INTRODUCTION. DISCOVERY AND COLONIZATION OF NORTH AMERICA. § 1. THE DISCOVERY. The Northmen. The time when people from the civilized countries of the Old World first visited the shores of America is not positively known. Vague stories have been current of voyages to America made long ago by Phoenicians, by Irishmen, by Welshmen; some persons have thought that our western coast was visited by Chinese junks a thousand years before Columbus. It may perhaps have been so, but the evidence is very slender, and the stories have but little value. The case is quite different, however, when we come to the stories about the Northmen. The Northmen were people in whom Americans have much reason for feeling interested. They were one of the finest and strongest races of men ever known in the world, and they were the ancestors of most of us. They lived in the countries now known as Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, and the adjacent regions of northern Germany, and have been called by various names. Under the name of Angles, or English, they conquered and settled Britain in the fifth century; under the name of Danes, they partly conquered it again in the ninth. At the same time they conquered the northern part of Gaul, where they were known as Normans; and under this name they again invaded England in the eleventh century, and formed an aristocracy there, and placed their great leader, William the Conqueror, upon the throne which his descendant, Queen Victoria, occupies to-day. They were skilful and daring sailors. From the innumerable bays and fiords which indent the Scandinavian coasts, their bold sea-rovers, known 66 as Vikings, or men of the bay," sailed forth in their little ships, not much larger than modern yachts, but strongly and neatly built, and urged along partly by oars and partly by sails; and in such little craft they visited all the coasts of Europe, disputed with the Saracens the supremacy of the Mediterranean, and even ventured far out into the trackless ocean, without compass or aught save the stars for guides. Thus they settled in the Orkney and Shetland Islands, and thence, about the year 874, they made their way to Iceland, where they founded a thriving state. In 981 they discovered Greenland, and planted a colony there, which lasted about four hundred years, until it was swept away by the Black Death. In the year 1000 Leif Ericsson sailed southwesterly from Greenland and landed in a pleasant and well-wooded country, which he called Vinland because of its abundance of grapes. Other explorers followed him, of whom the most famous was Thorfinn Karlsefni. They had fights with the savage natives of Vinland, who, from the descriptions, are supposed to have been Eskimos. Trees are scarce in Greenland and Iceland, and voyages for timber seem to have been made from time to time to Vinland as late as the fourteenth century. But the Northmen had no idea that they had found a new world; they thought Greenland and Vinland were appendages of Europe; they had reached these places without crossing a wide ocean; and their voyages along these remote coasts attracted' no serious attention in Europe, though the Pope duly appointed a missionary bishop for Vinland. There are many reasons for supposing that Vinland may have been some part of the coast of New England, perhaps the region about Narragansett and Buzzard's bays; but it is possible that it may have lain as far north as Nova Scotia. It is not likely that the Northmen made any settlements in Vinland. Where they did settle, as in Greenland, they have left abundant remains of ruined houses and churches. No such vestiges have been found on the coasts of Nova Scotia or New England. The stone building at Newport, which has made so much talk, is undoubtedly a windmill built on the estate of Benedict Arnold, governor of Rhode Island, after the pattern of one with which he had been familiar |