Hope to Tasmania, it is six thousand miles in width. At this line the depth suddenly decreases, as though the edge of a submerged Antarctic plateau defined the southerly rim of its basin there. This ocean contains several large and some groups of small islands, but these are mostly near the shore, and connected with the neighboring continent by shallow waters, showing that they rise from a submerged plateau. The average depth of the Indian Ocean is about fourteen thousand feet; its surface-water is warmer and salter than that of any other; and its winds and weather are more regular and peaceful than in either the Atlantic or the North Pacific.

The Arctic Ocean is the well-defined body of water around and probably over the north pole. It is connected with the Pacific only by the narrow and very shallow Bering Strait, and with the Atlantic by comparatively narrow openings. It has been fairly well explored as far north as the parallel of 80°, and found to contain many islands; but it appears that there is great depth of water north of Spitzbergen and northeast of Greenland, making it probable that the trough of the Atlantic reaches to or beyond the pole itself. Most of its area is covered with drifting ice.

The Antarctic Ocean is regarded as the space of water within the Antarctic circle; but this is surrounded by a zone of deep ocean, unbroken almost half-way to the equator, except by the narrow southern part of South America and by New Zealand. It is an area, apparently rather shallow, of ice, fogs, and tempestuous gales, inclosing lands of unknown extent.

WAVE-WORN CLIFFS AND PEBBLE-BEACH AT ETRETAT, FRANCE.
(FROM A PAINTING BY WILLIAM P. W. DANA.)

But these geographical distinctions are merely convenient methods of speech. After all, there is only one ocean “poured round all,” and its particles are incessantly changed in place and remingled by means of a world-wide system of tides and currents, the effect of which is to keep sea-water everywhere uniform in character and perfectly pure and healthful.

IN MID-OCEAN: A GREAT WAVE.

CHAPTER II
WAVES, TIDES, AND CURRENTS

Now that we have studied the ancient ocean, it is time to study its present characteristics and understand the great and important part it plays in the world.

A very striking thing about the ocean is its flatness. Being water, it seeks always to find its level; and we commonly assume that it everywhere does so, and take the sea-level as the standard from which to calculate all heights above or depths below its surface; that is, we assume that every part of the surface of the ocean when calm and at mean tide is exactly the same distance from the center of the globe. This, however, is not wholly true. Careful observation has shown that the Pacific is several feet lower on the western shore of the Isthmus of Darien than is the Atlantic on its eastern shore—a fact due, no doubt, to the crowding of water by the Gulf Stream into the Caribbean Sea. The Mediterranean is known to be somewhat higher than the Atlantic, and other differences exist in similar places elsewhere.

This introduces the subject of depth—a matter which we have learned accurately only within a very few years. In the early days ropes alone were used for sounding, and these had to be of considerable size to bear the strain; but a mile or so of rope became too heavy to handle, and depths below that length remained unmeasured. Then a little machine was tried consisting of a heavy weight having attached to it, by a trigger, a wooden float. This was thrown overboard. It sank, and when it touched bottom the shock released the float. From the time that elapsed before the float reappeared the depth was estimated. This, however, was little better than guesswork; and accurate soundings exceeding one thousand fathoms were not obtained until an American naval officer began to use wire instead of rope. From this hint was developed elaborate machinery, operated by steam, using steel piano-wire, having automatic registers of the amount reeled out, and carried down by weights that were released when the bottom was struck, making it easier to recover the wire. To these weights (or rather to the wire just above them) were attached devices for clutching and bringing to the surface specimens of the bottom, self-closing jars to fetch water from the lowest layer, self-registering thermometers that recorded the temperatures at the greatest or at various intermediate depths, and other means of learning the character of the water, bottom-material, and animal life several miles below the surface, including methods of photographing by aid of a submerged electric light. Such investigations, carried on in ships suitably equipped, have been prosecuted by several governments, most notably by the expedition of the Challenger, a British surveying-ship which circumnavigated the globe during the years from 1872 to 1876.

SEA-CAVE
NEAR GIANT’S CAUSEWAY,
NORTH OF IRELAND.

This and many other expeditions have sounded in all parts of the world, and explored large tracts where the water uniformly exceeded three miles in depth. The United States ship Enterprise, after passing the Chatham Islands in her run from New Zealand to the Strait of Magellan, found the water everywhere more than thirteen thousand feet deep. Throughout her run from Montevideo to New York the water varied from twelve to eighteen thousand feet deep, and Captain Nares and Admiral Belknap found like depths over equally vast breadths elsewhere.

Yet even in these basins more profound pits and valleys exist. Several places are known near Japan and off Porto Rico exceeding five miles in depth; and an English officer sounded 29,400 feet in the southern Pacific Ocean, nineteen hundred miles east of Brisbane, without finding bottom.

The average depth of all the oceans is estimated at from twelve thousand to fifteen thousand feet. As, according to Humboldt, the average height of the lands of the globe is only about one thousand feet, it will be seen that all the land now above the water, and its foundations, could be shoveled into the ocean troughs and still leave water more than two miles in depth covering the whole planet.

The soundings and dredgings of which I have spoken enable us to make a tolerable map of the ocean beds and to describe their features. All the continents are bordered by a shelf reaching out under the shallow shore-water to a greater or less distance, and then dropping, usually with much abruptness, to the ocean trough. This shelf, perhaps originally a part of the primeval continent, bears most of the great islands near continents, such as Newfoundland, the West Indies, Great Britain and Ireland, Madagascar, the Aleutian, Japanese, and Philippine groups, the Malay Archipelago, and others. If you will look at a map that has marked upon it the line of one thousand fathoms’ depth along the shores of the various continents, you will find it reaching far out from the eastern shores of both Americas, the western and northern shores of Europe, the eastern shores of South Africa, prolonging India hundreds of miles, and embracing great spaces among the East Indies, while even the hundred-fathom line would connect many an island with the mainland or with some other island, as they actually have been connected in times gone by. The fact is, there is not a single proper mountain-peak rising out of deep water at any great distance from the margins of the continents. All the numerous islands of the wide oceans are either coral reefs or the summits of volcanic cones.

Upon this shelf, and for the most part within two hundred miles of the coast, are deposited all of the materials torn from the land by the sea or brought down by rivers or glaciers, excepting the very finest, which currents may float somewhat farther out, and also excepting the rocks that icebergs carry away and drop in mid-ocean; but this is not a great amount, for most icebergs strand on the shallows off Newfoundland or in Bering Sea.

Almost nothing from the shores, therefore, reaches the central depths of the open oceans, whose beds are in substantially the same condition that they were in at the beginning, except for two things—volcanic upheavals in some places, and the remains of animal life everywhere. The former exception is a very important one, since it is now known, according to Professor Shaler, that volcanoes, by their eruptions, send more dust and broken materials to the seas than the rivers and shores combined.

THE VOLCANO KRAKATOA (SUNDA STRAIT) IN ERUPTION IN 1883.

“Although the deeper sea-floors probably lack mountains,” says Professor Shaler, “they are not without striking reliefs, which, if they could be seen, would present all the dignity which their size gives to the Himalayas or Andes: the difference is that these elevations are not true mountains, but volcanic peaks, sometimes isolated, again accumulated in long, narrow ridges, but all made up of matter poured out from the craters or through great fissures in the crust. So numerous are these heaped masses of lava and other ejections from these vents that there is hardly any considerable area of the oceans where they do not rise above the surface. There are indeed thousands of these volcanic peaks distributed from pole to pole.... Thus on the floor of the North Atlantic there is evidently a long, irregular chain of these elevations extending from the Icelandic group of islands southward to the Azores. If an explorer could view this part of the sea-bottom, he would probably find that the line of craters was as continuous as that exhibited by the volcanoes of the Andes.

“Besides the volcanic peaks,” Professor Shaler continues, “the sea-bottom in certain parts of the tropics ... is beset with the singular elevations formed by coral reefs.” But of these I shall have more to say toward the end of the book, and I allude to them here only as a feature of the invisible landscape beneath the waves.

Over the vast, gently undulating spaces separating these submerged lines of volcanoes and the ridges of coral, lies a mat of mud of unknown thickness, which naturalists term “ooze.” It is principally composed of volcanic dust and of the microscopic “tests,” or flinty limy skeletons of minute animals, few of which are large enough to be seen by the unaided eye. “Dwelling in myriads in the superficial parts of the sea, these foraminifera, as they are termed, sink at death to the bottom, over which they accumulate a thick coating of minutely divided limestone powder, forming a layer of ooze as unsubstantial as the finest snow.”

In regions like the North Atlantic this ooze consists almost wholly of such animal matter; but in other regions, such as the South Pacific, where volcanoes prevail, it is constantly and largely increased by an enormous quantity of mineral matter hurled broadcast by volcanoes, all of which are on islands or near sea-coasts. A part of this is the merest dust, which slowly settles from the air, perhaps hundreds of miles from where it was ejected. A larger part consists of that spongy lava called pumice, which is so full of holes filled with air and gases that it may float half way around the globe before it sinks, as happened after the explosion of Krakatoa.

Into the oceanic ooze, too, sinks so much of all dead fishes and other mid-sea animals as is not dissolved or devoured before reaching it; and it forms the grave of thousands of men. It is often said that ships and other things would not sink far, but would float, suspended by dense water or some miraculous influence, only a few hundred or a few thousand feet below the surface, for no one knows how long. But this eerie notion has no foundation in fact. “No other fate,” we are assured by those who know, “awaits the drowned sailor or his ship than that which comes to the marine creatures who die on the bottom of the sea. In time their dust all passes into the great storehouse of the earth, even as those who receive burial on land.” Wooden wrecks probably last much longer than those of iron.

I have mentioned that a small part of what the sea tears away from the land, or receives from rivers, winds, and other sources, is dissolved in its waters, which now contain, no doubt, samples of every ingredient of the rocks and soils of the dry land, and very likely some elements not yet detected. This solvent power of the sea explains its saltness, and it must go on growing more and more bitter as long as its waves grind at the shores and the rivers run down. The salinity varies in degree, water at great depths being salter than that near the surface, and excelling in saltness where evaporation is rapid, as under the trade-winds, while fresher in the regions of equatorial calms, where an immense amount of rain falls; broadly, the lightest (freshest) water is found at the equator, and the heaviest in the temperate regions. Inclosed, or nearly inclosed, areas become very salt. Thus the Dead Sea is what chemists call a saturated solution, being nearly one third (28 per cent.) salt, and Great Salt Lake in Utah is not far behind. The Red Sea contains 4 per cent., and some parts of the Mediterranean nearly as much. Taking all the open oceans together, about 3½ in every 100 parts (3½ per cent.) is composed of various salts, more than three quarters of which is common salt (chloride of sodium), and the remainder mainly forms of magnesium. One of the Challenger authors has estimated that the oceans contain enough salt to make a layer 170 feet thick over their whole area, and another writer says that the amount, if heaped up, would be four times larger than the whole bulk of Europe above the level of high-water mark, mountains and all.

In early times, indeed, sea-water, which yields about a quarter of a pound of crystallized salt per gallon, was almost the only source of salt for food. Even yet it is the principal source of supply for the manufacture of commercial salt in France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Austria, the West Indies, and Central and South America; and it is largely used in Holland, Belgium, and Great Britain. The early process, still extensively practised in some parts of Europe, was to admit the sea-water to large partitioned flats floored with clay, where it evaporated rapidly. The salt-crystals remaining were then collected, purified to a greater or less degree, and sold off-hand. It was by similar means that our great-grandfathers in New England and along the Southern coasts provided themselves with salt, only they used large vats arranged over fires instead of earthen basins exposed to the sun.

But analysis of sea-water discloses small quantities of many other recognizable minerals. Silica must be there to supply the needs of many foraminifers, sponges, and other animals; lime in various forms exists, or else such sea animals as mollusks could not compose their shells, nor polyps erect their enormous reefs; bromine is present, and to the iodine and other mineral dyes in the water we owe the lovely purples, crimsons, and scarlets painting corallines, seaweeds, echinoderms, and some molluscan shells, as that of the Sargasso-snail (Janthina).

As for gold and silver, both are present. I have seen it stated that a voyage of a year or two is sufficient to permit the formation of a film of silver all over the copper sheathing of a ship’s bottom, so that a frigate returning from a long cruise is really silver-plated; but I fancy this is more a matter of imagination than visible reality. Gold, in certain chemical combinations, certainly exists in sea-water, and may be extracted therefrom. Up to the present, however, the cost of the extraction has been more than the precious metal obtained was worth. Gold is often washed from sea-sand.

A FIORD, OR DEEP CREVICE WORN IN SEA-CLIFFS.

The ceaseless restlessness of the ocean forms another of the greatest contrasts between it and the immovable land—terra firma, as those like to call it who have been tossing too long on the “rolling deep”. This characteristic restlessness involves some of the most important and interesting facts in physical geography; for were the waters still,—that is, were the oceans simply huge, quiet ponds,—none of that action could take place along the shores which has been so important an agent in shaping the world and making it a suitable place for human habitation and social development.

On a planet with an atmosphere and changing seasons like ours, however, a stagnant ocean is as impossible as a motionless air; indeed, it is because the air is always in motion that large bodies of water are never at rest, for it is the changing density and temperature and movements (winds) of the air that produce waves and currents.

Waves are caused by the pressure and friction of the wind upon the surface of the water, as you may readily see at any pond; and the water in them simply rises and falls, driving forward a little at the very surface so as to cause a gentle current called wind-drift. When the waves approach the shallow, sloping border of the land they are checked at the bottom by the slope of the beach, while the freer upper part goes forward, and the waves speedily lose their rounded form and become more and more sharply ridged and steep on the front side as they sweep on until at last they pitch forward in the crash and thunder of surf.

In the open ocean the waves are usually doing little work except to cause the surface to rise and fall. The harder the wind blows, the higher the waves become, and the faster they travel. This speed has been calculated, and has been found to be proportionate to size.

“Waves 200 feet long from hollow to hollow,” we are told, “travel about 19 knots per hour; those of 400 feet in length make 27 knots; and those of 600 feet rush forward irresistibly at 32 knots.” These, of course, are under the furious impulse of a gale, and it is marvelous that ships can be made to ride over them; nor is it any wonder that excited mariners clinging to the bulwarks of some small and heeling craft, should call them “mountain high,” and declare in all seriousness that they have seen their crests rising one hundred feet above their hollows. No such altitude, nor half of it, probably, is ever reached by a storm-wave in the heaviest cyclone. An excellent authority, Lieutenant Qualtrough, assures us that the highest trustworthy measurements are from forty-four to forty-eight feet. The height of a wave depends upon what mariners call its “fetch”—that is, its distance from the place where the waves began to form. This has been worked out mathematically by Thomas Stevenson (father of the late Robert Louis Stevenson, the novelist), an eminent engineer and designer of lighthouses, who gives the following formula: “The height of the wave in feet is equal to 1½ multiplied by the square root of the fetch in nautical miles.” If the waves began 100 miles away from your ship, the waves about you will be 15 feet high, because the square root of 100 is 10, and one and a half times 10 is 15 (feet). The highest waves are not formed in the greatest tempests, which beat down their crests, but when the gale is both very strong and long continued. The worst “seas,” as sailors call big waves, are those met with off the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn.

The depth to which wave disturbance extends depends on the violence of the wind, and near shore upon the slope of the bottom. Prestwich tells us that pebbles may sometimes be moved at the depth of one hundred feet, and sand much deeper, as is shown by the fact that the bottom is disturbed in heavy storms on the Banks of Newfoundland.

The weight and power of such on-rushing masses of water are tremendous, as appears from the effect on coasts where they strike; but this opens up a subject which is too large for treatment here, and I must refer readers to geological treatises, and to such special works as Professor N. S. Shaler’s excellent “Sea and Land,” where the work of the ocean in tearing down and building up its coasts is fully and entertainingly explained. I shall have something more to say on this point, also, when I come to the chapter “Dangers of the Deep,” and speak of the terrible destruction caused by earthquakes, and in certain other agitations of the sea not due to the wind, and often styled “tidal waves.” There is only one kind of “tidal wave,” properly speaking, however; and this is a theoretical rather than an actual one, perceptible usually only in that rising and falling of the water along coasts twice each twenty-four hours that we call the flow and ebb of the tides; and here we see the effect rather than the thing itself.

LOW TIDE, ST. JOHN’S HARBOR, N. B.

The tide has been an inevitable circumstance of the existence on the earth of the ocean, or any other great body of water, ever since its origin, yet it was not until Sir Isaac Newton made us comprehend the law of gravitation that its mystery was explained. We now know with certainty—if you want the mathematical formulæ and so forth, consult some good modern encyclopædia under the word tide—that this periodical rising and falling of the sea is due to the attraction of the sun and moon,—to the last three times as much as to the first, because it is so much nearer. This attraction is exerted toward the globe as a whole; and its visible effect upon the movable water is to lift it bodily on that side nearest the moon, and at the same time to pull away the earth from the water on the opposite side, which amounts to the same thing; and thus high tides are simultaneously produced at these antipodes, which accounts for the two a day. At the same time, however, the intermediate spaces have low tides caused by an attraction there toward the center of the earth. “There are thus always simultaneously and directly under the moon two high waters opposite each other, and two low waters at equal distances between them. Owing to the rotation of the earth, this permanent system of swells and troughs travels from east to west over every part of the ocean and of its coast, and explains the regular succession of rising and falling waters, at equal intervals of time, which we call the tides.”

THE EARTHQUAKE WAVE PASSING OVER
THE LIGHTHOUSE ON POINT ANJER.

But the sun also exerts a similar but lesser influence, producing four daily solar tides, which most of the time are lost to view in the greater lunar tides. When, however, the moon gets into line with the earth and the sun, so that both the heavenly bodies pull together like a tandem team, as happens twice a month,—at new moon and full moon,—their combined action causes unusually high water, which is the sum of the lunar and solar tides, and is called the spring tide. High water is then highest, and low water lowest. On the other hand, in the midst of these fortnightly intervals, when the moon is at its first or third quarter, the sun is a full quarter of the heavens (90°) away from the moon. Its influence, therefore, acts at right angles to or practically against that of the moon, and the solar tides go to swell the low waters and diminish the high waters, forming what sailors call neap tides,—preserving an old English word meaning low.

Now remember that the globe is not standing still, even while we make these explanations, but is revolving at a tremendous speed, so that the water under the moon lifted by lunar attraction is changing place every instant at the rate of over one thousand miles an hour, and you have the conception of a low wave on each side of the earth, reaching north and south, highest and swiftest on the equator and diminishing toward the poles. These are the true tidal waves. Were the globe covered with an unbroken mantle of water, such waves, each about twenty inches (or twenty-nine inches at springtide) high on the average at the equator, would follow one another round and round the earth at the rate of one complete circuit in every twenty-four hours. That must have been the case in the primeval ocean before any continents existed; and something of it still exists in the belt of unobstructed water surrounding the Antarctic continent of ice. It would then be flood tide or ebb tide at the same hour along the whole length of any one meridian. But in the present condition of the globe, where the oceans are separated by continents and broken by islands, the progress of the tidal waves is obstructed, deflected, and wholly stopped in a great variety of ways and places, so that the hours, amount, and behavior of the tides are exceedingly varied in different regions, and are often very puzzling, forming one of the most difficult matters with which the practical navigator has to deal. Interference of tidal currents forms the Maelstrom, off the coast of Norway, whose revolution is reversed twice daily, the classic Scylla and Charybdis, in the Straits of Messina, so much dreaded by the navigators of old, and many other whirlpools of less celebrity. The tidal wave sweeping northward across the Atlantic has time to round the northern end of Scotland and flood the German Ocean with southward swelling currents before the rising water pouring into the southern end of the English Channel has time to push its way through that narrow and shallow passage; hence the two floods meet in the Straits of Dover, which accounts for the miserable chop-sea so sadly prevalent in that unfortunate bit of water.

The natural height of the tide seems to be from two to five feet, as shown in the midst of the broad Pacific. “But when dashing against the land, and forced into deep gulfs and estuaries,” to quote Professor Simon Newcomb, “the accumulating tide-waters sometimes reach a very great height. On the eastern coast of North America, which is directly in the path of the great Atlantic wave, the tide rises on an average from 9 to 12 feet. In the Bay of Fundy, which opens its bosom to receive the full wave, the tide, which at the entrance is 18 feet, rushes with great fury into that long and narrow channel, and swells to the enormous height of 60 feet, and even to 70 feet in the highest spring tides. In the Bristol Channel, on the coast of England, the spring tides rise to 40 feet, and swell to 50 in the English Channel at St. Malo on the coast of France.”

To this cause is also due in some degree those great oceanic currents which form another striking fact in the history of the sea; but they are mainly due to temperature, wind, and the rotation of the earth.

The drops that make up a body of water are the most restless things in the world; they are always sliding down the least slope, sinking out of the way of lighter substances, rising to let a heavier object pass beneath them, or moving hither and thither in an ever hopeful search of that levelness and quiet that we call equilibrium. Furthermore, when water is heated it becomes lighter. Should, therefore, a portion of the sea grow warmer than the remainder, it must and will rise to the surface; and whenever a portion becomes cooled, it must and will sink.

Now, under the continuous blazing sun of the torrid zone the sea-water near the surface gets fairly warm,—having an average temperature of about 85° along the equator,—while in the polar regions the ocean is always chilled by permanent or floating ice until it is nearly cold enough to freeze; but these masses of warm and cold water cannot remain separate in the universal ocean. The hot tropical flood, continually rising, must flow away somewhere to find its level; and it can flow nowhere except toward the poles, for there the ever-sinking volume of chilled and therefore heavier water sucks it in to take its place, while it, in turn, creeps underneath toward the equator, there to fill the gap which the escaping warm water leaves behind. So we know there is constantly going on an interchange of water—a constant flowing away from the equator northward and southward on the surface, and a flowing in toward the equator along the bottom; an endless springing up in the torrid zone and a steady settling down in the polar seas. One out of many proofs of this fact is that the thalassal abysses below the depth of a mile or so are known to be ice-cold. This could not happen unless they were constantly filled and refilled with new water from the great coolers at the poles; for if the water at those depths should remain unchanged, it would soon become very warm from the heat of the interior of the earth, whence it does constantly extract some heat.

But while this invisible vertical circulation is going on, another more visible and interesting set of movements is in progress on the surface, forming what are known as ocean currents. These are vast rivers in the ocean flowing across its face in certain directions and to a certain depth, as rivers make their way along the land. They begin and are kept going mainly by a union of the two causes already explained—heat and wind.

A STEAMER BORNE ASHORE BY AN EARTHQUAKE-WAVE.

The heat of the sun at the equator, warming, lightening, and evaporating the water, constantly tends to draw the colder water from the poles, most copiously from the South Pole; but the Antarctic water, hastening to the equator, is soon interrupted by the extremities of Australia, Africa, and South America, and so split into three great branches. That which passes into the South Atlantic goes on northward along the western coast of Africa, part of it becoming so warm under the hot sun there that it will not sink, but constantly comes more and more to the surface, until it strikes against the great shoulder of Guinea and is turned sharply westward. Now it is squarely under the trade-wind and headed the same way; constantly urged forward by this moderate but endless tugging of the wind upon its waves, the current can never swerve, but flows along the equator, and for half a dozen degrees each side of it, straight across the Atlantic. South America, however, stands in its path, and the wedge-like coast of Brazil, pointed with Cape St. Roque, splits this great river. Part of it now turns southward and swings back across toward Africa, making an eddy a couple of thousand miles wide in the South Atlantic, while another arm runs down the Patagonian coast. But by far the largest part of the divided current is sent northward, past the coast of upper Brazil into the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, where it is well heated, and thence poured into the North Atlantic, to become widely celebrated as the Gulf Stream.

Gathered in full force, the Gulf Stream flows northward close along the coast of our Southern States at the rate of eighty or ninety miles a day until Cape Hatteras gives it a swerve away, when it strikes out to sea and pushes straight across to Spain, where a branch leaves it and runs northward between Iceland and the British Islands, while the main body turns southward to mingle again with the equatorial current from Africa and repeat its journey all over again. It is in the heart of this great circle of currents in the middle of the Atlantic that navigators find that dreaded region of heat and calms which they call the Doldrums; and here, too, float round and round the wide, buoyant meadows of the Sargasso Sea.

Meanwhile another most important cold stream is making its way through the Atlantic, known as the Arctic current. It comes down out of Baffin’s Bay, joins a similar flood from the outer coast of Greenland, is thrown up to the surface by the Banks of Newfoundland (where meeting warm air, it produces those thick and prolonged fogs so common in that region), fills the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the bight between Nova Scotia and Cape Cod with chilly water, and finally dips under the Gulf Stream amid that commotion of winds and waters that makes the track of the steamships between New York and Europe the most tempestuous of ocean highways. It is the mingling of these warm and cold waters there which is chiefly responsible for the stormy condition of the North Atlantic.

The Pacific has a similar arrangement of circulation north and south of the equator. The Antarctic waters form a cold stream named the Humboldt current, which pours up the western side of South America, keeping the climate down to a far more wintry condition than it is entitled to by latitude, until it reaches the southern trade-winds, which sweep it westward straight across the Pacific, where much of it is lost among the archipelagoes of Oceanica, and the southern part flows onward into the Indian Ocean.

North of the Pacific equator a similar westward current moves steadily over the great waste of waters past the Sandwich Islands to the coast of China. From the Philippines and Japan northward, however, there is a far stronger flow, known to the Japanese as the Black Current (Kuroshiwo), which skirts the coast of Japan and the Kurile Islands, makes these and Kamchatka habitable, then turns sharply east along the front of the foggy Aleutian chain of islands, and broadening and cooling as it turns, swings down the temperate coast of Alaska and gradually disappears. These two great currents and their inclosed eddies are far broader and less distinct than those of the North and South Atlantic, but they follow the same laws.

In a similar but lesser way the Indian Ocean has a strong westerly stream flowing straight across from Australia to South Africa, which is of immense help to ships returning from the East around the Cape of Good Hope. From Mozambique the water turns northward to make the return round, but here it is complicated by the peculiar conditions made by the inflow and outflow of the Red Sea, Arabian Gulf, and so on, and by the disturbing influences of the monsoons, until it can hardly be defined.

Of all these currents none is as well marked as the Gulf Stream. Its blue water is in such contrast to the darker, greenish hue of the remainder of the ocean that sailors can often tell when they enter the edge of the current, half their vessel being in and half out of the stream. If you approach from the west you find that the water at first shows a warmth of only fifty or sixty degrees near the surface; but as you sail on, this increases until, opposite Sandy Hook, you may get as high a reading on the thermometer as eighty degrees, and opposite Florida above one hundred degrees. This difference in temperature between the eastern and western margins of the Gulf Stream is owing to the presence of the great river of Arctic water flowing in an opposite direction between the Gulf Stream and the shore. Off Florida the Gulf Stream is about sixty miles wide; off New York it is over one hundred miles in width, but is less sharply defined. Its depth is hard to determine, but certainly amounts to several hundred feet. It is worth remembering that, although some guesses had been made at it before, Dr. Benjamin Franklin was the first man to study the Gulf Stream and to tell us anything of its origin and course.

The way in which some of these ocean currents affect the weather of the lands upon which they border shows how great is the influence of the sea upon land-climates; indeed, it may be truthfully said that only the continents and such great islands as Australia or Madagascar have any climate essentially distinct from that of the ocean in their quarter of the globe. But the equability that would reign over an ocean of quiet water, determining the amount of cold and heat by regular gradation in latitude between the equator and the poles, is completely upset by the great current-movements I have outlined. Scotland, for example, lies as far north as Labrador, and the latitude of London is above that of Lake Superior, yet neither have those terrible frosts and heavy snows which prevail in Canada, and make Labrador a land of ice almost uninhabitable. This difference is due almost wholly to the fact that the Gulf Stream pours its warm flood against the coast of Great Britain, and even tempers the Norwegian coast, keeps Barentz’s Sea largely free from summer ice, and clothes Spitzbergen with vegetation, although within ten degrees of the pole. Hence in the forests of northern Scandinavia Laps can dwell in much comfort on a line with the frozen barren grounds north of Hudson Bay.

A ROUGH NIGHT IN THE GULF STREAM.

On the other hand, the unfortunate coasts of Greenland are bathed in water chilled by months of captivity near the pole, and loaded with ice that cools down all the winds that blow ashore. Greenland itself is covered with an unbroken sheet of ice, hundreds or thousands of feet thick, yet most of it is no farther north than Sweden. The whole northeastern coast of America, down to Labrador, is incrusted with ice; and the region south of the St. Lawrence has a similar climate to Finland; while even farther south, Boston, within the protecting arm of Cape Cod, is in winter a city of frost and snow and fog from November till April, when it really is little farther north than sunny Naples, where one laughs at winter.

Similarly, in the Pacific Ocean, the northward movement of the great Japanese current makes the coast of China habitable and pleasant clear to the Sea of Okhotsk, gives the Aleutian archipelago a pretty decent climate, and causes the islands and coasts of Alaska and British Columbia to nourish the most magnificent forests in America, and to have a climate resembling that of Great Britain. Glasgow and Sitka are, in fact, in the same latitude, and under very similar climatic conditions, except that in Scotland there are no such lofty and cold mountains to precipitate constant rains as is the case along the northwestern margin of America.

Similar examples and contrasts might be drawn in other parts of the world. The weather in the interior of continents is pretty much alike on similar latitudes the world round, varying with height; but the climate of all sea-coasts is good or bad as a place to live, in accordance with the temperature of the water which the currents bring to that part of the ocean.

But the currents of the ocean influence something besides the weather. Upon them depends to a considerable extent whether a certain part of the coast shall have one or another kind of animals dwelling in the salt water. This is not so much true of fishes as it is of the mollusks or “shell-fish,” the worms that live in the mud of the tide-flats, the anemones, sea-urchins, starfish and little clinging people of the wet rocks, and of the jellyfishes, great and small, that swim about in the open sea.

Nothing would injure most of these “small fry” more than a change in the water making it a few degrees colder or warmer than they were accustomed to. Since the constant circulation of the currents keeps the ocean water in all its parts almost precisely of the same density, and food seems about as likely to abound in one district as another, naturalists have concluded that it is temperature which decides the extent of coast or of sea-area where any one kind of invertebrate animal will be found. It thus happens that the life of Cuban waters is different from that of our Carolina coast; and that, again, largely separate from what you will see off New York; while Cape Cod seems to run out as a partition between the shore life south of it and a very different set of shells, sand-worms, and so forth, characteristic of the colder waters to the northward.

Out in the ocean, however, the warm current of the Gulf Stream forms a genial pathway along which southern swimming animals, like the wondrously beautiful Portuguese-man-o’-war (Physalia), may wander northward for hundreds of miles beyond where they are found near shore; yet if by chance they stray outside the limits of the warm Gulf Stream, they will at once be chilled to death, as happened once to millions of tile-fish.

Ocean currents carry floating burdens long distances. They bring the icebergs to form those terrible fogs of Alaska and Newfoundland; and they often bear far away the logs that float out of tropical rivers.

A YOUNG SHIP-RIGGER.

These drifting logs often have plants growing upon them or contain quantities of seeds which are not injured by their short voyages. When, therefore, the coral polyps build up one of their reef-islands until it appears above the waves, thither the currents bring roots and seeds from neighboring islands, and quickly plant them upon the new barren shores, so that in a few seasons the little islet becomes green and wooded and ready to hold its own against the winds and waves. Moreover, the same drifting stuff will carry land animals as passengers,—insects, snails of many kinds, reptiles, and even four-footed beasts,—and so not only give the island a vegetation, but populate it with various of the smaller animals. This seems to you, perhaps, a very accidental and haphazard way of fitting out a country so that presently it may support human beings, nor is it the only means by which barren islands become productive; but it is important as far as it goes, and when we study into the distribution of plants and animals in an archipelago, we are pretty sure to find those of the same sort upon islands that lie in the same current—even to the human inhabitants.

CHAPTER III
THE BUILDING AND RIGGING OF SHIPS

As late as 1861 an exploring ship was visited by natives of Western Australia, riding simple rough logs. To smooth and sharpen the log’s end and then to hollow it out has been thought to be the first step taken by primitive man in his progress toward a boat; but I think the dugout probably came later, or at any rate no earlier, than the folding of bark into a trough and tying up the ends, as some savages are still content to do. In North America, where materials were favorable, this germ developed into the very highest type of canoe—the Algonkin birch-bark. It may have been an attempt to imitate the bark canoe in a more durable form which led to the laborious hollowing of dugouts; but here again, in regions where suitable trees grew, the art developed so highly as to produce the great sea-boats of the Papuans and our Northwest Coast Indians, carved from a single log, yet able to carry sixty or more persons and their luggage. Such boats as these, when provided with sails, are practically “ships,” and satisfy every need of their owners.

Another root of naval architecture lies in the raft, which long ago reached a high degree of usefulness in the sea-going balsa of western South America. It is probable that the South Sea catamaran is a clever outgrowth of experience with a raft. In Polynesia it took the form of two great canoes, exactly equal, fastened close together and covered by a single central deck; and such are the seaworthiness and speed of these double boats, that the Polynesians voyage hundreds of miles in them.

Similar in purpose—namely, to insure stability—are the various outriggers that at once characterize and distinguish among themselves the native craft of the South Seas. This device consists of a beam of the lightest obtainable wood, usually about half as long as the canoe, which rests upon the water parallel to and a few feet away from the side of the boat, and is connected with its gunwale by elastic rods or planks. Sometimes these are covered, or partly covered, by a light platform, and there are many variations in form; but the idea in all cases is to keep the boat from overturning.

In many parts of the world logs could be obtained large enough only for a narrow bottom or hollowed keel, and the remainder of the boat was built up of planks and pieces ingeniously pegged and knit together with treenails, ratan, and cords made of vegetable fibers that tightened when wet. The Madras surf-boats are a familiar example in civilized waters of boats made in this way which have great elasticity, and out of them have developed, without much change, the swift proas of the Malays, and the junks of China, Korea, and Japan. One device for stitching these boats firmly together was the leaving of ridges on the inner side of the planks or pieces, through holes in which they could be tied to each other and to the inner framework without making a hole reaching the outside. This system seems to have been earlier than the use of treenails.

PROA, WITH OUTRIGGER.

Of similar construction, apparently, were the boats of the Egyptians and other peoples about the eastern end of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, which, as far back as three thousand years before Christ, at least, had reached the size and capabilities of true ships, making, as we shall presently see, extensive sea voyages. Pictures of them remain in the very ancient tombs, and show that the planking consisted of pieces about three feet square, which were laid on overlapping, like shingles on a roof, and fastened to the framework by wooden treenails. The Phenicians, and their pupils the Greeks and Romans, improved on these methods in various ways, at last substituting iron, copper, and bronze nails or bolts (which would not rust) for the wooden pegs of their ancestors.

All of these boats and those of all western Europe (of which the best outside the Mediterranean were the vikings’ ships) differed in one essential point of construction from Oriental ships: instead of making the shell of the vessel, and fitting into it a framework of connected braces, as the Malays and Polynesians did (and yet do), they laid a keel, bending it up or setting into it stem- and stern-posts at the ends, and inserted along its sides curving upright timbers, well styled “ribs,” which swelled out amidships, and narrowed in forward and aft, making a skeleton of the shape the hull was intended to be. Finally, over and upon this well-braced framework were securely fastened the planks, which were narrow and ran lengthwise in every case except that of the ancient Nile boats. The Scandinavian vikings developed a craft of their own, one of the most interesting of the ancient ships; and to these northern craftsmen is traceable the principal influence that has shaped British (and consequently American) ship-building and seamanship. This early Scandinavian boat was always made of oak, sharp at both ends, and rather shallow, the general form being much like that of a modern whaleboat, with a great rounding keel—if, indeed, this wonderful sea-craft may not be a lineal descendant of the viking ship. The hewn planks were attached to the keel and to the ribs (usually single, naturally bent V-shaped prongs of oak) in a most ingenious and serviceable manner, and they were always overlapping or clinker (i. e., clencher) built. Several of these and other prehistoric boats have been found buried in peat-moss and in mounds in Germany, Denmark, and Scandinavia, and have been described by various writers.

The motive power of all the early boats was found in human arms, wielding paddles or oars. It is said that the oldest forms of paddles of which we have any record among the Egyptian or Assyrian hieroglyphs show them to have been shaped somewhat like the arm and hand, and that similar paddles were to be seen a few decades ago on the canals in Holland. This is natural, because undoubtedly the first paddle ever used was the naked hand. Short paddles were soon found less powerful than long ones; but in order to work the latter it was necessary to brace them against something in the middle. Notches were therefore cut in the edge of the boat, or thole-pins were inserted, the paddle became an oar, and by and by boatmen learned the art of feathering, and so forth.

Steering could be done of old, as now, with a turn of the rearmost paddle in a canoe, and as canoes enlarged, the steering-paddle was lengthened. As the sterns of the ancient boats were usually either sharp, like the prows, or else built up into an ornamental height, the most convenient place for the steering-oar was over the right side, where it was balanced in a loop of cable, or otherwise, as close to the after end of the boat as practicable, and then a cross-piece extended inboard from the handle, enabling the steersman to move it more easily by giving him the benefit of leverage. Such was the arrangement of steering-gear in all the ancient Mediterranean boats, and it is to a similar arrangement in the sea-going craft of our northern ancestors that we owe our words stern and starboard, which originally meant “steering-place” and “steering-side.” The modern rudder is substantially the same oar, set upright, tiller and all, and hinged to the stern-post; in fact, the word has descended from the old Teutonic name for “oar,” and all gradations between steering-oar and true rudder may still be found.

Though some romantic stories are told by the old mythologists as to its origin, the idea of rigging was as natural and practical in its development as that of hull or steering-gear. That a strong breeze moves a canoe, and that, if a man in a canoe holds his robe outstretched or a thick bush upright, the force will send him along without the labor of paddling, and lengthwise rather than sidewise, because that is the direction of least resistance, were facts quickly and gratefully seized upon by the earliest boatmen. To have a skin ready for the purpose, and to set up a pole and ropes to hold it in position, were easy matters; yet in this simple arrangement you have the first sail.

But skins were too heavy and valuable for such a purpose, except in such limited circumstances as those of the Arctic Eskimos.

Persons who spent much time on the water, therefore, like the most ancient Egyptians and the islanders of the Chinese and South seas, soon devised a way of weaving rushes or splints of bamboo into broad mats, and thus were able, on account of their lightness, to carry much larger and more effective sails, which were kept outstretched by one or more cross-poles or spars, and could be taken down quickly. Many such sails are in use to this day not only among Asiatic and African boatmen, but on the northwest coast of Canada. A fine example hangs above my desk as I write.

With the discovery of how to make cloth and cordage of woolen, silken, hempen, and cotton fibers (and in Egypt of papyrus), came a still better material for ropes and sails, since cloth was so much lighter that a far greater extent of it could be spread than before; its flexibility enabled it to be handled, changed, and rolled up snugly, and its cheapness encouraged its use and the practice of navigation generally. We read of silken sails on the royal barges of medieval times, but they could hardly have exceeded in strength or elegance those of the fine Phenician ships that carried the commerce of the world twenty-five centuries ago. “Fine linen with broidered work from Egypt was that which thou spreadest forth to be thy sail,” exclaims the sacred chronicler (Ezekiel xxvii. 7). Hempen cloth, indeed, was preferred for sails until the present century, as is expressed in our word canvas, which is derived from the Latin name of flax; but now cotton has mainly superseded it.

Anciently the sails were often colored, purple or vermilion being the badge of a monarch or an admiral. Black denoted mourning. “In some cases the topsail seems to have been colored, while the sail below was plain; and frequently a patchwork of colors was produced by using different stuffs.” Various inscriptions and devices were also woven or painted on the sails, sometimes in gold. The Venetians and Greeks do the same to this day, adding a gaudy feature to the lovely Levantine sea-scenery; and the sails of the North Sea fishermen are turned to a rich red and yellow by the tanning mixture in which they soak their canvas.

REEFING A TOPSAIL IN A STORM.

As for the shape, all rigs seem reducible to two types—the lateen and the square. The former is characteristic of the eastern half of the world, the latter of the western half, including primitive America, where, so far as I know, only plain, rectangular sails were ever made by the Indians.

A HONG-KONG “PULL-AWAY” BOAT.
Showing method of hoisting and reefing matting sails.

There must be some good reason for a broad division like this, and it is found in the different conditions which eastern and western seamen had to meet. The lateen seems to have originated in the Indian Ocean, is seen wherever Arabs are, and has been taken eastward by the Malays as far into the South Sea Islands as their influence extended. It is a huge, triangular canvas extended at a steep angle by a long, flexible yard balanced across the mast to which it is loosely hung, and controlled by a sheet attached to the free corner. It is thus very lofty, and therefore suitable to a region of steady and usually light winds. This is the characteristic rig of the Arab dhow—a model that has come down from remote antiquity and is capable of excellent service on the northern and eastern coasts of Africa, where it prevails. It was probably in a small vessel of this kind that the Apostle Paul suffered shipwreck; and an outgrowth and perfection of it is the dahabiyeh of the Nile, now become famous as a tourists’ pleasure-boat, whose immensely lofty sail is precisely adapted to catch every faint breath that comes across the river from the deserts. Such sails are spread like the great pointed wings of an albatross over the narrow decks of the Malayan “flying proas” and other swift South Sea craft, and urge upon their fleet errands the xebecs, saics, feluccas, and other light craft of the Levant and Barbary coasts, identified with former piracy and modern smuggling, as well as with fishing and freighting. Some of these boats have two or three masts, the xebec and felucca being notable because of the curious forward rake of the foremast; and in that extremely picturesque Portuguese fishing-boat called the muleta there are, in addition to the big lateen, a huge free second sail ballooning out to leeward from the tip of the yard, and a host of little flying jibs forward, which somebody has well likened to a flock of birds hovering about the prow. Good examples of lateen-rigged boats may be seen in Louisiana, built and manned by the Greek, Maltese, and Sicilian fishermen.

The difficulty of handling in rough or squally weather this long yard and expansive canvas makes it unsuitable for such weather as prevails in the western Mediterranean or on the Atlantic; and to meet these stormy and frequently changing conditions, and obtain a rig with which they could beat to windward, the earliest rough-water seamen devised square sails. What the rig of the ancient far-voyaging Phenician ships was we have no means of knowing, but the indications are that they carried lug sails, which appear to be the simplest and earliest of the “square” forms; that is, sails suspended from short cross-yards, and controlled by ropes (sheets) attached to their lower corners. Such at least were the sails of the Roman and Greek merchant and war vessels of the classical era, and they persist to-day in the local fishing-smacks of the stormy Adriatic.

The true home of the square-sailed craft, however, was northern Europe, where the Norwegian, Dutch, and Norman coasters and fishermen of to-day probably represent fairly well the rigs of the bold viking boats of twelve or fifteen centuries ago.

Of the slow development of ship-building during the middle ages we have little information, but in the fourteenth century we begin to hear of a revival in the art, as, indeed, was needful when the long voyages were to be undertaken which the discovery of the mariner’s compass had then rendered possible. In this revival the Venetians and Genoese took the lead, but the English were not far behind. There was a large variety of vessels in that day, rude though they were, and called by names we should hardly recognize.

Though the hulls of these vessels were large and tight, their shape was poorly adapted for speed or for safety in bad weather. Their decks were built up into immensely high structures at the stern and bows, after the old galley model, and to form forts for soldiers. Our word “forecastle” reminds us of this old usage. Their masts were single sticks,—not divided into topmasts,—and hence, necessarily, were thick and heavy; and they bore upon their summits large “top-castles” where marines stood in battle to shoot down upon the enemy’s decks. This weight above, with the height of surface exposed to the wind and the clumsy rigging, made it impossible for them to sail safely except with a fair and gentle wind (they never attempted it otherwise), and they were required to carry an enormous quantity of ballast. There was so little room for anything except armament, sleeping-berths, and a cooking-room in the war-ships that every war fleet had to take with it small vessels carrying provisions; and the case was little better in respect to merchant vessels.

The ships in which Vasco da Gama, Columbus, the Cabots, and other explorers did their marvelous work were no better than this. Strangely inefficient they seem to us, and we wonder that some of the simplest contrivances in rigging were not adopted centuries before they came into use until we remember that it was not for long, speedy voyages that vessels were intended previous to the sixteenth century (with certain exceptions in northern seas), but simply as a means of carrying slowly from one coast-port to another a great number of men or huge cargoes.

However, as the known world widened and trade grew, inventions by private ship-owners continually improved the rigging, though it would be hard to find a class of men slower to change old ways for new than the seamen. Columbus’s “caravel” had four short masts, the forward one having a square lug-sail and the three after masts lateens. It was very gradually, indeed, that lateens were given up, and most curious combinations of sails were to be seen in this transition period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The old-fashioned Mediterranean barca, for example, had as foremast the forward-raking “trinchetto” of the felucca, with a huge lateen, while the mainmast bore three square sails and the mizzen two lugs; and in addition to this two banks of oars were provided! In fact, it was not until 1800 that English frigates substituted a spanker for the lateen-rigged mizzen.

Another curiosity of rigging possessed by these solidly built, beautifully carved vessels (no such exterior decoration has been seen since as adorned the ships of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) was the quaint little spritsail-topmast. By this time the single heavy pole-mast had been superseded by the three built-up masts and topmasts, braced by stays, made accessible by rope ladders (shrouds), and carrying several tiers of topsails instead of only one. A bowsprit had been added, also, and this became almost a fourth mast, so loaded were it and its stays with various small sails. Its outer end bore this miniature spritsail-mast, with topmast, shrouds, and tiny sails all complete, surmounted by a pole-head, or jack-staff, upon which was hoisted the flag since known as the jack, and always now carried at the prow of any national boat or ship, even such as the shapeless monitors.

But gradually, out of the experience of long voyages, the competition of merchants, and as an effect of improved gunnery and consequent changes in naval tactics, the lofty deck-structures, great tops, needless outworks, and odd sails, like this spritsail, were got rid of, and vessels were trimmed down and equalized until they became, as now, “ship-shape, Bristol-fashion.”

The rigging of modern sailing-vessels is divided into “standing” and “running”; the former includes the masts, their stays, now generally made of wire, and such other rope-work as is not adjustable.

The sails, also, may be assigned to two classes: first, those attached to a mast, with or without boom and gaff, or to a stay, which are called fore-and-aft sails because they may be ranged lengthwise of the ship; and, second, those suspended by their upper and lower edges to or between spars or “yards” swung across the mast, and known as “square” sails, the lowermost of which are really lugs. All the variations of shape seen in America, except the rare and local lateens, can be counted in one or the other of these classes.

The styles of rig visible in American waters are not many, and are easily learned. Let us begin with the simplest—that having one mast.

ANCIENT CARAVELS.
Copied from old manuscripts and tapestries.

The cat-boat (i. e., cat-rigged boat) is one having a simple pole-mast stepped very near the bow, and a fore-and-aft sail laced to a gaff and boom and managed by a sheet. This is the rig of the ordinary American sail-boat, which is noted for its ability in pointing up into the wind. In England it is known as a una-boat. Sometimes the peak of the sail is sustained by a little loose spar called a “sprit,” instead of a gaff. In the chapter on Yachting will be found further illustrations of these small rigs.

A sloop has one mast (with topmast) set well back from the stem, and a bowsprit. The sloop-rig consists of a fore-and-aft mainsail, spread by means of a boom and gaff, a gaff-topsail, a forestaysail, and one or more jibs. A cutter is now substantially the same thing, though formerly somewhat distinguished. Both are derived, probably, from the northern lugger, and old-time pictures show queer intermediate forms, often having a square topsail instead of a gaff. Thus the earlier of the Hudson River sloops, which were not only the freight-carriers but the packet-boats between New York and Albany from the time the Dutch introduced them until steamboats took their place, had the top of the mainsail supported, lug-fashion, by a short yard, and carried above that a square topsail; but this rig was steadily modified toward the modern type to make it faster and safer in the sudden squalls that beset this hill-girt river.

Of two-masted rigs, the oldest is the brig, which has square sails on both masts, just like the main and mizzen masts of a full-rigged ship. Then there is the brigantine, a slight modification of the brig, and the hermaphrodite brig, or brig-schooner, with fore-and-aft sails on the after mast. This kind of vessel has been greatly modified (one of its most extraordinary forms was the ketch), is less common now than formerly, and took its name, which is derived from the same source as “brigand,” from the fact that it was the most common rig of the pirates of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its place was largely taken for small vessels by a purely American invention, and one of the greatest of Yankee notions—the schooner. The schooner was originally small, and had two masts; but now is often built of great size, with as many as five or six masts, each of which has a fore-and-aft rig—that is, a sloop’s mainsail and gaff-topsail on every mast, with forestaysail and several jibs in front, and staysails between. Sometimes a square sail is placed on the foretopmast, which makes the vessel a topsail schooner. The first one was built by a Gloucester sea-captain about 1817, and proved so satisfactory that all the fishing-fleet were soon rigged in that way, whence the idea has spread to all parts of the world.

Until recently, however, vessels large enough to have three masts were always “square-rigged,” as barks, barkentines, or ships; for, although we have come to speak of any big vessel as a “ship,” yet in proper nautical language a ship is a vessel rigged in a particular way, and it is nothing else. In fact, in olden times they were sometimes very small—too small to be economical, as we now know. The “Naval Chronicle” for 1807 contained an account of a full-rigged ship of only thirty-six tons’ burden, which for one hundred and thirty years previous to that date had been cruising about the English coast, and may be doing so yet, for aught I know.

A FIJI ISLAND OUT-RIGGED CANOE, APPROACHING A FULL-RIGGED SHIP HOVE-TO.

Masts have their proper names: the tallest is in the middle of the vessel, and is called the mainmast; the next tallest stands in front of it, and is the foremast; and the third is in the stern, and is named mizzenmast, because it carries the mizzen (sail). All the rigging, except that belonging to the bowsprit, is repeated for each mast, and each piece is named with reference to the mast or part of the mast or appropriate sail to which it belongs: as, for example, main shrouds, fore shrouds, mizzen shrouds, mizzen-royal, maintopsail yard, foretopmast studdingsail downhaul, and so on. In a proper full-rigged ship all the sails upon the masts, except the spanker, are square, and are named from the sections of the mast opposite which they hang. Counting from the deck to the truck, or tiptop of the mast, they are as follows: on the mainmast, mainsail or maincourse, maintopsail, maintopgallant-sail, mainroyal, and skysail; on the foremast, foresail or forecourse, foretopsail, foretopgallant, foreroyal, and skysail; on the mizzenmast, cross-jack (and behind it the spanker, mizzen, or driver), mizzentopsail, mizzentopgallant, mizzen-royal, and skysail. The bowsprit sails are the forestaysail, foretopmast staysail, jib, flying jib, and outer jib, or jibstaysail. Each of the stays running diagonally from mast to mast bears a triangular sail known by the name of the particular stay on which it hangs, as maintopmast staysail, and so on—nine in all. In addition to all this, a little sail is sometimes set above the skysail, and another under the bowsprit, while out beyond the ends of the yards are often extended light additional spars carrying studdingsails. In favorable weather, when the captain wishes to “crowd all on,” as sometimes can be done for days and weeks together before the trades, almost forty sails may be spread, and the ship moves grandly along under a swaying cloud of canvas that reaches far beyond her rails on each side, and towers more than one hundred feet into the steady air.

But the cost of building, maintaining, and handling these grand fabrics is so great that they are steadily diminishing in numbers, and perhaps are destined before long to disappear altogether from the seas to which they have lent so much picturesqueness and romance. The supremacy of the schooner seems likely to prove complete. Unwilling to concede everything at once, many vessels are now rigged with square sails on the foremast and mainmast and fore-and-aft sails on the mizzen (a bark), or square sails on the foremast only, and the others schooner-rigged (a barkentine); but even these are disappearing in favor of the three-masted or four-masted schooner. This is due to the fact that the schooner rig will sail closer to the wind and gives as much force in proportion as the ship style, while it is far less expensive to build, and more quickly and easily managed, not requiring nearly as many men, and therefore being cheaper to run as well as to set up. It is for these reasons that I have called it one of the greatest of Yankee notions.

A MULETA, OR PORTUGUESE LATEEN-RIGGED FISHING-BOAT.

CHAPTER IV
EARLY VOYAGES AND EXPLORATIONS

PART I—PREVIOUS TO THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

Wherever it may have been that man first appeared upon the earth, the period must certainly have been incalculably long ago, for he had time to spread to all parts of the habitable globe long before any sort of record begins. Little, if any, part of the world has yet been found where the evidences of man’s residence in the long-forgotten past do not exist. So long ago that all tradition of it is forgotten, and only the imperishable stone implements they used remain as traces of their presence, mankind had reached and settled the farthest northern and eastern coasts of Europe and Asia, and the southern extremities of Africa and India. These might have been reached by land; but similar traces exist in many islands which, so far as we can see, could never have been connected with each other or with any continent by lands now submerged (as perhaps has been the case in some other islands) since man originated. Such places, then, could have been reached and colonized only by means of boats, and that at an exceedingly remote time.

Some hint of what these prehistoric navigators might have been able to do may be gathered from the performances that we know of in the South Sea, where almost every island and coral atoll that could support a colony has apparently been inhabited, since long before even tradition begins, although some of them, like the Hawaiian group, are separated from all others by hundreds of miles of open sea.

It is exceedingly interesting and suggestive to read in a work like Professor Friedrich Ratzel’s “History of Mankind,” of the dispersion of population over the islands of the South Pacific Ocean, where a mixed population of black and yellow races possessed themselves of the whole of Oceanica long before white men had even heard of that part of the world. This astounding fact gains in significance when we remember that wide tracts of very deep ocean divide these islands, many of which are so small that they were found by exploring navigators only with difficulty. Cook and Beechey and other early voyagers note finding upon certain islands people who had come thither in their own boats over distances of six or eight hundred miles; and there are many instances of castaways surviving voyages of one thousand or fifteen hundred miles, even against the trade-winds. But these involuntary voyages were no longer than many others undertaken for war or trade, or because of famine or a mere love of wandering. Over-population of the limited spaces of most islands and groups led to the colonization of others; and it must often have been necessary to go far away to seek unoccupied or thinly peopled refuges. This could not have been done had men not been good shipwrights, not only, but careful students of the heavens by whose sun and moon and stars they steered, aiding themselves with charts made of sticks. The remotest groups, like the Sandwich Islands and Easter Island, were found and settled too long ago even for tradition to retain more than a fabulous story about it. “These Vikings of the Pacific,” says Ratzel, “continued to discover even small and remote islets. In the whole of the Pacific there is not one island of any size of which it was left to Europeans to demonstrate the habitability.” It has even been argued that the continent of America was peopled by Pacific Islanders, who made their way to it from Polynesia; but of this there is no direct evidence, and it seems unlikely, because the prevailing winds and currents flow from South America, rather than toward it, in this part of the Pacific.

But leaving these dim old times when barbarous men voyaged far and wide over seas, and races mingled that were born on opposite sides of wide waters, let us note what traveling our civilized ancestors did.

The evidences of ruined walls, graves, carvings, and stone tools show that that earliest of civilized races of which we now have any knowledge—the Hittites—were acquainted not only with the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, but had boldly rounded the headlands of Spain, skirted the stormy Bay of Biscay, and settled colonies in England and France. Who were these Hittites? They were an Asiatic people, dwelling in the Taurus Mountains of the eastern part of Asia Minor, who increased into the most powerful nation of that part of the world about two thousand years before Christ, and carried on wars with the Egyptians, among others, until at last they were overcome by the rise of the empire of Assyria, north of them, about eleven hundred years before Christ. Doubtless they explored the African coast somewhat south of the Red Sea, and very likely knew the Persian Gulf and the route to India. My own opinion is that we are likely to give the people of antiquity too little credit rather than too much in the direction of a knowledge of geography.

Meanwhile there was rising along the Mediterranean from Palestine northward the most able commercial race of antiquity, who styled themselves Canaanites, as in the Bible, but whom the Greeks called Phenicians, the name by which we know them best. Their capitals were the cities Tyre and Sidon, the ruins of which are still to be seen on the Syrian coast a little way south of Beirut, and the wealth and commercial power of which will give us some interesting paragraphs for a future chapter. Suffice it here to say that their rulers were foremost among the loosely organized “nations” between the Nile and the Euphrates, and that they maintained their power through a long period, not only by their wealth and enterprise as traders, but mainly through their skill and energy as navigators. As we shall see when we come to consider their commerce in Chapter VII, they excelled in the building of ships, in an understanding of how to steer long courses by the heavenly bodies, and in sea knowledge generally. It is well known that the Phenicians traded in their ships down the west coast of Africa to and beyond the Canary Islands, which they also visited; made repeated voyages to the French coast and the British Islands; and may very likely have gone around into the Baltic, for they knew of its amber, though this might have been obtained by the overland trade routes. It is believed that they ascertained that Africa was, in fact, a huge island; for it was to prove this supposition that Pharaoh Necho (or Naku or Neku) II, an enlightened Egyptian monarch who reigned in the sixth century before Christ, hired a crew of Phenician seamen to man an expedition whose purpose it was to circumnavigate Africa. These men started down the Red Sea in 611 B. C., and in 605 B. C. came sailing home through the Strait of Gibraltar, to the delight of their friends and confusion of a kingdom full of I-told-you-sos.[1] Just twenty centuries elapsed before any one else repeated that feat, so far as I know;, and no wonder it was forgotten. This same Necho II did even more for maritime commerce, for he attempted to complete the canal, begun long before his time, connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, and seems to have made a passage along which barges and small boats might be towed, which remained open for many centuries, and in part followed the line now covered by the Suez Canal. Earlier than that Darius, the Persian conqueror of Egypt, had dug a navigable canal from the Nile to the Red Sea; and this shows that there must have been large traffic in both seas at that time to justify such tasks.

AN EARLY ROMAN BIREME.

By this time the power and prosperity of Tyre and Sidon had declined, and Carthage, originally a colonial city, had become the most important center of Phenician influence; and from this port there sailed a century later (perhaps about 500 B. C.) an exploring expedition under a Carthaginian king named Hanno, intended to study and establish trade with the West African coast. It was a large and powerful fleet, said to number sixty galleys; and that women were taken as well as men shows that it was intended to form settlements at suitable points, as, indeed, was done. The account of it has been preserved in a short writing called the “Periplus,” by an ancient but unknown Greek; and this inscription is regarded by most scholars as entirely authentic, since all its details conform to modern knowledge, even though it is impossible to identify surely the various points mentioned. It tells us that the terminus of Hanno’s exploration was an island beyond a gulf called Noti Cornu, in which he found a company of hairy women, whom the interpreters called gorillas. It was in memory of this that the manlike apes which a few years ago were discovered on the west coast of Africa received the same name; but they are not known anywhere north of the Kamerun Mountains, while the farthest point any critic is willing to believe reached by Hanno is the Bight of Benin, some distance north of the Kameruns. It is easy to believe that the inquiring Carthaginians might have heard of these apes,—or perhaps of chimpanzees, now found as far north as the Gambia River,—and reported actually seeing them, in order to add glory to their name. At any rate, this expedition increased largely the ancient knowledge of the sea in that direction; and navigators now knew the shores of the Atlantic from the Gulf of Guinea to the North Sea; but there the knowledge of the world seems to have rested for more than a dozen centuries, principally, no doubt, because there seemed nothing beyond, either north or south, to invite the merchants who then, as ever since, have been the principal promoters of discovery. It is only within the past century that voyages of discovery have been undertaken purely for the sake of the increase of knowledge. Previous to that the object was always either military conquest or the extension of trade.

SHIP OF PTOLEMY PHILOPATOR.
(About 240 B. C. Banks of oars and lug-sails.)

Attention was now turned to the eastern seas, overland routes to India and even to China having become well known both to conquering armies and to mercantile caravans. The coasts of Abyssinia, of Arabia, of the Persian Gulf, and of western India were settled by a semi-civilized people for a thousand, perhaps two thousand, years before the Christian era; but they were broken into many independent tribes; and their ships, if they had any, only crept from one harbor to another near by, and neither knew nor cared what lay beyond the farther headlands. As time went on, however, and strong kingdoms arose in Egypt, Arabia, Syria, and Persia, consolidating these scattered tribes into nations, it became necessary to learn the sea-routes between more distant ports. Thus it came about that while the Pharaohs still flourished, Arabic commerce extended regularly along the coast of Abyssinia, and doubtless as far southward as Zanzibar, while the Malays had probably already reached and colonized Madagascar. There seems no reason to doubt that those remarkable ruins in stone which the late Mr. Thomas Bent has studied at and near Zimbabwe, in Mashonaland, East Africa, are the work of Arabian gold-miners, made perhaps a thousand or more years ago; and it is pretty certain that Arabic seamen even at that date regularly traded as far as the island of Madagascar.

The Persian Gulf has been another nursery of a seafaring people since long before the record of history begins; yet so slow were they to learn of anything outside their capes, that it was accounted a wonderful thing when, in the winter of 325-4 B. C., Nearchus, the admiral of the fleet of Alexander the Great, voyaged from the mouth of the Indus to the head of the Persian Gulf. Soon afterward, however, under the house of the Ptolemies, rulers of Egypt, fleets sailed regularly between Red Sea ports and India and Ceylon.

But now for many long centuries the boundaries of the known world were not to be much enlarged (although methods of navigation were improved and commerce continued within the limits of Roman and Arabic dominion), for we know of the discovery of no new coasts until we begin to hear of the doings of an independent and far northern people, scarcely known to the civilized world, and certainly not regarded as a part of it.

On the bleak shores of the North Sea, where the fiords and creek-mouths of Scandinavia gave shelter not only from foreign enemies, but from each other, there had grown up a seafaring race of men, of Gothic ancestry, who had settled on the coasts of what are now Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. They styled themselves Norsemen, or men of the North, and did not object to the title Vikings, or Fiord-men; but their enemies called them pirates, and with much reason, for they ravaged and ruled all the coasts both north and south of the Baltic, voyaging northward to the “land of the midnight sun,” colonizing northern France in the tenth century, and taking practical possession of all they pleased of the British Isles—Ireland and northern Scotland in particular. Here these Norsemen met equally fierce foes, or found congenial partners, as the case might be, in the Scottish and Irish seamen of that day, who were themselves bold freebooters and wide voyagers; and when, in the middle of the ninth century, the Northmen had discovered, as they supposed, the Faroe Islands and Iceland, a little exploration soon showed them that the Irish culdees, or priests of the Christian church planted in Ireland by St. Patrick, had been there before them—first in 725, according to the Irish chronicles of Dicuilus, who seems worthy of credence. Indeed, it is believed by some antiquarians that these Irish sea-wanderers had colonized Iceland at the same early age; had reached Newfoundland, and regularly resorted to its banks for fishing and whaling (five hundred years before Cabot); and were even acquainted with the coast of the North American continent, where traditions assert that their colonies were planted on what are now the shores of Virginia and the Carolinas, which they called New Ireland.

These are entertaining old stories, and may have some truth in them, for it seems certain that the Irish reached Iceland, at least, in the eighth century. Icelandic history, however, begins with the visits of Norsemen in 850, followed by others, who, a few years later, took colonies there and set up an island population which before a century had elapsed numbered more than fifty thousand people. They had a republican form of government, and were quite independent of the King of Norway (Harold the Fair-haired, great-great-grandfather of William the Conqueror), from whom the earlier colonists had fled because of his oppression; but they kept up acquaintance with the mother-country, and merchants and adventurers were continually voyaging between Iceland and all the islands and coasts of that region, using stanch vessels sometimes one hundred feet in length, and eminently seaworthy; yet their only guides were the stars and such signs as seafaring men read in the water and weather about them.

A WAR EXPEDITION OF THE VIKINGS.
Showing build, steering-oar, and rig (colored lug-sail), of Scandinavian exploring ships in the North Atlantic.

It continually happened, however, that they were driven far out of their courses, in such a region of gales, currents, and fogs as is the North Atlantic. In one such adventure, in the year 876, a sea-captain named Gunnbjörn Ulfkragesson was driven far to the west of Iceland, and when he got back to port told his friends that he had seen land. Probably he also told them that so far as he could see there was nothing but icy mountains, of which they already had enough, for no one seems to have investigated the matter further until more than a century later, when a turbulent viking of the rebellious house of Erik, called Erik the Red, was banished from Norway and fled to Iceland with his followers. He was soon convicted there also of manslaughter in a neighborhood quarrel, and again condemned to banishment. Iceland wanted to get rid of him and his brawlers, and Europe would not let him return. Whither should he go?

Then his thoughts turned toward the strange land in the west that tradition said Gunnbjörn had sighted. It is believed by the most careful students that Gunnbjörn’s “rocks” were volcanic islets, which have now disappeared, and are represented only by certain shoals; but it would not be incredible that he had caught a glimpse of the Greenland coast itself.

At any rate, Erik had little hesitation in starting out to rediscover them. Why should he? Those rough-riders of the sea were used to voyages of equal length. It is about 200 miles from the Norwegian coast at Bergen to the Shetland Islands; 200 miles from the Shetlands, or 225 from the Hebrides, to the Faroes; and 275 miles thence to the nearest coast of Iceland,—reckoning all in straight lines, shorter than any ship could actually follow.

If his viking boat and viking crew could span those stretches of sea unguided, what hindered his crossing the little further space whose tempests had no terrors for this wild sea-king? In that unpossessed land, could he find it, he might be free to riot at his will (but one cannot help thinking there was more in the man than that!); and if he could open to his people a new country, what wealth and power might not come with it to him, for the humbling of his rivals at the court of Norway.

So Red Erik sailed away to the west in 984, and two years later returned to Iceland and reported that he had met first a far-extending icy coast, along whose front he had sailed southward until he could turn to the west and then northward, thus rounding its narrow southern extremity (Cape Farewell); and there he had found a habitable region, which he called Greenland, in order, as he said, to attract settlers by a pleasant name. Thus this wicked old Norseman was the first of American “real-estate boomers.”

Attracted by his story, a band of adventurers went back with him in 986, and established a settlement near the site of the present Danish town Julianshaab, just inside the cape, on an inlet that they named Eriksfiord.

Among these emigrants was one named Herjulf, whose son Bjarne[2] was a merchant captain who owned his own ship, and was then absent in Norway. Returning to Iceland shortly after Erik’s departure, he concluded at once to follow his father, and, with a willing crew and still loaded ship, set sail for the west. But incessant bad weather drove them they knew not whither during many days. At last the wind fell, the sun shone out, and they saw land; but its appearance did not agree with the description of Greenland, and knowing they were too far south, Bjarne turned north, and kept on, occasionally sighting the coast, until finally he reached Eriksfiord in safety. No one knows what headlands he looked upon; but if the Icelandic versified chronicles called sagas may be believed,—and the wisest students of history put faith in them,—he was the first European to see America of whom we have definite knowledge.

Several years passed by, however, before any one tried to profit by this accident and seek the lands that had been seen southward. Then Leif, the eldest son of old Red Erik, resolved to do so. He had talked with Bjarne and his men until he knew all the details of their story, and then he bought the same good old ship, and enlisted a crew of thirty-five men. This happened in Norway, where Leif then was, and it is said by some that the king aided and authorized the expedition. At any rate, after a public farewell they sailed away, and seem to have gone straight across the ocean; but whether they did this, or sailed by way of Iceland and Greenland, they easily found the unknown coasts Bjarne had described, and landed in Helluland, Markland, and Vinland, in the last of which they built huts and spent the winter of the year 1000.

The identification of these places has caused much discussion. That “Helluland” was Newfoundland and “Markland” Nova Scotia seems tolerably certain; but historians are not agreed as to where that winter was spent in “Vinland,” so called (meaning “Wineland”) because a German member of the crew gathered grapes there, from which wine could be made. When, in 1602, Gosnold discovered a fruitful island south of Cape Cod, he named it Martha’s Vineyard, believing that he had found the place.

When Leif reached Greenland again, the next spring, every one was vastly interested in his discoveries, and emigrants from Greenland, Iceland, and even from Europe went out to colonize the new lands; but the attempts, though spasmodically continued for a long time, seem never to have been really successful, so that no undisputed trace of the presence of these sea-wanderers on the mainland of North America is known to exist. That they knew the coast fairly well from Disco Island (70° N. lat.) southward to Virginia, is generally believed; but where Leif Erikson spent that first winter, or where the Vinland settlement of subsequent times was, is thus far a matter of conjecture. Some students of the sagas place it in New York harbor, others in Narragansett or Buzzard’s bay, near Boston, or in Nova Scotia. Formerly the general belief was that Newport, R. I., or the shore above there, was surely the site; but this was based, first, on the supposed European inscriptions on a rock in the Somerset River, at Dighton, just above Fall River, which were in reality only Indian markings; and, second, upon the “old round tower” at Newport, which few persons now believe was built prior to the coming of the English colonists with Roger Williams. The late Professor E. H. Horsford believed that he had found the site of the principal Norse settlement of the tenth century, called Norumbega, at Watertown, on the Charles River, a few miles west of Boston; and he made an argument from old maps, etc., to support his assertion that the ancient river-walls, etc., there were really the remains of a town; but historians generally do not attach any importance to Professor Horsford’s theory.

Perhaps we shall never know where this “Vinland” was that Leif discovered, and where the queenly Gudrid dwelt and her son Schnorr—the first white child in America—was born; nor is it of much consequence that we should, for the settlements were few and transitory. That they existed, however, and that the shores of Canada and New England were occasionally visited from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries by Norsemen, cannot be gainsaid. That the Greenlanders did not all migrate to the warmer, well-timbered, and fruitful region in the south was probably due to the fact that it was so remote from their kindred, and so open to attack by the native red men, whom they called skrellings.

A VIKING GALLEY.

Over the long but slow history of these American settlements of the Northmen we need not linger. Although Vinland seems to have been abandoned within a few decades, the Greenland settlements were maintained. A republican government was organized; Christianity was introduced, and remains of their stone churches and Augustinian monasteries have been identified. By the end of the fifteenth century, however, these colonies had completely disappeared, worn out in the hopeless struggle against climate and the savage Eskimos, but exterminated, at last, perhaps, by the Black Death—for the great plague which almost depopulated Europe in the fourteenth century seems to have reached even the desolate shores of Greenland, and to have consumed the last of these remote people, causing them to be utterly forgotten.

A more definite account of pre-Columbian North America than that of the sagas and other traditions of the Vinlanders, and one accepted as true by Mr. Major of the English Hakluyt Society and other competent geographical critics, is that of the voyages and reports of the brothers Nicolò and Antonio Zeno. These men belonged to a family distinguished in Venice; and toward the close of the fourteenth century they separately or together made many voyages in the North Atlantic, going far beyond any previous navigators of which they knew. They wrote letters home containing an account of these, but little publication was given to them, and they were forgotten until the revival of interest in geography following the early discoveries of Columbus. The documents possessed by the Zeno family were then made the basis of a pamphlet by a grand-nephew reciting what his ancestor had done, long before the time of Columbus. The most interesting thing in it is an account of how, about 1390, Nicolò Zeno fitted out a ship at the Faroes, went over to Greenland and there learned of an island which was called Estotiland, and which we know as Newfoundland. Not very far away to the southwest of it, he says, was the country of Drogeo, which fishermen whom he saw had visited. They claimed to have “discovered” none of these places, but spoke of them as formerly well known, although then little frequented by Europeans.

As to Drogeo,—which he speaks of as if it were the mainland,—that was still occasionally resorted to for fishing; and he relates the adventures of a white man who had been captured by the mainland savages a few years previously, and adopted by them on account of his knowledge of how to fish with a net, and to do other useful things. Such a course would be very characteristic of the aborigines of eastern North America, as we have since learned to know; and it is also natural that he should have been fought for by rival chiefs, as Zeno says happened to this man, who, by capture and exchange, or of his own motion, traveled about and saw much of the people of this “country” Drogeo. At any rate, the information given by Zeno tallies remarkably well with the truth about primitive North America and its inhabitants. “They have no kind of metal,” reported this wandering refugee, who finally drifted back to the coast, and was able to make his escape to a fishing-boat. Now the one really remarkable and distinctive fact about the North Americans was just this,—that with a considerable advance in other directions, they had never learned to fuse and forge or otherwise utilize iron or other metals, save a little metallic copper and silver in the Great Lakes region. But listen to the rest of his brief report:

They live by hunting, and carry lances of wood sharpened at the point. They have bows, the strings of which are made of beasts’ skins. They are very fierce, and have deadly fights amongst each other, and eat one another’s flesh [as was true, to a limited ceremonial extent, after battles]. They have chieftains and certain laws among themselves, but differing in the different tribes. The farther you go southwestward, however, the more refinement you meet with, because the climate is more temperate, and, accordingly, there [i. e., in Mexico] they have cities and temples dedicated to their idols, in which they sacrifice men and afterwards eat them. In those parts they have some knowledge of gold and silver.

Now, whether all this was the observation of a single rude sailor, or, as is more likely, summarizes what Zeno was able to learn from all sources at his command regarding the new western mainland and its people, it is correct and forcible. Had young Nicolò the editor, a century afterward, tried to invent something of the kind, he would surely have made his invention marvelous, for that was an age of fable and bombast. On the contrary, this is a simple and accurate statement of what we now know were the facts. Nor did he have any means of knowing anything more of the case than his family archives revealed, since he wrote and published this account of his uncle’s voyages only a few years after the first return of Columbus, and before any writer had visited the northern American coasts, or had learned the habits of the natives. I can but believe, therefore, that the report was made in good faith, and records simply what the Zeni did and saw and heard; and that these bold Venetian navigators knew more about North America, at least, before the end of the fourteenth century than Columbus had learned by the end of the fifteenth.

I have run ahead of my story, but I wanted to show how little impression these northern investigations and occupation of a new continent had made upon the Mediterranean “world,” which seems rarely to have heard of them, much less to have profited by the information, for more than four hundred years, in spite of the fact that there was constant communication between the Normans and British, at least, and the Mediterranean peoples.

Let us now go back to those southern countries and see what they had been doing toward maritime exploration during these thousand years and more when the Scandinavians were so busy in the north. It was principally perfecting the knowledge of the world their fathers knew. From the very first men had tried to make maps, and succeeded fairly well for small spaces; but to make a map of the whole world was a task that defied human knowledge for many centuries. After Aristotle’s time all men of education understood that the world was a sphere; and about 150 B. C. Hipparchus, borrowing an idea from the Babylonians, taught the Greeks that the way to place their towns and mountains and rivers and the outlines of the coast correctly upon a model of the world, was to determine their position by observations of the heavenly bodies. Thus the ideas of latitude and longitude originated. He could not apply his method practically very far, because there were few or no accurate astronomical observations away from a few cities in Egypt and Greece; but two hundred and fifty years later Ptolemy, a learned mathematician of Alexandria, gathered all the facts obtainable, and made an attempt which bore a rude resemblance to the truth and served as the best and almost the only account of the world for several hundred years. Ptolemy flourished about 150 A. D. His book describes Asia as far east as the Malayan peninsula, Africa south to Zanzibar and the Gulf of Guinea, and shows a knowledge of Europe as far north as the Shetland Islands (Ultima Thule) and Denmark; the original work seems to have contained no maps, but these were added to it about 500 A. D. by another mathematician named Agathodæmon. It is called the Almagest.

Nothing of value was added to this during the long stagnant period of the world called the middle ages, when the love of learning declined and men fell back into the old traditions, even to the extent of being taught by their priests that it was a sin to believe that the world was round. In those times the Arabs of Bagdad nourished knowledge more than any one else, but even they did little for geography. Finally the people of Europe began to wake up and look at things for themselves, instead of tamely accepting whatever the Pope of Rome or somebody else told them, and going and coming as he directed, regardless of whether it was for their interest to do so or not. One of the first and one of the most important influences of this revival in a desire for learning and the means for larger activity among men was the sudden extension of navigation; and this could not have come about, nor amounted to much, had the mariner’s compass not been invented.

“Off, thou Norseland Terror, clouding

Hellas with the jealous wraith

Which, the gods of old enshrouding,

Froze their hearts, the poet saith!”

Nothing is more obscure than the history of this instrument. The Chinese have certainly known, from a remote antiquity, that a magnetized needle, permitted to move freely, would turn north and south; but they seem to have profited as little by it as by so many other useful things that, long afterward, in the hands of the more energetic men of the West, contributed so largely to the progress of civilization. They were accustomed to poise a sliver of magnetized steel upon a bit of cork and set it afloat in a bowl of water. One end was marked, but this, with characteristic Chinese perversity, was the one pointing toward the south, not toward the north, as with us. This rude and simple arrangement is still in use among the Koreans—or was until recently. With such a contrivance and little, it any, knowledge of the variation of the needle, the Chinese of a thousand years ago made longer voyages than they have done in more modern times, trading not only with India, but sailing regularly as early at least as the ninth century to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.

There is no direct evidence, but it seems incontestable, that it was from these eastern mariners that the Arabs received the compass, and gradually brought it into use in their home waters, where it became well known to the crusaders and other sea-going travelers of the middle ages. Little reliance could be placed upon it, however, until the sixteenth century, when the need for something trustworthy for long voyages made men turn their attention to the study and betterment of it.

Toward the end of the fourteenth century, as I have said, Europe was beginning to recover from the terrible visitations of the plague, and to wake from its lethargy and to look abroad; and various influences were at work to promote exploration by sea and land—and what a grand field for study there was!

At this time nearly all the commerce of Europe, mainly in Italian hands, was with India and China. The overland route was long, perilous, and expensive, and that across the Arabian Gulf hardly less so. At best, such traffic was slow and limited, and the first need of the reviving world was the discovery of some straighter and quicker road to the East. In this quest Portugal came forward under the brilliant leadership of Dom Henrique (Prince Henry), styled “the Navigator,” who was the younger son of King João (or John) I, and half an Englishman, since his mother was Philippa of Lancaster. It was Prince Henry’s ambition to extend geographical discovery and improve seamanship, and he enlisted the help of the best navigators obtainable, regardless of nationality. In order to observe the heavens to better advantage, and also to study the tides and other nautical phenomena, he established an observatory on the bleak headland of Cape Sagres, where he willingly spent a large portion of his time for the sake of science. Navigation was sorely in need of such help. Except that they had rude compasses, of whose laws of variation, etc., they were ignorant, the seamen of that day were little, if any, better equipped than were those who sailed the “ships of Tarshish” a thousand years before that. Astronomers had supplied them with rough tables of the declination of the sun, pole-star, etc., by which, with the help of a cross-staff,—a simple instrument for ascertaining angles,—they might make a guess at the latitude. Longitude was found only by observations of eclipses of the moon, and noting the difference between the time when it was due at home, according to the almanac, and the local time of its actual coming; but at sea the “observations” were little better than guessing.

Chart-making was an important branch of study at Sagres. So few and rare were sea-maps then that one was never seen in England until 1489. To the collection of information in this direction, and the improvement of nautical methods, Prince Henry and his aids applied themselves most diligently; but he died before much had been accomplished. Nautical studies went on, however, under the next king, John II, for whom Martin of Bohemia, the foremost astronomer of his time, devised a form of the astrolabe for use on shipboard, increasing accuracy in finding latitude.

It was with no better instruments than these (and sand-glasses in place of chronometers) as guides over chartless and unsounded seas that the way was found to India and to America, and the globe was circumnavigated; and that the same thing might be done again is shown by the fact that only last year (1897) a vessel, which had barely escaped destruction in a storm and lost all her instruments in the mid-Pacific, was brought safely into San Francisco by observation of the stars and “dead-reckoning” alone.

But Prince Henry (for I have run ahead of my story again) was not content to study and teach on land alone. He was fired with the ardor of discovery and conquest likely to augment Portugal’s wealth and influence in the East. Expedition after expedition was sent southward, and in 1435 Henry’s ships finally passed Cape Bojador. Great was the wonder and rejoicing thereat, for it had always been taught by the monks that this cape was the end of the earth; but it was not until 1462 that the Cape Verd Islands and Sierra Leone were reached. Prince Henry had been dead since 1460, but the influence of his wise and untiring enthusiasm and work lived on, and inspired the king and people of Portugal to renewed efforts at solving that riddle of Africa that perhaps the Egyptian sphinx was meant to typify. By 1469 trade had been opened with the Gold Coast, and a few years later the mouth of the Congo was found.

These advances showed that there was nothing unnatural or fearful in the southern latitudes, as sailors had been taught to believe from time immemorial,—a superstitious dread which the old chart-makers long sustained by their habit of filling the empty sea-spaces on their maps with fearsome and wondrous monsters,—and therefore, in 1486, King John II sent Bartholomew Dias in two sail-boats—pinnaces of fifty tons each—with orders to go as far as he could; and this bold captain, passing the last known headland of the Guinea coast, sailed on and on, tracing the West African coast, and landing here and there to examine the swampy shores, to get fresh water, and to hoist the castellated banner of Portugal in token of possession before the wondering eyes of naked negroes. At length he was blown and buffeted for days and days in heavy storms, and at their close found himself far to the eastward of his former longitude, whereupon he fought his way on and sighted land which he rightly determined must be the southern extremity of Africa. This was in 1487. Returning to Lisbon toward Christmas of that year, he reported his experiences, and dwelling especially upon the rough time he had had in the south, proposed to style the point of the continent Cape of all the Storms; but King John, foreseeing great things to follow for his country, said, “No; we will call it the Cape of Good Hope”; and so it remains to this day—but all the storms remain about it, too!

PORTION OF A FIFTEENTH CENTURY SEA-CHART, BY TOSCANELLI.
Copied by permission of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., from Justin Winsor’s “Narrative and Critical History of America.”

Now for some years previous to this time the monarchs of western Europe were much exercised over rumors of the existence somewhere in the Orient of an all-powerful and generally marvelous potentate styled (by them) Prester John, and reputed to be a conqueror of Asiatic, or perhaps African, infidels who later had become cut off from Christendom. The whole affair was a myth, probably arising from an indistinct knowledge of Abyssinia, whose negus afterward borrowed the title; but before this was realized popes and various “Catholic majesties” had sent embassies in search of Prester John’s court, some of which incidentally gained valuable information. Among the latter was Pedro Covilho, an emissary of Portugal, who, having failed to find Prester John in western India or Persia, made his way back to Egypt and Abyssinia, whence he sent home in 1486 or 1487 a report of progress that told John II some surprising news of the advancement of the Arabs of that part of the world in the sciences, and especially in those belonging to geography and navigation.

Covilho’s messenger was a Portuguese Jew, Rabbi Joseph of Lamego, who carried voluminous letters, one of which showed that Arabic mariners were then familiar with the whole length of the east coast of Africa, including Madagascar, and were perfectly well aware where it terminated at the south, and that there was no obstacle to passing around to the western side of the continent; and just at this interesting juncture Dias came sailing back in his pinnace to say that it was all true, for he had seen it.

Thus the sea-road was open to India and Cathay, and Portugal was eager to take advantage of it. She was then one of the leading powers of Europe, and the foremost one in colonial and commercial enterprise, striving to wrest from Genoa and Venice the supremacy in trade that they had so long enjoyed. Nevertheless almost ten years elapsed before the next expedition was sent southward to confirm Portugal’s possessions, and establish commerce with the Orient. John II had died, and Emmanuel the Fortunate reigned in his stead—a reign that has been called the heroic period of the nation’s history; and it must not be forgotten that “Little Portugal” was then so mighty that a year or so previously (May 4, 1493) the Pope (Alexander VI) had issued a bull in which he had divided, with intended equality, all undiscovered parts of the earth between Spain and Portugal, the former being given everything to the west, while to Portugal were reserved all future rights east of a certain north-and-south line.

The line of separation designated was the meridian of no variation of the compass-needle. The existence of such a line had been discovered by the same Christopher Columbus who was to thrill the world a few years later; but he did not know, what only experience developed, that this meridian was changeable, swinging many degrees east and then returning west in the course of two or three centuries. At that time the line seemed fixed some three hundred miles west of the Azores, and philosophers accounted for it later by a theory that it lay in the middle of the Atlantic because there it was subject to an equality of attraction toward both continents which held it steady. This was not true, but it was better than the less learned but more popular explanation of the magnetism of the compass—namely, that it was “an effluvium from the root of the tail of the Little Bear.” A year later, however (June 7, 1494), the treaty of Tordesillas, between Spain and Portugal, declared that the line of demarcation should be the meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verd Islands, or as nearly as possible in the center of the Atlantic. The supposition that there might be valuable lands within, that is, east of, that limit, inspired several of Portugal’s subsequent searchers.

DRAWN BY HENRY B. SNELL.

“THE SEA-ROAD TO INDIA AND CATHAY.”

In 1497 King Emmanuel’s expedition was ready to sail—the largest and best equipped, probably, that had ever been sent out by any government, and its commander was Vasco da Gama, a young naval officer of renown. His fleet consisted of four vessels,—small caravels, of course, one of which was commanded by Dias,—and left the Tagus, after ceremonious farewells, in July. Da Gama stopped at various places, but reached and safely rounded the stormy cape in November. He had with him the information (and some say an Arabic map) sent home by Covilho, but his business was not to verify this, but to reach India and establish new Portuguese possessions. Why, then, did he not strike straight across from Cape Agulhas, as East Indiamen have done ever since? For the good reason that he had no guide, no means of finding his way across the southern ocean, where all the stars were strange; for sun observations for latitude were then unknown to European navigators, and rarely used on land. Instead of this, he was obliged to turn northward and skirt the coast for a thousand miles, stopping here and there, until he had passed far enough north of the equator to bring above the horizon the familiar home stars, for which he had “tables.”

At last, from the Arab port of Melindi, near Mombasa, he turned east and sailed straight away to India, where he anchored before Calicut, then the most important port of southern India, on May 20. Returning the next year with ships richly laden, he was received with public rejoicings and given high honors; and he greatly astonished his friends of the navy by telling them that the Arabs used the compass, sea-charts, quadrants, and “had divers maritime mysteries not short of the Portugals.”

Da Gama lived many years, and sailed often to India and China after that; but chiefly on political expeditions, in which he disgraced his otherwise great name by inexcusable rapine and cruelty.

Meanwhile some exploration had been done toward the far north, as we shall see in the next chapter; and so the fifteenth century ended, with Europe understood as far as Nova Zembla, Africa circumnavigated, and the coasts of India, Malaya, southern China, and the larger Malayan islands fairly familiar to geographers. This is much, and yet it leaves unmentioned the greatest fact of all—the work of that grand, sad character, Christopher Columbus, upon whose grave near Seville has been written:

HE GAVE A NEW WORLD TO SPAIN.

ENGRAVED BY E. H. DEL’ORME.

THE FLYING DUTCHMAN.

“There, beyond the Cape of Storms,

Where the breaker’s voice of thunder

Roars when ships are rent asunder,

Through a fog of ghostly forms

“Men catch glimpses of the sail,

Ages old, and rent and hoary,

Of that quaint old ship of story,

And cry, ‘Vanderdecken, hail!’”

THE ROCK IN THE SEA.

CHAPTER IV
(Continued)
EARLY VOYAGES AND EXPLORATIONS

PART II—FROM COLUMBUS TO COOK

Why to Spain? It is an “oft-told tale,” and the merest reminder is all that is needed here. Columbus was a young seafaring man, born at Genoa about 1434, and ambitious to become a master of his profession, and especially to acquire great wealth. He traveled to Venice, Barcelona, and other cities where learning was to be gained, and became thoroughly acquainted with all the astronomical and geographical science of the time, and especially proficient in the art of cartography. Attracted by the naval activity in Portugal under that indefatigable Prince Henry, Columbus went to Lisbon about 1454, and endeavored to find a leading place in the sea-work that country was doing. But Portugal’s eyes were so blinded by the glamour of Africa and the East Indies that she had no time to follow the gaze of this young and ardent Genoese captain whose eyes were turned steadily toward the west, where, more and more insistently, he urged that a sea-track, straight as a line of latitude marked on a globe, lay open to the Indies and the coasts of Cathay. To prove this true would be not only a glorious exploit for any man, but an achievement of untold advantage to the nation under whose flag he sailed.

PORTRAIT-STATUE OF COLUMBUS IN MADRID.

Just how this conviction arose in the mind of Columbus we do not know. It was probably first a purely scientific conclusion from the facts of astronomy and geography that he had learned, encouraged by romantic traditions of western “Isles of the Blest.” A few scientific men agreed with him, but the great influence of the Church of Rome condemned such notions as opposed to the Bible and revealed religion; and the mass of the people, ignorant and superstitious, looked upon them as foolish, and laughed at Columbus as a dreamer or worse. Between his danger of arrest and death as a heretic on the one hand, and imprisonment as a lunatic on the other, the man of science in those days had a hard time. Columbus therefore sought far and wide for evidence to support his theories and render them acceptable. How much he learned—what, in the way of facts, he actually knew—it is hard to say. Having fallen in love with a Portuguese lady of good family, he married and apparently settled in Portugal as his home, but continued his voyaging. He knew the Mediterranean from end to end. He made several voyages to the Guinea coast, and dwelt for a time at El Mina, then newly founded, satisfying himself of the foolishness of the common assertion that men could not live “under the equinoctial”—that is, near the equator. He went north to and beyond Iceland, and acquainted himself with those waters, and thus convinced himself that the ocean was everywhere navigable, and subject to uniform laws of tides, weather, etc. His mind was cleared more and more of the mists of fable and superstition, and all he learned brought into clearer view the truth of science as a guide. He devoted more and more attention to improving the means of finding the true position of a vessel at sea, and of keeping a true course by the compass, which he continually studied; and it was he who first discovered that some leagues west of the Azores lay the meridian of no variation—a meridian that has now moved eastward until it lies near London. Everywhere he interrogated explorers, discussed navigation with experienced captains, and sought the aid of new maps, improved instruments, and advancing knowledge; and yet mixed with all seem to have been a childlike vanity, credulity, and superstition, hard to reconcile with his courage and acumen.

How much actual evidence he had of the existence of lands below the Atlantic horizon unknown to his countrymen can never probably be satisfactorily answered. The latest critical biographer of Columbus, the great Spanish liberal statesman Emilio Castelar, considers that he was led to his discoveries by little, if anything, outside of pure reasoning upon the rotundity of the earth and other scientific data, and dismisses as fables or things unknown to Columbus all the Scandinavian discoveries of Greenland and the rest, and other stories of men who, it is said, had already seen the transatlantic world he sought. We are told that he learned of woods and canes like none that grew in Africa, of strange carvings, and even of the dead bodies of men, resembling those of the far East, being cast upon the shores of Africa and the islands near it, especially the Azores. It seems impossible that when he was in Iceland and the other northern regions, a man of his inquiring mind should not have learned something of Greenland and the continental shores beyond, especially when one remembers that for centuries previous Catholic missionaries had been reporting progress to Rome from that distant but real field of labor. It is quite likely that some knowledge of these facts, which must have been known to the professors of the universities of Pavia and Barcelona, where Columbus studied, and to other intelligent men of Italy and Spain with whom he came in contact, had caused Columbus to go to the north, for we know of no other errand. Perhaps he had heard of the Zeni.

Especially to be noted is the allegation that Columbus possessed information as to the experience of a Frenchman named Jean Cousin,—a Dieppe sea-captain, who, it is asserted, discovered South America and the Amazon River in 1488. This claim has been lately reviewed (“Fortnightly Review,” January, 1894) by Captain Gambier of the British navy, and he decides that it is good; and that it was because Cousin’s first mate was one of the Pinçons that that firm was willing to assist Columbus, as a good investment.

Whatever he knew or did not know, and whatever may have been the difficulties in his way, Columbus spent many weary years in fruitless efforts to interest some government in his schemes. How finally he won Spain to his support, secured the aid of the Pinçons, merchant princes of Palos, and sailed from that port on August 3, 1492,—and it was Friday!—are details that need not be repeated. Equally well remembered are the story of his daring onward voyage, and of the glorious outcome when, on October 12, land was seen,—a new world found.

Expedition after expedition followed one another from Spain to the newly found possessions, some conducted by the earlier companions of Columbus, and all filled with adventurers who cared for nothing but plunder. One of these, led by an officer named Ojeda, reached the coast of Guiana in 1499, and coasted along the north shore of South America as far, probably, as Maracaibo. This was the first of the Spanish expeditions actually to set foot upon the mainland; and it would not have been mentioned out of its place (since Cabot, as we shall presently see, had landed on the continent nearly two years before) but for the fact that one of its members was that Amerigo Vespucci whose fortune it was to have his name attached to the continent.

Amerigo Vespucci (or Vespusze, as Columbus spells it) was a Florentine engaged in the shipping business who was attracted to Spain by the maritime activity there, and became interested in equipping the second flotilla of Columbus and in other similar enterprises for the government. The wealth and influence thus gained and his general abilities led him to join that expedition of Ojeda in 1499, and during the next four years he made three other voyages to Brazil, in which the bay of Rio Janeiro was entered (New Year’s day, 1501), and an exploration southward extended probably as far as South Georgia (Islands). Upon his return from this last voyage, in 1505, he publicly asserted that he had visited, in 1497, the coast of what is now the southern United States. It has lately been shown by Spanish records, however, that at that date he was busy in the government dockyards in Spain; therefore his assertion was false. It served, however, to deceive a forgetful public, and to procure for its author the coveted glory of being the first “discoverer” of the “New World,” as he first called it (though there is no evidence that he understood it to be a continent), and hence the one entitled to give it his name.

This bold claim achieved its purpose. The oldest known map of the whole world, dated A. D. 1500, said to have been drawn by the great artist Leonardo da Vinci, from data furnished by Juan de la Cosa, and hence known to historians as the “De la Cosa Mappimundi” (it is preserved in Madrid), bears the name “America” across the new countries for the first known time; but Juan de la Cosa was with Ojeda and Vespucci on the expedition of 1499, and doubtless Vespucci managed the naming. In 1507, only a year after the death of Columbus, there appeared in France the “Cosmographie Introductio” of Waldseemüller (also called Hylacomylus), which was regarded as the most complete and authentic geography of its time; and here the name of America was boldly written across “a fourth part of the world, since Amerigo found it.” The name (a Latin derivative) was novel, easy to pronounce, no one knew or cared as to the right of it, and so it stood.

THE “SANTA MARIA”—THE FLAGSHIP OF COLUMBUS’ FLEET.