The savage Indians ranged to the west of Hudson Bay, and southward between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific, to the northern part of Mexico. They lived by catching fish or game. They knew little or nothing of tilling the soil. They did not dwell in permanent villages, but roamed from place to place like Bedouin Arabs.
The barbarous Indians inhabited the country east of the Rocky Mountains. They did not depend wholly upon hunting or fishing, but knew how to upturn the soil slightly with rude tools, and raise squashes, beans, tomatoes, and, most important of all, Indian corn. They lived in villages, and made houses that would last several years. They had dogs of an inferior breed, but no other domestic animals. Some tribes were able to weave coarse cloth and make weapons of polished stones. They had strange social customs and singular religious beliefs. Fighting was their principal occupation.
The half-civilized Indians once lived in New Mexico and the adjoining region. They have had almost nothing to do with the history of the United States. They are the Pueblo Indians, so called from the pueblos or strongholds, dwellings which they built of stones or of sun-dried brick. Some of these strongholds, story above story, would accommodate at least three thousand inhabitants! They were built oftentimes in situations almost inaccessible, like eagles' nests on cliffs, apparently that they might be defended more easily against the attack of an enemy.
6. The Northmen and their Discoveries.—The real contact between the eastern and western halves of the world practically began in 1492, the year of the first great voyage of Columbus. Occasional visitors may have sailed before that date directly across the "Sea of Darkness" from the Old World to the New. The subject is shrouded for the most part in the mists of vague stories and obscure traditions.
It seems quite certain, however, that in the year 986 a daring Scandinavian navigator, Eric the Red, founded on the southwestern coast of Greenland a colony that lasted four or five hundred years. In the same year, as the Iceland Sagas (heroic legends) tell us, another Norse sailor, voyaging from Iceland to Greenland, was driven by storms far out towards the southwest, and was perhaps the first white man to behold the American coast.
Many interesting ruins of stone-built houses and of a church are still to be seen on that desolate Greenland shore. In those ages the Northmen, or Norsemen, as the people of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were called, were the most skillful sailors in the world. Eric the Red had several sons, bold sailors like their father. The oldest of these (whose statue stands on Commonwealth Avenue, Boston), Leif the Lucky, with thirty-five hardy men, sailed south from Greenland in the year 1000, to explore these lands that had been discovered fourteen years before. He landed at several points along the coast. In a place which he called "Vinland the Good" (land of vines), he found an abundance of luscious wild grapes. Just where this sturdy Norse sailor feasted on the grapes is, of course, uncertain, but good authorities are inclined to think it may have been not far from Plymouth, on the coast of Massachusetts Bay. He returned home in the spring. Two years later Leif's brother, Thorwald, came on a voyage of discovery, but was killed by the natives in the summer of 1004.
In the spring of the year 1007 an Icelandic chief, accompanied by his wife and a crew of one hundred and sixty men, in three vessels, came to this Vinland. He remained here three years, and had many dealings with the Indians.
The Norsemen went home and gave vivid and accurate descriptions of the land they visited. They described the Indians, the fish, the animals, and the plants, all of which are given in the Icelandic chronicles. No real relic, however, of these people has yet been found upon our own coast.
Columbus, who visited Iceland in the year 1477, may have had access to the Icelandic archives, and have learned of the discoveries of these rovers of the deep. But we have no evidence on that point. After the eleventh century America remained as much unknown as if the bold Northmen had never steered their dragon-prowed ships along our shores. The waves that incessantly rolled upon its sands or dashed against its rocks brought no vessel from the far-away lands of the East. Nearly five hundred years were to come and go before, in the fullness of time, the hour struck for the real and fruitful discovery of the New World. It was left for Columbus, the great Genoese navigator, to open wide its gates!
CHAPTER II.
COLUMBUS AND THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA.
7. Commercial Activity in the Fifteenth Century.—In southern Europe, the last half of the fifteenth century was a period of great commercial activity. Then, for the first time, many voyages of exploration were made in various directions, to find new riches, new markets, or new routes of travel and transportation. Merchants were turning their attention more and more to enterprises in far-off regions beyond the seas.
Venice and Genoa became rivals for the vast and valuable trade of India. With other Italian cities they grew rich and powerful. They kept great fleets of merchant vessels plying back and forth across the Mediterranean.
They sent out to India large quantities of copper, iron, pitch, wool, hides, and the like, and brought back cargoes of drugs, spices, silks, pearls, and other luxuries. But the path of this commerce between the Mediterranean and India required both ships and caravans; and whether by way of the Isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea, or by Damascus and the Persian Gulf, or by the Black Sea and the Caspian and thence across the eastern plains, the journey was long, tedious, costly; always hazardous, and often, by reason of the Turkish wars, positively dangerous.
And so it became important, especially for the merchants of Spain and Portugal, the would-be rivals of Venice and Genoa, to find a shorter and safer route. In many a country, people were asking, "Is there no easier way to get to India?"
In the attempts to solve this problem Portugal took the lead. Her sailors boldly ventured farther and farther down the coast of Africa until, about twenty years before Columbus discovered America, they crossed the equator. But it was not till five years after the memorable exploit of Columbus, that Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese captain, rounded the Cape of Good Hope and crossed the broad Indian Ocean to India. Two years later he returned home with his vessels full of rich merchandise from that country.
8. The Shape of the Earth—Spherical or Flat?—The learned men of that age, for the most part, believed the earth to be round like a ball. But the common people, and doubtless many of high rank, thought the land surface to be flat, with a flat ocean flowing around it on every side. Now if the earth were really a sphere, and no larger than was commonly supposed, it would seem that the easiest way to get to India, unless unforeseen obstacles intervened, would be to strike out to the west and sail straight across the "Sea of Darkness," as the sailors called the Atlantic. To embrace so startling a theory and deliberately to risk his life in testing its truth, required a man of keen sagacity, of lofty faith, of unbending resolution, and of the most heroic daring. Such a man was Christopher Columbus.
9. Columbus; his Early Life as a Sailor.—He was born at Genoa, in or about the year 1445. He was the son of a poor wool-comber, and while yet very young he helped in his father's daily toil. We find him a studious boy, early able to write a good hand and to draw maps and charts for mariners visiting his home. He loves the sea, listens eagerly to old sailors' "yarns," weaves their fancies and legends into his day-dreams, and is fired with ambition to go in search of strange lands. How shall he realize his visions? Who will believe in him?
At the age of fourteen he becomes a sailor. He sails