initial commit of ebook 4069HEADmain

1 files changed, 2512 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/4069.txt b/4069.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e4803de
--- /dev/null
+++ b/4069.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,2512 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle
+of Aboriginal Canada, by Stephen Leacock
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada
+
+Author: Stephen Leacock
+
+Editor: George M. Wrong
+        H. H. Langton
+
+Posting Date: June 13, 2009 [EBook #4069]
+Release Date: March, 2003
+First Posted: November 3, 2001
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DAWN OF CANADIAN HISTORY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Gardner Buchanan.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHRONICLES OF CANADA
+
+Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H. Langton
+
+In thirty-two volumes
+
+
+
+Part I
+
+The First European Visitors
+
+THE DAWN OF CANADIAN HISTORY
+
+A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada
+
+
+By
+
+STEPHEN LEACOCK
+
+
+TORONTO, 1915
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+   I  BEFORE THE DAWN
+  II  MAN IN AMERICA
+ III  THE ABORIGINES OF CANADA
+  IV  THE LEGEND OF THE NORSEMEN
+   V  THE BRISTOL VOYAGES
+  VI  FORERUNNERS OF JACQUES CARTIER
+      BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+BEFORE THE DAWN
+
+We always speak of Canada as a new country. In one sense, of course,
+this is true. The settlement of Europeans on Canadian soil dates back
+only three hundred years. Civilization in Canada is but a thing of
+yesterday, and its written history, when placed beside the long
+millenniums of the recorded annals of European and Eastern peoples,
+seems but a little span.
+
+But there is another sense in which the Dominion of Canada, or at least
+part of it, is perhaps the oldest country in the world. According to
+the Nebular Theory the whole of our planet was once a fiery molten mass
+gradually cooling and hardening itself into the globe we know. On its
+surface moved and swayed a liquid sea glowing with such a terrific heat
+that we can form no real idea of its intensity. As the mass cooled,
+vast layers of vapour, great beds of cloud, miles and miles in
+thickness, were formed and hung over the face of the globe, obscuring
+from its darkened surface the piercing beams of the sun. Slowly the
+earth cooled, until great masses of solid matter, rock as we call it,
+still penetrated with intense heat, rose to the surface of the boiling
+sea. Forces of inconceivable magnitude moved through the mass. The
+outer surface of the globe as it cooled ripped and shrivelled like a
+withering orange.  Great ridges, the mountain chains of to-day, were
+furrowed on its skin. Here in the darkness of the prehistoric night
+there arose as the oldest part of the surface of the earth the great
+rock bed that lies in a huge crescent round the shores of Hudson Bay,
+from Labrador to the unknown wilderness of the barren lands of the
+Coppermine basin touching the Arctic sea. The wanderer who stands
+to-day in the desolate country of James Bay or Ungava is among the
+oldest monuments of the world. The rugged rock which here and there
+breaks through the thin soil of the infertile north has lain on the
+spot from the very dawn of time. Millions of years have probably
+elapsed since the cooling of the outer crust of the globe produced the
+solid basis of our continents.
+
+The ancient formation which thus marks the beginnings of the solid
+surface of the globe is commonly called by geologists the Archaean
+rock, and the myriads of uncounted years during which it slowly took
+shape are called the Archaean age. But the word 'Archaean' itself tells
+us nothing, being merely a Greek term meaning 'very old.' This Archaean
+or original rock must necessarily have extended all over the surface of
+our sphere as it cooled from its molten form and contracted into the
+earth on which we live. But in most places this rock lies deep under
+the waters of the oceans, or buried below the heaped up strata of the
+formations which the hand of time piled thickly upon it. Only here and
+there can it still be seen as surface rock or as rock that lies but a
+little distance below the soil. In Canada, more than anywhere else in
+the world, is this Archaean formation seen. On a geological map it is
+marked as extending all round the basin of Hudson Bay, from Labrador to
+the shores of the Arctic. It covers the whole of the country which we
+call New Ontario, and also the upper part of the province of Quebec.
+Outside of this territory there was at the dawn of time no other 'land'
+where North America now is, except a long island of rock that marks the
+backbone of what are now the Selkirk Mountains and a long ridge that is
+now the mountain chain of the Alleghanies beside the Atlantic slope.
+
+Books on geology trace out for us the long successive periods during
+which the earth's surface was formed. Even in the Archaean age
+something in the form of life may have appeared. Perhaps vast masses of
+dank seaweed germinated as the earliest of plants in the steaming
+oceans. The water warred against the land, tearing and breaking at its
+rock formation and distributing it in new strata, each buried beneath
+the next and holding fast within it the fossilized remains that form
+the record of its history. Huge fern plants spread their giant fronds
+in the dank sunless atmospheres, to be buried later in vast beds of
+decaying vegetation that form the coal-fields of to-day.
+
+Animal life began first, like the plants, in the bosom of the ocean.
+From the slimy depths of the water life crawled hideous to the land.
+Great reptiles dragged their sluggish length through the tangled
+vegetation of the jungle of giant ferns.
+
+Through countless thousands of years, perhaps, this gradual process
+went on. Nature, shifting its huge scenery, depressed the ocean beds
+and piled up the dry land of the continents. In place of the vast
+'Continental Sea,' which once filled the interior of North America,
+there arose the great plateau or elevated plain that now runs from the
+Mackenzie basin to the Gulf of Mexico. Instead of the rushing waters of
+the inland sea, these waters have narrowed into great rivers--the
+Mackenzie, the Saskatchewan, the Mississippi--that swept the face of
+the plateau and wore down the surface of the rock and mountain slopes
+to spread their powdered fragments on the broad level soil of the
+prairies of the west. With each stage in the evolution of the land the
+forms of life appear to have reached a higher development. In place of
+the seaweed and the giant ferns of the dawn of time there arose the
+maples, the beeches, and other waving trees that we now see in the
+Canadian woods. The huge reptiles in the jungle of the Carboniferous
+era passed out of existence. In place of them came the birds, the
+mammals,--the varied types of animal life which we now know. Last in
+the scale of time and highest in point of evolution, there appeared man.
+
+We must not speak of the continents as having been made once and for
+all in their present form. No doubt in the countless centuries of
+geological evolution various parts of the earth were alternately raised
+and depressed. Great forests grew, and by some convulsion were buried
+beneath the ocean, covered deep as they lay there with a sediment of
+earth and rock, and at length raised again as the waters retreated. The
+coal-beds of Cape Breton are the remains of a forest buried beneath the
+sea. Below the soil of Alberta is a vast jungle of vegetation, a dense
+mass of giant fern trees. The Great Lakes were once part of a much
+vaster body of water, far greater in extent than they now are. The
+ancient shore-line of Lake Superior may be traced five hundred feet
+above its present level.
+
+In that early period the continents and islands which we now see wholly
+separated were joined together at various points. The British islands
+formed a connected part of Europe. The Thames and the Rhine were one
+and the same river, flowing towards the Arctic ocean over a plain that
+is now the shallow sunken bed of the North Sea. It is probable that
+during the last great age, the Quaternary, as geologists call it, the
+upheaval of what is now the region of Siberia and Alaska, made a
+continuous chain of land from Asia to America. As the land was
+depressed again it left behind it the islands in the Bering Sea, like
+stepping-stones from shore to shore. In the same way, there was perhaps
+a solid causeway of land from Canada to Europe reaching out across the
+Northern Atlantic. Baffin Island and other islands of the Canadian
+North Sea, the great sub-continent of Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe
+Islands, and the British Isles, all formed part of this continuous
+chain.
+
+As the last of the great changes, there came the Ice Age, which
+profoundly affected the climate and soil of Canada, and, when the ice
+retreated, left its surface much as we see it now. During this period
+the whole of Canada from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains lay buried
+under a vast sheet of ice. Heaped up in immense masses over the frozen
+surface of the Hudson Bay country, the ice, from its own dead weight,
+slid sidewise to the south. As it went it ground down the surface of
+the land into deep furrows and channels; it cut into the solid rock
+like a moving plough, and carried with it enormous masses of loose
+stone and boulders which it threw broadcast over the face of the
+country. These stones and boulders were thus carried forty and fifty,
+and in some cases many hundred miles before they were finally loosed
+and dropped from the sheet of moving ice. In Ontario and Quebec and New
+England great stones of the glacial drift are found which weigh from
+one thousand to seven thousand tons. They are deposited in some cases
+on what is now the summit of hills and mountains, showing how deep the
+sheet of ice must have been that could thus cover the entire surface of
+the country, burying alike the valleys and the hills. The mass of ice
+that moved slowly, century by century, across the face of Southern
+Canada to New England is estimated to have been in places a mile thick.
+The limit to which it was carried went far south of the boundaries of
+Canada. The path of the glacial drift is traced by geologists as far
+down the Atlantic coast as the present site of New York, and in the
+central plain of the continent it extended to what is now the state of
+Missouri.
+
+Facts seem to support the theory that before the Great Ice Age the
+climate of the northern part of Canada was very different from what it
+is now. It is very probable that a warm if not a torrid climate
+extended for hundreds of miles northward of the now habitable limits of
+the Dominion. The frozen islands of the Arctic seas were once the seat
+of luxurious vegetation and teemed with life. On Bathurst Island, which
+lies in the latitude of 76 degrees, and is thus six hundred miles north
+of the Arctic Circle, there have been found the bones of huge lizards
+that could only have lived in the jungles of an almost tropical climate.
+
+We cannot tell with any certainty just how and why these great changes
+came about. But geologists have connected them with the alternating
+rise and fall of the surface of the northern continent and its altitude
+at various times above the level of the sea. Thus it seems probable
+that the glacial period with the ice sheet of which we have spoken was
+brought about by a great elevation of the land, accompanied by a change
+to intense cold. This led to the formation of enormous masses of ice
+heaped up so high that they presently collapsed and moved of their own
+weight from the elevated land of the north where they had been formed.
+Later on, the northern continent subsided again and the ice sheet
+disappeared, but left behind it an entirely different level and a
+different climate from those of the earlier ages. The evidence of the
+later movements of the land surface, and its rise and fall after the
+close of the glacial epoch, may still easily be traced. At a certain
+time after the Ice Age, the surface sank so low that land which has
+since been lifted up again to a considerable height was once the beach
+of the ancient ocean. These beaches are readily distinguished by the
+great quantities of sea shells that lie about, often far distant from
+the present sea. Thus at Nachvak in Labrador there is a beach fifteen
+hundred feet above the ocean. Probably in this period after the Ice Age
+the shores of Eastern Canada had sunk so low that the St Lawrence was
+not a river at all, but a great gulf or arm of the sea. The ancient
+shore can still be traced beside the mountain at Montreal and on the
+hillsides round Lake Ontario. Later on again the land rose, the ocean
+retreated, and the rushing waters from the shrunken lakes made their
+own path to the sea. In their foaming course to the lower level they
+tore out the great gorge of Niagara, and tossed and buffeted themselves
+over the unyielding ledges of Lachine.
+
+Mighty forces such as these made and fashioned the continent on which
+we live.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+MAN IN AMERICA
+
+It was necessary to form some idea, if only in outline, of the
+magnitude and extent of the great geological changes of which we have
+just spoken, in order to judge properly the question of the antiquity
+and origin of man in America.
+
+When the Europeans came to this continent at the end of the fifteenth
+century they found it already inhabited by races of men very different
+from themselves. These people, whom they took to calling 'Indians,'
+were spread out, though very thinly, from one end of the continent to
+the other. Who were these nations, and how was their presence to be
+accounted for?
+
+To the first discoverers of America, or rather to the discoverers of
+the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Columbus and his successors),
+the origin of the Indians presented no difficulty. To them America was
+supposed to be simply an outlying part of Eastern Asia, which had been
+known by repute and by tradition for centuries past. Finding,
+therefore, the tropical islands of the Caribbean sea with a climate and
+plants and animals such as they imagined those of Asia and the Indian
+ocean to be, and inhabited by men of dusky colour and strange speech,
+they naturally thought the place to be part of Asia, or the Indies. The
+name 'Indians,' given to the aborigines of North America, records for
+us this historical misunderstanding.
+
+But a new view became necessary after Balboa had crossed the isthmus of
+Panama and looked out upon the endless waters of the Pacific, and after
+Magellan and his Spanish comrades had sailed round the foot of the
+continent, and then pressed on across the Pacific to the real Indies.
+It was now clear that America was a different region from Asia. Even
+then the old error died hard. Long after the Europeans realized that,
+at the south, America and Asia were separated by a great sea, they
+imagined that these continents were joined together at the north. The
+European ideas of distance and of the form of the globe were still
+confused and inexact. A party of early explorers in Virginia carried a
+letter of introduction with them from the King of England to the Khan
+of Tartary: they expected to find him at the head waters of the
+Chickahominy. Jacques Cartier, nearly half a century after Columbus,
+was expecting that the Gulf of St Lawrence would open out into a
+passage leading to China. But after the discovery of the North Pacific
+ocean and Bering Strait the idea that America was part of Asia, that
+the natives were 'Indians' in the old sense, was seen to be absurd. It
+was clear that America was, in a large sense, an island, an island cut
+off from every other continent. It then became necessary to find some
+explanation for the seemingly isolated position of a portion of mankind
+separated from their fellows by boundless oceans.
+
+The earlier theories were certainly naive enough. Since no known human
+agency could have transported the Indians across the Atlantic or the
+Pacific, their presence in America was accounted for by certain of the
+old writers as a particular work of the devil. Thus Cotton Mather, the
+famous Puritan clergyman of early New England, maintained in all
+seriousness that the devil had inveigled the Indians to America to get
+them 'beyond the tinkle of the gospel bells.' Others thought that they
+were a washed-up remnant of the great flood. Roger Williams, the
+founder of Rhode Island, wrote: 'From Adam and Noah that they spring,
+it is granted on all hands.' Even more fantastic views were advanced.
+As late as in 1828 a London clergyman wrote a book which he called 'A
+View of the American Indians,' which was intended to 'show them to be
+the descendants of the ten tribes of Israel.'
+
+Even when such ideas as these were set aside, historians endeavoured to
+find evidence, or at least probability, of a migration of the Indians
+from the known continents across one or the other of the oceans. It
+must be admitted that, even if we supposed the form and extent of the
+continents to have been always the same as they are now, such a
+migration would have been entirely possible. It is quite likely that
+under the influence of exceptional weather--winds blowing week after
+week from the same point of the compass--even a primitive craft of
+prehistoric times might have been driven across the Atlantic or the
+Pacific, and might have landed its occupants still alive and well on
+the shores of America. To prove this we need only remember that history
+records many such voyages. It has often happened that Japanese junks
+have been blown clear across the Pacific. In 1833 a ship of this sort
+was driven in a great storm from Japan to the shores of the Queen
+Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia. In the same way a
+fishing smack from Formosa, which lies off the east coast of China, was
+once carried in safety across the ocean to the Sandwich Islands.
+Similar long voyages have been made by the natives of the South Seas
+against their will, under the influence of strong and continuous winds,
+and in craft no better than their open canoes. Captain Beechey of the
+Royal Navy relates that in one of his voyages in the Pacific he picked
+up a canoe filled with natives from Tahiti who had been driven by a
+gale of westerly wind six hundred miles from their own island. It has
+happened, too, from time to time, since the discovery of America, that
+ships have been forcibly carried all the way across the Atlantic. A
+glance at the map of the world shows us that the eastern coast of
+Brazil juts out into the South Atlantic so far that it is only fifteen
+hundred miles distant from the similar projection of Africa towards the
+west. The direction of the trade winds in the South Atlantic is such
+that it has often been the practice of sailing vessels bound from
+England to South Africa to run clear across the ocean on a long stretch
+till within sight of the coast of Brazil before turning towards the
+Cape of Good Hope. All, however, that we can deduce from accidental
+voyages, like that of the Spaniard, Alvarez de Cabral, across the ocean
+is that even if there had been no other way for mankind to reach
+America they could have landed there by ship from the Old World. In
+such a case, of course, the coming of man to the American continent
+would have been an extremely recent event in the long history of the
+world. It could not have occurred until mankind had progressed far
+enough to make vessels, or at least boats of a simple kind.
+
+But there is evidence that man had appeared on the earth long before
+the shaping of the continents had taken place. Both in Europe and
+America the buried traces of primitive man are vast in antiquity, and
+carry us much further back in time than the final changes of earth and
+ocean which made the continents as they are; and, when we remember
+this, it is easy to see how mankind could have passed from Asia or
+Europe to America. The connection of the land surface of the globe was
+different in early times from what it is to-day. Even still, Siberia
+and Alaska are separated only by the narrow Bering Strait. From the
+shore of Asia the continent of North America is plainly visible; the
+islands which lie in and below the strait still look like
+stepping-stones from continent to continent. And, apart from this, it
+may well have been that farther south, where now is the Pacific ocean,
+there was formerly direct land connection between Southern Asia and
+South America. The continuous chain of islands that runs from the New
+Hebrides across the South Pacific to within two thousand four hundred
+miles of the coast of Chile is perhaps the remains of a sunken
+continent. In the most easterly of these, Easter Island, have been
+found ruined temples and remains of great earthworks on a scale so vast
+that to believe them the work of a small community of islanders is
+difficult. The fact that they bear some resemblance to the buildings
+and works of the ancient inhabitants of Chile and Peru has suggested
+that perhaps South America was once merely a part of a great Pacific
+continent. Or again, turning to the other side of the continent, it may
+be argued with some show of evidence that America and Africa were once
+connected by land, and that a sunken continent is to be traced between
+Brazil and the Guinea coast.
+
+Nevertheless, it appears to be impossible to say whether or not an
+early branch of the human race ever 'migrated' to America. Conceivably
+the race may have originated there. Some authorities suppose that the
+evolution of mankind occurred at the same time and in the same fashion
+in two or more distinct quarters of the globe. Others again think that
+mankind evolved and spread over the surface of the world just as did
+the various kinds of plants and animals. Of course, the higher
+endowment of men enabled them to move with greater ease from place to
+place than could beings of lesser faculties. Most writers of to-day,
+however, consider this unlikely, and think it more probable that man
+originated first in some one region, and spread from it throughout the
+earth. But where this region was, they cannot tell. We always think of
+the races of Europe as having come westward from some original home in
+Asia. This is, of course, perfectly true, since nearly all the peoples
+of Europe can be traced by descent from the original stock of the Aryan
+family, which certainly made such a migration. But we know also that
+races of men were dwelling in Europe ages before the Aryan migration.
+What particular part of the globe was the first home of mankind is a
+question on which we can only speculate.
+
+Of one thing we may be certain. If there was a migration, there must
+have been long ages of separation between mankind in America and
+mankind in the Old World; otherwise we should still find some trace of
+kinship in language which would join the natives of America to the
+great racial families of Europe, Asia, and Africa. But not the
+slightest vestige of such kinship has yet been found. Everybody knows
+in a general way how the prehistoric relationships among the peoples of
+Europe and Asia are still to be seen in the languages of to-day. The
+French and Italian languages are so alike that, if we did not know it
+already, we could easily guess for them a common origin. We speak of
+these languages, along with others, as Romance languages, to show that
+they are derived from Latin, in contrast with the closely related
+tongues of the English, Dutch, and German peoples, which came from
+another common stock, the Teutonic. But even the Teutonic and the
+Romance languages are not entirely different. The similarity in both
+groups of old root words, like the numbers from one to ten, point again
+to a common origin still more remote. In this way we may trace a whole
+family of languages, and with it a kinship of descent, from Hindustan
+to Ireland. Similarly, another great group of tongues--Arabic, Hebrew,
+etc.--shows a branch of the human family spread out from Palestine and
+Egypt to Morocco.
+
+Now when we come to inquire into the languages of the American Indians
+for evidence of their relationship to other peoples we are struck with
+this fact: we cannot connect the languages of America with those of any
+other part of the world. This is a very notable circumstance. The
+languages of Europe and Asia are, as it were, dovetailed together, and
+run far and wide into Africa. From Asia eastward, through the Malay
+tongues, a connection may be traced even with the speech of the Maori
+of New Zealand, and with that of the remotest islanders of the Pacific.
+But similar attempts to connect American languages with the outside
+world break down. There are found in North America, from the Arctic to
+Mexico, some fifty-five groups of languages still existing or recently
+extinct. Throughout these we may trace the same affinities and
+relationships that run through the languages of Europe and Asia. We can
+also easily connect the speech of the natives of North America with
+that of natives of Central and of South America. Even if we had not the
+similarities of physical appearance, of tribal customs, and of general
+manners to argue from, we should be able to say with certainty that the
+various families of American Indians all belonged to one race. The
+Eskimos of Northern Canada are not Indians, and are perhaps an
+exception; it is possible that a connection may be traced between them
+and the prehistoric cave-men of Northern Europe. But the Indians belong
+to one great race, and show no connection in language or customs with
+the outside world. They belong to the American continent, it has been
+said, as strictly as its opossums and its armadillos, its maize and its
+golden rod, or any other of its aboriginal animals and plants.
+
+But, here again, we must not conclude too much from the fact that the
+languages of America have no relation to those of Europe and Asia. This
+does not show that men originated separately on this continent. For
+even in Europe and Asia, where no one supposes that different races
+sprung from wholly separate beginnings, we find languages isolated in
+the same way. The speech of the Basques in the Pyrenees has nothing in
+common with the European families of languages.
+
+We may, however, regard the natives of America as an aboriginal race,
+if any portion of mankind can be viewed as such. So far as we know,
+they are not an offshoot, or a migration, from any people of what is
+called the Old World, although they are, like the people of the other
+continents, the descendants of a primitive human stock.
+
+We may turn to geology to find how long mankind has lived on this
+continent. In a number of places in North and South America are found
+traces of human beings and their work so old that in comparison the
+beginning of the world's written history becomes a thing of yesterday.
+Perhaps there were men in Canada long before the shores of its lakes
+had assumed their present form; long before nature had begun to hollow
+out the great gorge of the Niagara river or to lay down the outline of
+the present Lake Ontario. Let us look at some of the notable evidence
+in respect to the age of man in America. In Nicaragua, in Central
+America, the imprints of human feet have been found, deeply buried over
+twenty feet below the present surface of the soil, under repeated
+deposits of volcanic rock. These impressions must have been made in
+soft muddy soil which was then covered by some geological convulsion
+occurring long ages ago. Even more striking discoveries have been made
+along the Pacific coast of South America. Near the mouth of the
+Esmeraldas river in Ecuador, over a stretch of some sixty miles, the
+surface soil of the coast covers a bed of marine clay. This clay is
+about eight feet thick. Underneath it is a stratum of sand and loam
+such as might once have itself been surface soil. In this lower bed
+there are found rude implements of stone, ornaments made of gold, and
+bits of broken pottery. Again, if we turn to the northern part of the
+continent we find remains of the same kind, chipped implements of stone
+and broken fragments of quartz buried in the drift of the Mississippi
+and Missouri valleys. These have sometimes been found lying beside or
+under the bones of elephants and animals unknown in North America since
+the period of the Great Ice. Not many years ago, some men engaged in
+digging a well on a hillside that was once part of the beach of Lake
+Ontario, came across the remains of a primitive hearth buried under the
+accumulated soil. From its situation we can only conclude that the men
+who set together the stones of the hearth, and lighted on it their
+fires, did so when the vast wall of the northern glacier was only
+beginning to retreat, and long before the gorge of Niagara had begun to
+be furrowed out of the rock.
+
+Many things point to the conclusion that there were men in North and
+South America during the remote changes of the Great Ice Age. But how
+far the antiquity of man on this continent reaches back into the
+preceding ages we cannot say.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE ABORIGINES OF CANADA
+
+Of the uncounted centuries of the history of the red man in America
+before the coming of the Europeans we know very little indeed. Very few
+of the tribes possessed even a primitive art of writing. It is true
+that the Aztecs of Mexico, and the ancient Toltecs who preceded them,
+understood how to write in pictures, and that, by this means, they
+preserved some record of their rulers and of the great events of their
+past. The same is true of the Mayas of Central America, whose ruined
+temples are still to be traced in the tangled forests of Yucatan and
+Guatemala. The ancient Peruvians also had a system, not exactly of
+writing, but of record by means of QUIPUS or twisted woollen cords of
+different colours: it is through such records that we have some
+knowledge of Peruvian history during about a hundred years before the
+coming of the Spaniards, and some traditions reaching still further
+back. But nowhere was the art of writing sufficiently developed in
+America to give us a real history of the thoughts and deeds of its
+people before the arrival of Columbus.
+
+This is especially true of those families of the great red race which
+inhabited what is now Canada. They spent a primitive existence, living
+thinly scattered along the sea-coast, and in the forests and open
+glades of the district of the Great Lakes, or wandering over the
+prairies of the west. In hardly any case had they any settled abode or
+fixed dwelling-places. The Iroquois and some Algonquins built Long
+Houses of wood and made stockade forts of heavy timber. But not even
+these tribes, who represented the furthest advance towards civilization
+among the savages of North America, made settlements in the real sense.
+They knew nothing of the use of the metals. Such poor weapons and tools
+as they had were made of stone, of wood, and of bone. It is true that
+ages ago prehistoric men had dug out copper from the mines that lie
+beside Lake Superior, for the traces of their operations there are
+still found. But the art of working metals probably progressed but a
+little way and then was lost,--overwhelmed perhaps in some ancient
+savage conquest. The Indians found by Cartier and Champlain knew
+nothing of the melting of metals for the manufacture of tools. Nor had
+they anything but the most elementary form of agriculture. They planted
+corn in the openings of the forest, but they did not fell trees to make
+a clearing or plough the ground. The harvest provided by nature and the
+products of the chase were their sole sources of supply, and in their
+search for this food so casually offered they moved to and fro in the
+depths of the forest or roved endlessly upon the plains. One great
+advance, and only one, they had been led to make. The waterways of
+North America are nature's highway through the forest. The bark canoe
+in which the Indians floated over the surface of the Canadian lakes and
+rivers is a marvel of construction and wonderfully adapted to its
+purpose: This was their great invention. In nearly all other respects
+the Indians of Canada had not emerged even from savagery to that stage
+half way to civilization which is called barbarism.
+
+These Canadian aborigines seem to have been few in number. It is
+probable that, when the continent was discovered, Canada, from the
+Atlantic to the Pacific, contained about 220,000 natives--about half as
+many people as are now found in Toronto. They were divided into tribes
+or clans, among which we may distinguish certain family groups spread
+out over great areas.
+
+Most northerly of all was the great tribe of the Eskimos, who were
+found all the way from Greenland to Northern Siberia. The name Eskimo
+was not given by these people to themselves. It was used by the Abnaki
+Indians in describing to the whites the dwellers of the far north, and
+it means 'the people who eat raw meat.' The Eskimo called and still
+call themselves the Innuit, which means 'the people.'
+
+The exact relation of the Eskimo to the other races of the continent is
+hard to define. From the fact that the race was found on both sides of
+the Bering Sea, and that its members have dark hair and dark eyes, it
+was often argued that they were akin to the Mongolians of China. This
+theory, however, is now abandoned. The resemblance in height and colour
+is only superficial, and a more careful view of the physical make-up of
+the Eskimo shows him to resemble the other races of America far more
+closely than he resembles those of Asia. A distinguished American
+historian, John Fiske, believed that the Eskimos are the last remnants
+of the ancient cave-men who in the Stone Age inhabited all the northern
+parts of Europe. Fiske's theory is that at this remote period
+continuous land stretched by way of Iceland and Greenland from Europe
+to America, and that by this means the race of cave-men was able to
+extend itself all the way from Norway and Sweden to the northern coasts
+of America. In support of this view he points to the strangely
+ingenious and artistic drawings of the Eskimos. These drawings are made
+on ivory and bone, and are so like the ancient bone-pictures found
+among the relics of the cave-men of Europe that they can scarcely be
+distinguished.
+
+The theory is only a conjecture. It is certain that at one time the
+Eskimo race extended much farther south than it did when the white men
+came to America; in earlier days there were Eskimos far south of Hudson
+Bay, and perhaps even south of the Great Lakes.
+
+As a result of their situation the Eskimos led a very different life
+from that of the Indians to the south. They must rely on fishing and
+hunting for food. In that almost treeless north they had no wood to
+build boats or houses, and no vegetables or plants to supply them
+either with food or with the materials of industry. But the very rigour
+of their surroundings called forth in them a marvellous ingenuity. They
+made boats of seal skins stretched tight over walrus bones, and clothes
+of furs and of the skins and feathers of birds. They built winter
+houses with great blocks of snow put together in the form of a bowl
+turned upside down. They heated their houses by burning blubber or fat
+in dish-like lamps chipped out of stones. They had, of course, no
+written literature. They were, however, not devoid of art. They had
+legends and folk-songs, handed down from generation to generation with
+the utmost accuracy. In the long night of the Arctic winter they
+gathered in their huts to hear strange monotonous singing by their
+bards: a kind of low chanting, very strange to European ears, and
+intended to imitate the sounds of nature, the murmur of running waters
+and the sobbing of the sea. The Eskimos believed in spirits and
+monsters whom they must appease with gifts and incantations. They
+thought that after death the soul either goes below the earth to a
+place always warm and comfortable, or that it is taken up into the cold
+forbidding brightness of the polar sky. When the aurora borealis, or
+Northern Lights, streamed across the heavens, the Eskimos thought it
+the gleam of the souls of the dead visible in their new home.
+
+Farthest east of all the British North American Indians were the
+Beothuks. Their abode was chiefly Newfoundland, though they wandered
+also in the neighbourhood of the Strait of Belle Isle and along the
+north shore of the Gulf of St Lawrence. They were in the lowest stage
+of human existence and lived entirely by hunting and fishing. Unlike
+the Eskimos they had no dogs, and so stern were the conditions of their
+life that they maintained with difficulty the fight against the rigour
+of nature. The early explorers found them on the rocky coasts of Belle
+Isle, wild and half clad. They smeared their bodies with red ochre,
+bright in colour, and this earned for them the name of Red Indians.
+From the first, they had no friendly relations with the Europeans who
+came to their shores, but lived in a state of perpetual war with them.
+The Newfoundland fishermen and settlers hunted down the Red Indians as
+if they were wild beasts, and killed them at sight. Now and again, a
+few members of this unhappy race were carried home to England to be
+exhibited at country fairs before a crowd of grinning yokels who paid a
+penny apiece to look at the 'wild men.'
+
+Living on the mainland, next to the red men of Newfoundland lay the
+great race of the Algonquins, spread over a huge tract of country, from
+the Atlantic coast to the head of the Great Lakes, and even farther
+west. The Algonquins were divided into a great many tribes, some of
+whose names are still familiar among the Indians of to-day. The Micmacs
+of Nova Scotia, the Malecite of New Brunswick, the Naskapi of Quebec,
+the Chippewa of Ontario, and the Crees of the prairie, are of this
+stock. It is even held that the Algonquins are to be considered typical
+specimens of the American race. They were of fine stature, and in
+strength and muscular development were quite on a par with the races of
+the Old World. Their skin was copper-coloured, their lips and noses
+were thin, and their hair in nearly all cases was straight and black.
+When the Europeans first saw the Algonquins they had already made some
+advance towards industrial civilization. They built huts of woven
+boughs, and for defence sometimes surrounded a group of huts with a
+palisade of stakes set up on end. They had no agriculture in the true
+sense, but they cultivated Indian corn and pumpkins in the openings of
+the forests, and also the tobacco plant, with the virtues of which they
+were well acquainted. They made for themselves heavy and clumsy pottery
+and utensils of wood, they wove mats out of rushes for their houses,
+and they made clothes from the skin of the deer, and head-dresses from
+the bright feathers of birds. Of the metals they knew, at the time of
+the discovery of America, hardly anything. They made some use of
+copper, which they chipped and hammered into rude tools and weapons.
+But they knew nothing of melting the metals, and their arrow-heads and
+spear-points were made, for the most part, not of metals, but of stone.
+Like other Indians, they showed great ingenuity in fashioning bark
+canoes of wonderful lightness.
+
+We must remember, however, that with nearly all the aborigines of
+America, at least north of Mexico, the attempt to utilize the materials
+and forces supplied by nature had made only slight and painful
+progress. We are apt to think that it was the mere laziness of the
+Indians which prevented more rapid advance. It may be that we do not
+realize their difficulties. When the white men first came these rude
+peoples were so backward and so little trained in using their faculties
+that any advance towards art and industry was inevitably slow and
+difficult. This was also true, no doubt, of the peoples who, long
+centuries before, had been in the same degree of development in Europe,
+and had begun the intricate tasks which a growth towards civilization
+involved. The historian Robertson describes in a vivid passage the
+backward state of the savage tribes of America. 'The most simple
+operation,' he says, 'was to them an undertaking of immense difficulty
+and labour. To fell a tree with no other implements than hatchets of
+stone was employment for a month. ...Their operations in agriculture
+were equally slow and defective. In a country covered with woods of the
+hardest timber, the clearing of a small field destined for culture
+required the united efforts of a tribe, and was a work of much time and
+great toil.'
+
+The religion of the Algonquin Indians seems to have been a rude nature
+worship. The Sun, as the great giver of warmth and light, was the
+object of their adoration; to a lesser degree, they looked upon fire as
+a superhuman thing, worthy of worship. The four winds of heaven,
+bringing storm and rain from the unknown boundaries of the world, were
+regarded as spirits. Each Indian clan or section of a tribe chose for
+its special devotion an animal, the name of which became the
+distinctive symbol of the clan. This is what is meant by the 'totems'
+of the different branches of a tribe.
+
+The Algonquins knew nothing of the art of writing, beyond rude pictures
+scratched or painted on wood. The Algonquin tribes, as we have seen,
+roamed far to the west. One branch frequented the upper Saskatchewan
+river. Here the ashes of the prairie fires discoloured their moccasins
+and turned them black, and, in consequence, they were called the
+Blackfeet Indians. Even when they moved to other parts of the country,
+the name was still applied to them.
+
+Occupying the stretch of country to the south of the Algonquins was the
+famous race known as the Iroquoian Family. We generally read of the
+Hurons and the Iroquois as separate tribes. They really belonged,
+however, to one family, though during the period of Canadian history in
+which they were prominent they had become deadly enemies. When Cartier
+discovered the St Lawrence and made his way to the island of Montreal,
+Huron Indians inhabited all that part of the country. When Champlain
+came, two generations later, they had vanished from that region, but
+they still occupied a part of Ontario around Lake Simcoe and south and
+east of Georgian Bay. We always connect the name Iroquois with that
+part of the stock which included the allied Five Nations--the Mohawks,
+Onondagas, Senecas, Oneidas, and Cayugas,--and which occupied the
+country between the Hudson river and Lake Ontario. This proved to be
+the strongest strategical position in North America. It lies in the gap
+or break of the Alleghany ridge, the one place south of the St Lawrence
+where an easy and ready access is afforded from the sea-coast to the
+interior of the continent. Any one who casts a glance at the map of the
+present Eastern states will realize this, and will see why it is that
+New York, at the mouth of the Hudson, has become the greatest city of
+North America. Now, the same reason which has created New York gave to
+the position of the Five Nations its great importance in Canadian
+history. But in reality the racial stock of the Iroquois extended much
+farther than this, both west and south. It took in the well-known tribe
+of the Eries, and also the Indians of Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac.
+It included even the Tuscaroras of the Roanoke in North Carolina, who
+afterwards moved north and changed the five nations into six.
+
+The Iroquois were originally natives of the plain, connected very
+probably with the Dakotas of the west. But they moved eastwards from
+the Mississippi valley towards Niagara, conquering as they went. No
+other tribe could compare with them in either bravery or ferocity. They
+possessed in a high degree both the virtues and the vices of Indian
+character--the unflinching courage and the diabolical cruelty which
+have made the Indian an object of mingled admiration and contempt. In
+bodily strength and physical endurance they were unsurpassed. Even in
+modern days the enervating influence of civilization has not entirely
+removed the original vigour of the strain. During the American Civil
+War of fifty years ago the five companies of Iroquois Indians recruited
+in Canada and in the state of New York were superior in height and
+measurement to any other body of five hundred men in the northern
+armies.
+
+When the Iroquoian Family migrated, the Hurons settled in the western
+peninsula of Ontario. The name of Lake Huron still recalls their abode.
+But a part of the race kept moving eastward. Before the coming of the
+whites, they had fought their way almost to the sea. But they were able
+to hold their new settlements only by hard fighting. The great stockade
+which Cartier saw at Hochelaga, with its palisades and fighting
+platforms, bore witness to the ferocity of the struggle. At that place
+Cartier and his companions were entertained with gruesome tales of
+Indian fighting and of wholesale massacres. Seventy years later, in
+Champlain's time, the Hochelaga stockade had vanished, and the Hurons
+had been driven back into the interior. But for nearly two centuries
+after Champlain the Iroquois retained their hold on the territory from
+Lake Ontario to the Hudson. The conquests and wars of extermination of
+these savages, and the terror which they inspired, have been summed up
+by General Francis Walker in the saying: 'They were the scourge of God
+upon the aborigines of the continent.'
+
+The Iroquois were in some respects superior to most of the Indians of
+the continent. Though they had a limited agriculture, and though they
+made hardly any use of metals, they had advanced further in other
+directions than most savages. They built of logs, houses long enough to
+be divided into several compartments, with a family in each
+compartment. By setting a group of houses together, and surrounding
+them with a palisade of stakes and trees set on end, the settlement was
+turned into a kind of fort, and could bid defiance to the limited means
+of attack possessed by their enemies. Inside their houses they kept a
+good store of corn, pumpkins and dried meat, which belonged not to each
+man singly but to the whole group in common. This was the type of
+settlement seen at Quebec and at Hochelaga, and, later on, among the
+Five Nations. Indeed, the Five Nations gave to themselves the
+picturesque name of the Long House, for their confederation resembled,
+as it were, the long wooden houses that held the families together.
+
+All this shows that the superiority of the Iroquois over their enemies
+lay in organization. In this they were superior even to their kinsmen
+the Hurons. All Indian tribes kept women in a condition which we should
+think degrading. The Indian women were drudges; they carried the
+burdens, and did the rude manual toil of the tribe. Among the Iroquois,
+however, women were not wholly despised; sometimes, if of forceful
+character, they had great influence in the councils of the tribe. Among
+the Hurons, on the other hand, women were treated with contempt or
+brutal indifference. The Huron woman, worn out with arduous toil,
+rapidly lost the brightness of her youth. At an age when the women of a
+higher culture are still at the height of their charm and
+attractiveness the woman of the Hurons had degenerated into a
+shrivelled hag, horrible to the eye and often despicable in character.
+The inborn gentleness of womanhood had been driven from her breast by
+ill-treatment. Not even the cruelest of the warriors surpassed the
+unhallowed fiendishness of the withered squaw in preparing the torments
+of the stake and in shrieking her toothless exultation beside the
+torture fire.
+
+Where women are on such a footing as this it is always ill with the
+community at large. The Hurons were among the most despicable of the
+Indians in their manners. They were hideous gluttons, gorging
+themselves when occasion offered with the rapacity of vultures.
+Gambling and theft flourished among them. Except, indeed, for the
+tradition of courage in fight and of endurance under pain we can find
+scarcely anything in them to admire.
+
+North and west from the Algonquins and Huron-Iroquois were the family
+of tribes belonging to the Athapascan stock. The general names of
+Chipewyan and Tinne are also applied to the same great branch of the
+Indian race. In a variety of groups and tribes, the Athapascans spread
+out from the Arctic to Mexico. Their name has since become connected
+with the geography of Canada alone, but in reality a number of the
+tribes of the plains, like the well-known Apaches, as well as the Hupas
+of California and the Navahos, belong to the Athapascans. In Canada,
+the Athapascans roamed over the country that lay between Hudson Bay and
+the Rocky Mountains. They were found in the basin of the Mackenzie
+river towards the Arctic sea, and along the valley of the Fraser to the
+valley of the Chilcotin. Their language was broken into a great number
+of dialects which differed so widely that only the kindred groups could
+understand one another's speech. But the same general resemblance ran
+through the various branches of the Athapascans. They were a tall,
+strong race, great in endurance, during their prime, though they had
+little of the peculiar stamina that makes for long life and vigorous
+old age. Their descendants of to-day still show the same facial
+characteristics--the low forehead with prominent ridge bones, and the
+eyes set somewhat obliquely so as to suggest, though probably without
+reason, a kinship with Oriental peoples.
+
+The Athapascans stood low in the scale of civilization. Most of them
+lived in a prairie country where a luxuriant soil, not encumbered with
+trees, would have responded to the slightest labour. But the
+Athapascans, in Canada at least, knew nothing of agriculture. With
+alternations of starvation and rude plenty, they lived upon the unaided
+bounty of tribes of the far north, degraded by want and indolence, were
+often addicted to cannibalism.
+
+The Indians beyond the mountains, between the Rockies and the sea, were
+for the most part quite distinct from those of the plains. Some tribes
+of the Athapascans, as we have seen, penetrated into British Columbia,
+but the greater part of the natives in that region were of wholly
+different races. Of course, we know hardly anything of these Indians
+during the first two centuries of European settlement in America. Not
+until the eighteenth century, when Russian traders began to frequent
+the Pacific coast and the Spanish and English pushed their voyages into
+the North Pacific,--the Tlingit of the far north, the Salish,
+Tsimshian, Haida, Kwakiutl-Nootka and Kutenai. It is thought, however,
+that nearly all the Pacific Indians belong to one kindred stock. There
+are, it is true, many distinct languages between California and Alaska,
+but the physical appearance and characteristics of the natives show a
+similarity throughout.
+
+The total number of the original Indian population of the continent can
+be a matter of conjecture only. There is every reason, however, to
+think that it was far less than the absurdly exaggerated figures given
+by early European writers. Whenever the first explorers found a
+considerable body of savages they concluded that the people they saw
+were only a fraction of some large nation. The result was that the
+Spaniards estimated the inhabitants of Peru at thirty millions. Las
+Casas, the Spanish historian, said that Hispaniola, the present Hayti,
+had a population of three millions; a more exact estimate, made about
+twenty years after the discovery of the island, brought the population
+down to fourteen thousand! In the same way Montezuma was said to have
+commanded three million Mexican warriors--an obvious absurdity. The
+early Jesuits reckoned the numbers of the Iroquois at about a hundred
+thousand; in reality there seem to have been, in the days of Wolfe and
+Montcalm, about twelve thousand. At the opening of the twentieth
+century there were in America north of Mexico about 403,000 Indians, of
+whom 108,000 were in Canada. Some writers go so far as to say that the
+numbers of the natives were probably never much greater than they are
+to-day. But even if we accept the more general opinion that the Indian
+population has declined, there is no evidence to show that the
+population was ever more than a thin scattering of wanderers over the
+face of a vast country. Mooney estimates that at the coming of the
+white man there were only about 846,000 aborigines in the United
+States, 220,000 in British America, 72,000 in Alaska, and 10,000 in
+Greenland, a total native population of 1,148,000 from the Mississippi
+to the Atlantic.
+
+The limited means of support possessed by the natives, their primitive
+agriculture, their habitual disinclination to settled life and
+industry, their constant wars and the epidemic diseases which, even as
+early as the time of Jacques Cartier, worked havoc among them, must
+always have prevented the growth of a numerous population. The explorer
+might wander for days in the depths of the American forest without
+encountering any trace of human life. The continent was, in truth, one
+vast silence, broken only by the roar of the waterfall or the cry of
+the beasts and birds of the forest.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE LEGEND OF THE NORSEMEN
+
+There are many stories of the coming of white men to the coasts of
+America and of their settlements in America long before the voyage of
+Christopher Columbus. Even in the time of the Greeks and Romans there
+were traditions and legends of sailors who had gone out into the 'Sea
+of Darkness' beyond the Pillars of Hercules--the ancient name for the
+Strait of Gibraltar--and far to the west had found inhabited lands.
+Aristotle thought that there must be land out beyond the Atlantic, and
+Plato tells us that once upon a time a vast island lay off the coasts
+of Africa; he calls it Atlantis, and it was, he says, sunk below the
+sea by an earthquake. The Phoenicians were wonderful sailors; their
+ships had gone out of the Mediterranean into the other sea, and had
+reached the British Isles, and in all probability they sailed as far
+west as the Canaries. We find, indeed, in classical literature many
+references to supposed islands and countries out beyond the Atlantic.
+The ancients called these places the Islands of the Blessed and the
+Fortunate Isles. It is, perhaps, not unnatural that in the earlier
+writers the existence of these remote and mysterious regions should be
+linked with the ideas of the Elysian Fields and of the abodes of the
+dead. But the later writers, such as Pliny, and Strabo, the geographer,
+talked of them as actual places, and tried to estimate how many Roman
+miles they must be distant from the coast of Spain.
+
+There were similar legends among the Irish, legends preserved in
+written form at least five hundred years before Columbus. They recount
+wonderful voyages out into the Atlantic and the discovery of new land.
+But all these tales are mixed up with obvious fable, with accounts of
+places where there was never any illness or infirmity, and people lived
+for ever, and drank delicious wine and laughed all day, and we cannot
+certify to an atom of historic truth in them.
+
+Still more interesting, if only for curiosity's sake, are weird stories
+that have been unearthed among the early records of the Chinese. These
+are older than the Irish legends, and date back to about the sixth
+century. According to the Chinese story, a certain Hoei-Sin sailed out
+into the Pacific until he was four thousand miles east of Japan. There
+he found a new continent, which the Chinese records called Fusang,
+because of a certain tree--the fusang tree,--out of the fibres of which
+the inhabitants made, not only clothes, but paper, and even food. Here
+was truly a land of wonders. There were strange animals with branching
+horns on their heads, there were men who could not speak Chinese but
+barked like dogs, and other men with bodies painted in strange colours.
+Some people have endeavoured to prove by these legends that the Chinese
+must have landed in British Columbia, or have seen moose or reindeer,
+since extinct, in the country far to the north. But the whole account
+is so mixed up with the miraculous, and with descriptions of things
+which certainly never existed on the Pacific coast of America, that we
+can place no reliance whatever upon it.
+
+The only importance that we can attach to such traditions of the
+discovery of unknown lands and peoples on a new continent is their
+bearing as a whole, their accumulated effect, on the likelihood of such
+discovery before the time of Columbus. They at least make us ready to
+attach due weight to the circumstantial and credible records of the
+voyages of the Norsemen. These stand upon ground altogether different
+from that of the dim and confused traditions of the classical writers
+and of the Irish and Chinese legends. In fact, many scholars are now
+convinced that the eastern coast of Canada was known and visited by the
+Norsemen five hundred years before Columbus.
+
+From time immemorial the Norsemen were among the most daring and
+skilful mariners ever known. They built great wooden boats with tall,
+sweeping bows and sterns. These ships, though open and without decks,
+were yet stout and seaworthy. Their remains have been found, at times
+lying deeply buried under the sand and preserved almost intact. One
+such vessel, discovered on the shore of Denmark, measured 72 feet in
+length. Another Viking ship, which was dug up in Norway, and which is
+preserved in the museum at Christiania, was 78 feet long and 17 feet
+wide. One of the old Norse sagas, or stories, tells how King Olaf
+Tryggvesson built a ship, the keel of which, as it lay on the grass,
+was 74 ells long; in modern measure, it would be a vessel of about 942
+tons burden. Even if we make allowance for the exaggeration or
+ignorance of the writer of the saga, there is still a vast contrast
+between this vessel and the little ship Centurion in which Anson sailed
+round the world.
+
+It is needless, however, to prove that the Norsemen could have reached
+America in their ships. The voyages from Iceland to Greenland which we
+know they made continually for four hundred years were just as arduous
+as a further voyage from Greenland to the coast of Canada.
+
+The story of the Norsemen runs thus. Towards the end of the ninth
+century, or nearly two hundred years before the Norman conquest, there
+was a great exodus or outswarming of the Norsemen from their original
+home in Norway. A certain King Harold had succeeded in making himself
+supreme in Norway, and great numbers of the lesser chiefs or jarls
+preferred to seek new homes across the seas rather than submit to his
+rule. So they embarked with their seafaring followers--Vikings, as we
+still call them--often, indeed, with their wives and families, in great
+open ships, and sailed away, some to the coast of England, others to
+France, and others even to the Mediterranean, where they took service
+under the Byzantine emperors. But still others, loving the cold rough
+seas of the north, struck westward across the North Sea and beyond the
+coasts of Scotland till they reached Iceland. This was in the year 874.
+Here they made a settlement that presently grew to a population of
+fifty thousand people, having flocks and herds, solid houses of stone,
+and a fine trade in fish and oil with the countries of Northern Europe.
+These settlers in Iceland attained to a high standard of civilization.
+They had many books, and were fond of tales and stories, as are all
+these northern peoples who spend long winter evenings round the
+fireside. Some of the sagas, or stories, which they told were true
+accounts of the voyages and adventures of their forefathers; others
+were fanciful stories, like our modern romances, created by the
+imagination; others, again, were a mixture of the two. Thus it is
+sometimes hard to distinguish fact and fancy in these early tales of
+the Norsemen. We have, however, means of testing the stories. Among the
+books written in Iceland there was one called the 'National Name-Book,'
+in which all the names of the people were written down, with an account
+of their forefathers and of any notable things which they had done.
+
+It is from this book and from the old sagas that we learn how the
+Norsemen came to the coast of America. It seems that about 900 a
+certain man called Gunnbjorn was driven westward in a great storm and
+thrown on the rocky shore of an ice-bound country, where he spent the
+winter. Gunnbjorn reached home safely, and never tried again to find
+this new land; but, long after his death, the story that there was land
+farther west still lingered among the settlers in Iceland and the
+Orkneys, and in other homes of the Norsemen. Some time after
+Gunnbjorn's voyage it happened that a very bold and determined man
+called Eric the Red, who lived in the Orkneys, was made an outlaw for
+having killed several men in a quarrel. Eric fled westward over the
+seas about the year 980, and he came to a new country with great rocky
+bays and fjords as in Norway. There were no trees, but the slopes of
+the hillsides were bright with grass, so he called the country
+Greenland, as it is called to this day. Eric and his men lived in
+Greenland for three years, and the ruins of their rough stone houses
+are still to be seen, hard by one of the little Danish settlements of
+to-day. When Eric and his followers went back to Iceland they told of
+what they had seen, and soon he led a new expedition to Greenland. The
+adventurers went in twenty-five ships; more than half were lost on the
+way, but eleven ships landed safely and founded a colony in Greenland.
+Other settlers came, and this Greenland colony had at one time a
+population of about two thousand people. Its inhabitants embraced
+Christianity when their kinsfolk in other places did so, and the ruins
+of their stone churches still exist. The settlers raised cattle and
+sheep, and sent ox hides and seal skins and walrus ivory to Europe in
+trade for supplies. But as there was no timber in Greenland they could
+not build ships, and thus their communication with the outside world
+was more or less precarious. In spite of this, the colony lasted for
+about four hundred years. It seems to have come to an end at about the
+beginning of the fifteenth century. The scanty records of its history
+can be traced no later than the year 1409. What happened to terminate
+its existence is not known. Some writers, misled by the name
+'Greenland,' have thought that there must have been a change of climate
+by which the country lost its original warmth and verdure and turned
+into an arctic region. There is no ground for this belief. The name
+'Greenland' did not imply a country of trees and luxuriant vegetation,
+but only referred to the bright carpet of grass still seen in the short
+Greenland summer in the warmer hollows of the hillsides. It may have
+been that the settlement, never strong in numbers, was overwhelmed by
+the Eskimos, who are known to have often attacked the colony: very
+likely, too, it suffered from the great plague, the Black Death, that
+swept over all Europe in the fourteenth century. Whatever the cause,
+the colony came to an end, and centuries elapsed before Greenland was
+again known to Europe.
+
+This whole story of the Greenland settlement is historical fact which
+cannot be doubted. Partly by accident and partly by design, the
+Norsemen had been carried from Norway to the Orkneys and the Hebrides
+and Iceland, and from there to Greenland. This having happened, it was
+natural that their ships should go beyond Greenland itself. During the
+four hundred years in which the Norse ships went from Europe to
+Greenland, their navigators had neither chart nor compass, and they
+sailed huge open boats, carrying only a great square sail. It is
+evident that in stress of weather and in fog they must again and again
+have been driven past the foot of Greenland, and must have landed
+somewhere in what is now Labrador. It would be inconceivable that in
+four centuries of voyages this never happened. In most cases, no doubt,
+the storm-tossed and battered ships, like the fourteen vessels that
+Eric lost, were never heard of again. But in other cases survivors must
+have returned to Greenland or Iceland to tell of what they had seen.
+
+This is exactly what happened to a bold sailor called Bjarne, the son
+of Herjulf, a few years after the Greenland colony was founded. In 986
+he put out from Iceland to join his father, who was in Greenland, the
+purpose being that, after the good old Norse custom, they might drink
+their Christmas ale together. Neither Bjarne nor his men had ever
+sailed the Greenland sea before, but, like bold mariners, they relied
+upon their seafaring instinct to guide them to its coast. As Bjarne's
+ship was driven westward, great mists fell upon the face of the waters.
+There was neither sun nor stars, but day after day only the thick wet
+fog that clung to the cold surface of the heaving sea. To-day
+travellers even on a palatial steamship, who spend a few hours
+shuddering in the chill grey fog of the North Atlantic, chafing at
+delay, may form some idea of voyages such as that of Bjarne Herjulf and
+his men. These Vikings went on undaunted towards the west. At last,
+after many days, they saw land, but when they drew near they saw that
+it was not a rugged treeless region, such as they knew Greenland to be,
+but a country covered with forests, a country of low coasts rising
+inland to small hills, and with no mountains in sight. Accordingly,
+Bjarne said that this was not Greenland, and he would not stop, but
+turned the vessel to the north. After two days they sighted land again,
+still on the left side, and again it was flat and thick with trees. The
+sea had fallen calm, and Bjarne's men desired to land and see this new
+country, and take wood and water into the ship. But Bjarne would not.
+So they held on their course, and presently a wind from the south-west
+carried them onward for three days and three nights. Then again they
+saw land, but this time it was high and mountainous, with great shining
+caps of snow. And again Bjarne said, 'This is not the land I seek.'
+They did not go ashore, but sailing close to the coast they presently
+found that the land was an island. When they stood out to sea again,
+the south wind rose to a gale that swept them towards the north, with
+sail reefed down and with their ship leaping through the foaming
+surges. Three days and nights they ran before the gale. On the fourth
+day land rose before them, and this time it was Greenland. There Bjarne
+found his father, and there, when not at sea, he settled for the rest
+of his days.
+
+Such is the story of Bjarne Herjulf, as the Norsemen have it. To the
+unprejudiced mind there is every reason to believe that his voyage had
+carried him to America, to the coast of the Maritime Provinces, or of
+Newfoundland or Labrador. More than this one cannot say. True, it is
+hard to fit the 'two days' and the 'three days' of Bjarne's narrative
+into the sailing distances. But every one who has read any primitive
+literature, or even the Homeric poems, will remember how easily times
+and distances and numbers that are not exactly known are expressed in
+loose phrases not to be taken as literal.
+
+The news of Bjarne's voyage and of his discovery of land seems to have
+been carried presently to the Norsemen in Iceland and in Europe. In
+fact, Bjarne himself made a voyage to Norway, and, on account of what
+he had done, figured there as a person of some importance. But people
+blamed Bjarne because he had not landed on the new coasts, and had
+taken so little pains to find out more about the region of hills and
+forests which lay to the south and west of Greenland. Naturally others
+were tempted to follow the matter further. Among these was Leif, son of
+Eric the Red. Leif went to Greenland, found Bjarne, bought his ship,
+and manned it with a crew of thirty-five. Leif's father, Eric, now
+lived in Greenland, and Leif asked him to take command of the
+expedition. He thought, the saga says, that, since Eric had found
+Greenland, he would bring good luck to the new venture. For the time,
+Eric consented, but when all was ready, and he was riding down to the
+shore to embark, his horse stumbled and he fell from the saddle and
+hurt his foot. Eric took this as an omen of evil, and would not go; but
+Leif and his crew of thirty-five set sail towards the south-west. This
+was in the year 1000 A.D., or four hundred and ninety-two years before
+Columbus landed in the West Indies.
+
+Leif and his men sailed on, the saga tells us, till they came to the
+last land which Bjarne had discovered. Here they cast anchor, lowered a
+boat, and rowed ashore. They found no grass, but only a great field of
+snow stretching from the sea to the mountains farther inland; and these
+mountains, too, glistened with snow. It seemed to the Norsemen a
+forbidding place, and Leif christened it Helluland, or the country of
+slate or flat stones. They did not linger, but sailed away at once. The
+description of the snow-covered hills, the great slabs of stone, and
+the desolate aspect of the coast conveys at least a very strong
+probability that the land was Labrador.
+
+Leif and his men sailed away, and soon they discovered another land.
+The chronicle does not say how many days they were at sea, so that we
+cannot judge of the distance of this new country from the Land of
+Stones. But evidently it was entirely different in aspect, and was
+situated in a warmer climate. The coast was low, there were broad
+beaches of white sand, and behind the beaches rose thick forests
+spreading over the country. Again the Norsemen landed. Because of the
+trees, they gave to this place the name of Markland, or the Country of
+Forests. Some writers have thought that Markland must have been
+Newfoundland, but the description also suggests Cape Breton or Nova
+Scotia. The coast of Newfoundland is, indeed, for the most part, bold,
+rugged, and inhospitable.
+
+Leif put to sea once more. For two days the wind was from the
+north-east. Then again they reached land. This new region was the
+famous country which the Norsemen called Vineland, and of which every
+schoolboy has read. There has been so much dispute as to whether
+Vineland--this warm country where grapes grew wild--was Nova Scotia or
+New England, or some other region, that it is worth while to read the
+account of the Norse saga, literally translated:
+
+   They came to an island, which lay on the north side
+   of the land, where they disembarked to wait for good
+   weather. There was dew upon the grass; and having
+   accidentally got some of the dew upon their hands and
+   put it to their mouths, they thought that they had
+   never tasted anything so sweet. Then they went on
+   board and sailed into a sound that was between the
+   island and a point that went out northwards from the
+   land, and sailed westward past the point. There was
+   very shallow water and ebb tide, so that their ship
+   lay dry; and there was a long way between their ship
+   and the water. They were so desirous to get to the
+   land that they would not wait till their ship floated,
+   but ran to the land, to a place where a river comes
+   out of a lake. As soon as their ship was afloat they
+   took the boats, rowed to the ship, towed her up the
+   river, and from thence into the lake, where they cast
+   anchor, carried their beds out of the ship, and set
+   up their tents.
+
+   They resolved to put things in order for wintering
+   there, and they erected a large house. They did not
+   want for salmon, in both the river and the lake; and
+   they thought the salmon larger than any they had ever
+   seen before. The country appeared to them to be of so
+   good a kind that it would not be necessary to gather
+   fodder for the cattle for winter. There was no frost
+   in winter, and the grass was not much withered. Day
+   and night were more equal than in Greenland and
+   Iceland.
+
+The chronicle goes on to tell how Leif and his men spent the winter in
+this place. They explored the country round their encampment. They
+found beautiful trees, trees big enough for use in building houses,
+something vastly important to men from Greenland, where no trees grow.
+Delighted with this, Leif and his men cut down some trees and loaded
+their ship with the timber. One day a sailor, whose home had been in a
+'south country,' where he had seen wine made from grapes, and who was
+nicknamed the 'Turk,' found on the coast vines with grapes, growing
+wild. He brought his companions to the spot, and they gathered grapes
+sufficient to fill their ship's boat. It was on this account that Leif
+called the country 'Vineland.' They found patches of supposed corn
+which grew wild like the grapes and reseeded itself from year to year.
+It is striking that the Norse chronicle should name these simple
+things. Had it been a work of fancy, probably we should have heard, as
+in the Chinese legends, of strange demons and other amazing creatures.
+But we hear instead of the beautiful forest extending to the shore, the
+mountains in the background, the tangled vines, and the bright patches
+of wild grain of some kind ripening in the open glades-the very things
+which caught the eye of Cartier when, five centuries later, he first
+ascended the St Lawrence.
+
+Where Vineland was we cannot tell. If the men really found wild grapes,
+and not some kind of cranberry, Vineland must have been in the region
+where grapes will grow. The vine grows as far north as Prince Edward
+Island and Cape Breton, and, of course, is found in plenty on the
+coasts of Nova Scotia and New England. The chronicle says that the
+winter days were longer in Vineland than in Greenland, and names the
+exact length of the shortest day. Unfortunately, however, the Norsemen
+had no accurate system for measuring time; otherwise the length of the
+shortest winter day would enable us to know at what exact spot Leif's
+settlement was made.
+
+Leif and his men stayed in Vineland all winter, and sailed home to
+Greenland in the spring (1001 A.D.). As they brought timber, much
+prized in the Greenland settlement, their voyage caused a great deal of
+talk. Naturally others wished to rival Leif. In the next few years
+several voyages to Vineland are briefly chronicled in the sagas.
+
+First of all, Thorwald, Leif's brother, borrowed his ship, sailed away
+to Vineland with thirty men, and spent two winters there. During his
+first summer in Vineland, Thorwald sent some men in a boat westward
+along the coast. They found a beautiful country with thick woods
+reaching to the shore, and great stretches of white sand. They found a
+kind of barn made of wood, and were startled by this first indication
+of the presence of man. Thorwald had, indeed, startling adventures. In
+a great storm his ship was wrecked on the coast, and he and his men had
+to rebuild it. He selected for a settlement a point of land thickly
+covered with forest. Before the men had built their houses they fell in
+with some savages, whom they made prisoners. These savages had bows and
+arrows, and used what the Norsemen called 'skin boats.' One of the
+savages escaped and roused his tribe, and presently a great flock of
+canoes came out of a large bay, surrounded the Viking ship, and
+discharged a cloud of arrows. The Norsemen beat off the savages, but in
+the fight Thorwald received a mortal wound. As he lay dying he told his
+men to bury him there in Vineland, on the point where he had meant to
+build his home. This was done. Thorwald's men remained there for the
+winter. In the spring they returned to Greenland, with the sad news for
+Leif of his brother's death.
+
+Other voyages followed. A certain Thorfinn Karlsevne even tried to
+found a permanent colony in Vineland. In the spring of 1007, he took
+there a hundred and sixty men, some women, and many cattle. He and his
+people remained in Vineland for nearly four years. They traded with the
+savages, giving them cloth and trinkets for furs. Karlsevne's wife gave
+birth there to a son, who was christened Snorre, and who was perhaps
+the first white child born in America. The Vineland colony seems to
+have prospered well enough, but unfortunately quarrels broke out
+between the Norsemen and the savages, and so many of Karlsevne's people
+were killed that the remainder were glad to sail back to Greenland.
+
+The Norse chronicles contain a further story of how one of Karlsevne's
+companions, Thorward, and his wife Freydis, who was a daughter of Eric
+the Red, made a voyage to Vineland. This expedition ended in tragedy.
+One night the Norsemen quarrelled in their winter quarters, there was a
+tumult and a massacre. Freydis herself killed five women with an axe,
+and the little colony was drenched in blood. The survivors returned to
+Greenland, but were shunned by all from that hour.
+
+After this story we have no detailed accounts of voyages to Vineland.
+There are, however, references to it in Icelandic literature. There
+does not seem any ground to believe that the Norsemen succeeded in
+planting a lasting colony in Vineland. Some people have tried to claim
+that certain ancient ruins on the New England coast--an old stone mill
+at Newport, and so on--are evidences of such a settlement. But the
+claim has no sufficient proof behind it.
+
+On the whole, however, there seems every ground to conclude that again
+and again the Norsemen landed on the Atlantic coast of America. We do
+not know where they made their winter quarters, nor does this matter.
+Very likely there were temporary settlements in both 'Markland,' with
+its thick woods bordering on the sea, and in other less promising
+regions. It should be added that some writers of authority refuse even
+to admit that the Norsemen reached America. Others, like Nansen, the
+famous Arctic explorer, while admitting the probability of the voyages,
+believe that the sagas are merely a sort of folklore, such as may be
+found in the primitive literature of all nations. On the other hand,
+John Fiske, the American historian, who devoted much patient study to
+the question, was convinced that what is now the Canadian coast, with,
+probably, part of New England too, was discovered, visited, and
+thoroughly well known by the Norse inhabitants of Greenland. For
+several centuries they appear to have made summer voyages to and from
+this 'Vineland the Good' as they called it, and to have brought back
+timber and supplies not found in their own inhospitable country. It is
+quite possible that further investigation may throw new light on the
+Norse discoveries, and even that undeniable traces of the buildings or
+implements of the settlers in Vineland may be found. Meanwhile the
+subject, interesting though it is, remains shrouded in mystery.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE BRISTOL VOYAGES
+
+The discoveries of the Norsemen did not lead to the opening of America
+to the nations of Europe. For this the time was not yet ripe. As yet
+European nations were backward, not only in navigation, but in the
+industries and commerce which supply the real motive for occupying new
+lands. In the days of Eric the Red Europe was only beginning to emerge
+from a dark period. The might and splendour of the Roman Empire had
+vanished, and the great kingdoms which we know were still to rise.
+
+All this changed in the five hundred years between the foundation of
+the Greenland colony and the voyage of Christopher Columbus. The
+discovery of America took place as a direct result of the advancing
+civilization and growing power of Europe. The event itself was, in a
+sense, due to pure accident. Columbus was seeking Asia when he found
+himself among the tropical islands of the West Indies. In another
+sense, however, the discovery marks in world history a necessary stage,
+for which the preceding centuries had already made the preparation. The
+story of the voyages of Columbus forms no part of our present
+narrative. But we cannot understand the background that lies behind the
+history of Canada without knowing why such men as Christopher Columbus
+and Vasco da Gama and the Cabots began the work of discovery.
+
+First, we have to realize the peculiar relations between Europe,
+ancient and mediaeval, and the great empires of Eastern Asia. The two
+civilizations had never been in direct contact. Yet in a sense they
+were always connected. The Greeks and the Romans had at least vague
+reports of peoples who lived on the far eastern confines of the world,
+beyond even the conquests of Alexander the Great in Hindustan. It is
+certain, too, that Europe and Asia had always traded with one another
+in a strange and unconscious fashion. The spices and silks of the
+unknown East passed westward from trader to trader, from caravan to
+caravan, until they reached the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and, at
+last, the Mediterranean. The journey was so slow, so tedious, the goods
+passed from hand to hand so often, that when the Phoenician, Greek, or
+Roman merchants bought them their origin had been forgotten. For
+century after century this trade continued. When Rome fell, other
+peoples of the Mediterranean continued the Eastern trade. Genoa and
+Venice rose to greatness by this trade. As wealth and culture revived
+after the Gothic conquest which overthrew Rome, the beautiful silks and
+the rare spices of the East were more and more prized in a world of
+increasing luxury. The Crusades rediscovered Egypt, Syria, and the East
+for Europe. Gold and jewels, diamond-hilted swords of Damascus steel,
+carved ivory, and priceless gems,--all the treasures which the warriors
+of the Cross brought home, helped to impress on the mind of Europe the
+surpassing riches of the East.
+
+Gradually a new interest was added. As time went on doubts increased
+regarding the true shape of the earth. Early peoples had thought it a
+great flat expanse, with the blue sky propped over it like a dome or
+cover. This conception was giving way. The wise men who watched the sky
+at night, who saw the sweeping circles of the fixed stars and the
+wandering path of the strange luminous bodies called planets, began to
+suspect a mighty secret,--that the observing eye saw only half the
+heavens, and that the course of the stars and the earth itself rounded
+out was below the darkness of the horizon. From this theory that the
+earth was a great sphere floating in space followed the most
+enthralling conclusions. If the earth was really a globe, it might be
+possible to go round it and to reappear on the farther side of the
+horizon. Then the East might be reached, not only across the deserts of
+Persia and Tartary, but also by striking out into the boundless ocean
+that lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules. For such an attempt an almost
+superhuman courage was required. No man might say what awful seas, what
+engulfing gloom, might lie across the familiar waters which washed the
+shores of Europe. The most fearless who, at evening, upon the cliffs of
+Spain or Portugal, watched black night settle upon the far-spreading
+waters of the Atlantic, might well turn shuddering from any attempt to
+sail into those unknown wastes.
+
+It was the stern logic of events which compelled the enterprise.
+Barbarous Turks swept westward. Arabia, Syria, the Isles of Greece,
+and, at last, in 1453, Constantinople itself, fell into their hands.
+The Eastern Empire, the last survival of the Empire of the Romans,
+perished beneath the sword of Mahomet. Then the pathway by land to
+Asia, to the fabled empires of Cathay and Cipango, was blocked by the
+Turkish conquest. Commerce, however, remained alert and enterprising,
+and men's minds soon turned to the hopes of a western passage which
+should provide a new route to the Indies.
+
+All the world knows the story of Christopher Columbus, his long years
+of hardship and discouragement; the supreme conviction which sustained
+him in his adversity; the final triumph which crowned his efforts. It
+is no detraction from the glory of Columbus to say that he was only one
+of many eager spirits occupied with new problems of discovery across
+the sea. Not the least of these were John and Sebastian Cabot, father
+and son. John Cabot, like Columbus, was a Genoese by birth; a long
+residence in Venice, however, earned for him in 1476 the citizenship of
+that republic. Like many in his time, he seems to have been both a
+scientific geographer and a practical sea-captain. At one time he made
+charts and maps for his livelihood. Seized with the fever for
+discovery, he is said to have begged in vain from the sovereigns of
+Spain and Portugal for help in a voyage to the West. About the time of
+the great discovery of Columbus in 1492, John Cabot arrived in Bristol.
+It may be that he took part in some of the voyages of the Bristol
+merchants, before the achievements of Columbus began to startle the
+world.
+
+At the close of the fifteenth century the town of Bristol enjoyed a
+pre-eminence which it has since lost. It stood second only to London as
+a British port. A group of wealthy merchants carried on from Bristol a
+lively trade with Iceland and the northern ports of Europe. The town
+was the chief centre for an important trade in codfish. Days of fasting
+were generally observed at that time; on these the eating of meat was
+forbidden by the church, and fish was consequently in great demand. The
+merchants of Bristol were keen traders, and were always seeking the
+further extension of their trade. Christopher Columbus himself is said
+to have made a voyage for the Bristol merchants to Iceland in 1477.
+There is even a tale that, before Columbus was known to fame, an
+expedition was equipped there in 1480 to seek the 'fabulous islands' of
+the Western Sea. Certain it is that the Spanish ambassador in England,
+whose business it was to keep his royal master informed of all that was
+being done by his rivals, wrote home in 1498: 'It is seven years since
+those of Bristol used to send out, every year, a fleet of two, three,
+or four caravels to go and search for the Isle of Brazil and the Seven
+Cities, according to the fancy of the Genoese.'
+
+We can therefore realize that when Master John Cabot came among the
+merchants of this busy town with his plans he found a ready hearing.
+Cabot was soon brought to the notice of his august majesty Henry VII of
+England. The king had been shortsighted enough to reject overtures made
+to him by Bartholomew Columbus, brother of Christopher, and no doubt he
+regretted his mistake. Now he was eager enough to act as the patron of
+a new voyage. Accordingly, on March 5, 1496, he granted a royal licence
+in the form of what was called Letters Patent, authorizing John Cabot
+and his sons Lewis, Sebastian and Sancius to make a voyage of discovery
+in the name of the king of England. The Cabots were to sail 'with five
+ships or vessels of whatever burden or quality soever they be, and with
+as many marines or men as they will have with them in the said ships
+upon their own proper costs and charges.' It will be seen that Henry
+VII, the most parsimonious of kings, had no mind to pay the expense of
+the voyage. The expedition was 'to seek out, discover and find
+whatsoever islands, countries, regions and provinces of the heathens or
+infidels, in whatever part of the world they be, which before this time
+have been unknown to all Christians.' It was to sail only 'to the seas
+of the east and west and north,' for the king did not wish to lay any
+claim to the lands discovered by the Spaniards and Portuguese. The
+discoverers, however, were to raise the English flag over any new lands
+that they found, to conquer and possess them, and to acquire 'for us
+dominion, title, and jurisdiction over those towns, castles, islands,
+and mainlands so discovered.' One-fifth of the profits from the
+anticipated voyages to the new land was to fall to the king, but the
+Cabots were to have a monopoly of trade, and Bristol was to enjoy the
+right of being the sole port of entry for the ships engaged in this
+trade.
+
+Not until the next year, 1497, did John Cabot set out. Then he embarked
+from Bristol with a single ship, called in an old history the Matthew,
+and a crew of eighteen men. First, he sailed round the south of
+Ireland, and from there struck out westward into the unknown sea. The
+appliances of navigation were then very imperfect. Sailors could reckon
+the latitude by looking up at the North Star, and noting how high it
+was above the horizon. Since the North Star stands in the sky due
+north, and the axis on which the earth spins points always towards it,
+it will appear to an observer in the northern hemisphere to be as many
+degrees above the horizon as he himself is distant from the pole or top
+of the earth. The old navigators, therefore, could always tell how far
+north or south they were. Moreover, as long as the weather was clear
+they could, by this means, strike, at night at least, a course due east
+or west. But when the weather was not favourable for observations they
+had to rely on the compass alone. Now the compass in actual fact does
+not always and everywhere point due north. It is subject to variation,
+and in different times and places points either considerably east of
+north or west of it. In the path where Cabot sailed, the compass
+pointed west of north; and hence, though he thought he was sailing
+straight west from Ireland, he was really pursuing a curved path bent
+round a little towards the south. This fact will become of importance
+when we consider where it was that Cabot landed. For finding distance
+east and west the navigators of the fifteenth century had no such
+appliances as our modern chronometer and instruments of observation.
+They could tell how far they had sailed only by 'dead reckoning'; this
+means that if their ship was going at such and such a speed, it was
+supposed to have made such and such a distance in a given time. But
+when ships were being driven to and fro, and buffeted by adverse winds,
+this reckoning became extremely uncertain.
+
+John Cabot and his men mere tossed about considerably in their little
+ship. Though they seem to have set out early in May of 1497, it was not
+until June 24 that they sighted land. What the land was like, and what
+they thought of it, we know from letters written in England by various
+persons after their return. Thus we learn that it was a 'very good and
+temperate country,' and that 'Brazil wood and silks grow there.' 'The
+sea,' they reported, 'is covered with fishes, which are caught not only
+with the net, but with baskets, a stone being tied to them in order
+that the baskets may sink in the water.' Henceforth, it was said,
+England would have no more need to buy fish from Iceland, for the
+waters of the new land abounded in fish. Cabot and his men saw no
+savages, but they found proof that the land was inhabited. Here and
+there in the forest they saw trees which had been felled, and also
+snares of a rude kind set to catch game. They were enthusiastic over
+their success. They reported that the new land must certainly be
+connected with Cipango, from which all the spices and precious stones
+of the world originated. Only a scanty stock of provisions, they
+declared, prevented them from sailing along the coast as far as Cathay
+and Cipango. As it was they planted on the land a great cross with the
+flag of England and also the banner of St Mark, the patron saint of
+Cabot's city of Venice.
+
+The older histories used always to speak as if John Cabot had landed
+somewhere on the coast of Labrador, and had at best gone no farther
+south than Newfoundland. Even if this were the whole truth about the
+voyage, to Cabot and his men would belong the signal honour of having
+been the first Europeans, since the Norsemen, to set foot on the
+mainland of North America. Without doubt they were the first to unfurl
+the flag of England, and to erect the cross upon soil which afterwards
+became part of British North America. But this is not all. It is likely
+that Cabot reached a point far south of Labrador. His supposed sailing
+westward carried him in reality south of the latitude of Ireland. He
+makes no mention of the icebergs which any voyager must meet on the
+Labrador coast from June to August. His account of a temperate climate
+suitable for growing dye-wood, of forest trees, and of a country so
+fair that it seemed the gateway of the enchanted lands of the East, is
+quite unsuited to the bare and forbidding aspect of Labrador. Cape
+Breton island was probably the place of Cabot's landing. Its balmy
+summer climate, the abundant fish of its waters, fit in with Cabot's
+experiences. The evidence from maps, one of which was made by Cabot's
+son Sebastian, points also to Cape Breton as the first landing-place of
+English sailors in America.
+
+There is no doubt of the stir made by Cabot's discovery on his safe
+return to England. He was in London by August of 1497, and he became at
+once the object of eager curiosity and interest. 'He is styled the
+Great Admiral,' wrote a Venetian resident in London, 'and vast honour
+is paid to him. He dresses in silk, and the English run after him like
+mad people.' The sunlight of royal favour broke over him in a flood:
+even Henry VII proved generous. The royal accounts show that, on August
+10, 1497, the king gave ten pounds 'to him that found the new isle.' A
+few months later the king granted to his 'well-beloved John Cabot, of
+the parts of Venice, an annuity of twenty pounds sterling,' to be paid
+out of the customs of the port of Bristol. The king, too, was lavish in
+his promises of help for a new expedition. Henry's imagination had
+evidently been fired with the idea of an Oriental empire. A
+contemporary writer tells us that Cabot was to have ten armed ships. At
+Cabot's request, the king conceded to him all the prisoners needed to
+man this fleet, saving only persons condemned for high treason. It is
+one of the ironies of history that on the first pages of its annals the
+beautiful new world is offered to the criminals of Europe.
+
+During the winter that followed, John Cabot was the hero of the hour.
+Busy preparations went on for a new voyage. Letters patent were issued
+giving Cabot power to take any six ships that he liked from the ports
+of the kingdom, paying to their owners the same price only as if taken
+for the king's service. The 'Grand Admiral' became a person of high
+importance. On one friend he conferred the sovereignty of an island; to
+others he made lavish promises; certain poor friars who offered to
+embark on his coming voyage were to be bishops over the heathen of the
+new land. Even the merchants of London ventured to send out goods for
+trade, and brought to Cabot 'coarse cloth, caps, laces, points, and
+other trifles.'
+
+The second expedition sailed from the port of Bristol in May of 1498.
+John Cabot and his son Sebastian were in command; of the younger
+brothers we hear no more. But the high hopes of the voyagers were
+doomed to disappointment. On arriving at the coast of America Cabot's
+ships seem first to have turned towards the north. The fatal idea, that
+the empires of Asia might be reached through the northern seas already
+asserted its sway. The search for a north-west passage, that
+will-o'-the-wisp of three centuries, had already begun. Many years
+later Sebastian Cabot related to a friend at Seville some details
+regarding this unfortunate attempt of his father to reach the spice
+islands of the East. The fleet, he said, with its three hundred men,
+first directed its course so far to the north that, even in the month
+of July, monstrous heaps of ice were found floating on the sea. 'There
+was,' so Sebastian told his friend, 'in a manner, continual daylight.'
+The forbidding aspect of the coast, the bitter cold of the northern
+seas, and the boundless extent of the silent drifting ice, chilled the
+hopes of the explorers. They turned towards the south. Day after day,
+week after week, they skirted the coast of North America. If we may
+believe Sebastian's friend, they reached a point as far south as
+Gibraltar in Europe. No more was there ice. The cold of Labrador
+changed to soft breezes from the sanded coast of Carolina and from the
+mild waters of the Gulf Stream. But of the fabled empires of Cathay and
+Cipango, and the 'towns and castles' over which the Great Admiral was
+to have dominion, they saw no trace. Reluctantly the expedition turned
+again towards Europe, and with its turning ends our knowledge of what
+happened on the voyage.
+
+That the ships came home either as a fleet, or at least in part, we
+have certain proof. We know that John Cabot returned to Bristol, for
+the ancient accounts of the port show that he lived to draw at least
+one or two instalments of his pension. But the sunlight of royal favour
+no longer illumined his path. In the annals of English history the name
+of John Cabot is never found again.
+
+The son Sebastian survived to continue a life of maritime adventure, to
+be counted one of the great sea-captains of the day, and to enjoy an
+honourable old age. In the year 1512 we hear of him in the service of
+Ferdinand of Spain. He seems to have won great renown as a maker of
+maps and charts. He still cherished the idea of reaching Asia by way of
+the northern seas of America. A north-west expedition with Sebastian in
+command had been decided upon, it is said, by Ferdinand, when the death
+of that illustrious sovereign prevented the realization of the project.
+After Ferdinand's death, Cabot fell out with the grandees of the
+Spanish court, left Madrid, and returned for some time to England. Some
+have it that he made a new voyage in the service of Henry VIII, and
+sailed through Hudson Strait, but this is probably only a confused
+reminiscence, handed down by hearsay, of the earlier voyages. Cabot
+served Spain again under Charles V, and made a voyage to Brazil and the
+La Plata river. He reappears later in England, and was made Inspector
+of the King's Ships by Edward VI. He was a leading spirit of the
+Merchant Adventurers who, in Edward's reign, first opened up trade by
+sea with Russia.
+
+The voyages of the Bristol traders and the enterprise of England by no
+means ended with the exploits of the Cabots. Though our ordinary
+history books tell us nothing more of English voyages until we come to
+the days of the great Elizabethan navigators, Drake, Frobisher,
+Hawkins, and to the planting of Virginia, as a matter of fact many
+voyages were made under Henry VII and Henry VIII. Both sovereigns seem
+to have been anxious to continue the exploration of the western seas,
+but they had not the good fortune again to secure such master-pilots as
+John and Sebastian Cabot.
+
+In the first place, it seems that the fishermen of England, as well as
+those of the Breton coast, followed close in the track of the Cabots.
+As soon as the Atlantic passage to Newfoundland had been robbed of the
+terrors of the unknown, it was not regarded as difficult. With strong
+east winds a ship of the sixteenth century could make the run from
+Bristol or St Malo to the Grand Banks in less than twenty days. Once a
+ship was on the Banks, the fish were found in an abundance utterly
+unknown in European waters, and the ships usually returned home with
+great cargoes. During the early years of the sixteenth century English,
+French, and Portuguese fishermen went from Europe to the Banks in great
+numbers. They landed at various points in Newfoundland and Cape Breton,
+and became well acquainted with the outline of the coast. It was no
+surprise to Jacques Cartier, for instance, on his first voyage, to find
+a French fishing vessel lying off the north shore of the Gulf of St
+Lawrence. But these fishing crews thought nothing of exploration. The
+harvest of the sea was their sole care, and beyond landing to cure fish
+and to obtain wood and water they did nothing to claim or conquer the
+land.
+
+There were, however, efforts from time to time to follow up the
+discoveries of the Cabots. The merchants of Bristol do not seem to have
+been disappointed with the result of the Cabot enterprises, for as
+early as in 1501 they sent out a new expedition across the Atlantic.
+The sanction of the king was again invoked, and Henry VII granted
+letters patent to three men of Bristol--Richard Warde, Thomas
+Ashehurst, and John Thomas--to explore the western seas. These names
+have a homely English sound; but associated with them were three
+Portuguese--John Gonzales, and two men called Fernandez, all of the
+Azores, and probably of the class of master-pilots to which the Cabots
+and Columbus belonged. We know nothing of the results of the
+expedition, but it returned in safety in the same year, and the
+parsimonious king was moved to pay out five pounds from his treasury
+'to the men of Bristol that found the isle.'
+
+Francis Fernandez and John Gonzales remained in the English service and
+became subjects of King Henry. Again, in the summer of 1502, they were
+sent out on another voyage from Bristol. In September they brought
+their ships safely back, and, in proof of the strangeness of the new
+lands they carried home 'three men brought out of an Iland forre beyond
+Irelond, the which were clothed in Beestes Skynnes and ate raw fflesh
+and were rude in their demeanure as Beestes.' From this description
+(written in an old atlas of the time), it looks as if the Fernandez
+expedition had turned north from the Great Banks and visited the coast
+where the Eskimos were found, either in Labrador or Greenland. This
+time Henry VII gave Fernandez and Gonzales a pension of ten pounds
+each, and made them 'captains' of the New Found Land. A sum of twenty
+pounds was given to the merchants of Bristol who had accompanied them.
+We must remember that at this time the New Found Land was the general
+name used for all the northern coast of America.
+
+There is evidence that a further expedition went out from Bristol in
+1503, and still another in 1504. Fernandez and Gonzales, with two
+English associates, were again the leaders. They were to have a
+monopoly of trade for forty years, but were cautioned not to interfere
+with the territory of the king of Portugal. Of the fate of these
+enterprises nothing is known.
+
+By the time of Henry VIII, who began to reign in 1509, the annual
+fishing fleet of the English which sailed to the American coast had
+become important. As early as in 1522, a royal ship of war was sent to
+the mouth of the English Channel to protect the 'coming home of the New
+Found Island's fleet.' Henry VIII and his minister, Cardinal Wolsey,
+were evidently anxious to go on with the work of the previous reign,
+and especially to enlist the wealthy merchants and trade companies of
+London in the cause of western exploration. In 1521 the cardinal
+proposed to the Livery Companies of London--the name given to the trade
+organizations of the merchants--that they should send out five ships on
+a voyage into the New Found Land. When the merchants seemed disinclined
+to make such a venture, the king 'spake sharply to the Mayor to see it
+put in execution to the best of his power.' But, even with this
+stimulus, several years passed before a London expedition was sent out.
+At last, in 1527, two little ships called the Samson and the Mary of
+Guildford set out from London with instructions to find their way to
+Cathay and the Indies by means of the passage to the north. The two
+ships left London on May 10, put into Plymouth, and finally sailed
+therefrom on June 10, 1527. They followed Cabot's track, striking
+westward from the coast of Ireland. For three weeks they kept together,
+making good progress across the Atlantic. Then in a great storm that
+arose the Samson was lost with all on board.
+
+The Mary of Guildford pursued her way alone, and her crew had
+adventures strange even for those days. Her course, set well to the
+north, brought her into the drift ice and the giant icebergs which are
+carried down the coast of America at this season (for the month was
+July) from the polar seas. In fear of the moving ice, she turned to the
+south, the sailors watching eagerly for the land, and sounding as they
+went. Four days brought them to the coast of Labrador. They followed it
+southward for some days. Presently they entered an inlet where they
+found a good harbour, many small islands, and the mouth of a great
+river of fresh water. The region was a wilderness, its mountains and
+woods apparently untenanted by man. Near the shore they saw the
+footmarks of divers great beasts, but, though they explored the country
+for about thirty miles, they saw neither men nor animals. At the end of
+July, they set sail again, and passed down the coast of Newfoundland to
+the harbour of St John's, already a well-known rendezvous. Here they
+found fourteen ships of the fishing fleet, mostly vessels from
+Normandy. From Newfoundland the Mary of Guildford pursued her way
+southward, and passed along the Atlantic coast of America. If she had
+had any one on board capable of accurate observation, even after the
+fashion of the time, or of making maps, the record of her voyage would
+have added much to the general knowledge of the continent.
+Unfortunately, the Italian pilot who directed the voyage was killed in
+a skirmish with Indians during a temporary landing. Some have thought
+that this pilot who perished on the Mary of Guildford may have been the
+great navigator Verrazano, of whom we shall presently speak.
+
+The little vessel sailed down the coast to the islands of the West
+Indies. She reached Porto Rico in the middle of November, and from that
+island she made sail for the new Spanish settlements of San Domingo.
+Here, as she lay at her anchorage, the Mary of Guildford was fired upon
+by the Spanish fort which commanded the river mouth. At once she put
+out into the open sea, and, heading eastward across the Atlantic, she
+arrived safely at her port of London.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+FORERUNNERS OF JACQUES CARTIER
+
+We have seen that after the return of the second expedition of the
+Cabots no voyages to the coasts of Canada of first-rate importance were
+made by the English. This does not mean, however, that nothing was done
+by other peoples to discover and explore the northern coasts of
+America. The Portuguese were the first after the Cabots to continue the
+search along the Canadian coast for the secret of the hidden East. At
+this time, we must remember, the Portuguese were one of the leading
+nations of Europe, and they were specially interested in maritime
+enterprise. Thanks to Columbus, the Spaniards had, it is true, carried
+off the grand prize of discovery. But the Portuguese had rendered
+service not less useful. From their coasts, jutting far out into the
+Atlantic, they had sailed southward and eastward, and had added much to
+the knowledge of the globe. For generations, both before and after
+Columbus, the pilots and sailors of Portugal were among the most
+successful and daring in the world.
+
+For nearly a hundred years before the discovery of America the
+Portuguese had been endeavouring to find an ocean route to the spice
+islands of the East and to the great Oriental empires which, tradition
+said, lay far off on a distant ocean, and which Marco Polo and other
+travellers had reached by years of painful land travel across the
+interior of Asia. Prince Henry of Portugal was busy with these tasks at
+the middle of the fifteenth century. Even before this, Portuguese
+sailors had found their way to the Madeiras and the Canary Islands, and
+to the Azores, which lie a thousand miles out in the Atlantic. But
+under the lead of Prince Henry they began to grope their way down the
+coast of Africa, braving the torrid heats and awful calms of that
+equatorial region, where the blazing sun, poised overhead in a
+cloudless sky, was reflected on the bosom of a stagnant and glistening
+ocean. It was their constant hope that at some point the land would be
+found to roll back and disclose an ocean pathway round Africa to the
+East, the goal of their desire. Year after year they advanced farther,
+until at last they achieved a momentous result. In 1487, Bartholomew
+Diaz sailed round the southern point of Africa, which received the
+significant name of the 'Cape of Good Hope,' and entered the Indian
+Ocean. Henceforth a water pathway to the Far East was possible.
+Following Diaz, Vasco da Gama, leaving Lisbon in 1497, sailed round the
+south of Africa, and, reaching the ports of Hindustan, made the
+maritime route to India a definite reality.
+
+Thus at the moment when the Spaniards were taking possession of the
+western world the Portuguese were establishing their trade in the
+rediscovered East. The two nations agreed to divide between them these
+worlds of the East and the West. They invoked the friendly offices of
+the Pope as mediator, and, henceforth, an imaginary line drawn down the
+Atlantic divided the realms. At first this arrangement seemed to give
+Spain all the new regions in America, but the line of division was set
+so far to the West that the discovery of Brazil, which juts out
+eastward into the Atlantic, gave the Portuguese a vast territory in
+South America. At the time of which we are now speaking, however, the
+Portuguese were intent upon their interests in the Orient. Their great
+aim was to pass beyond India, already reached by da Gama, to the
+further empires of China and Japan. Like other navigators of the time,
+they thought that these places might be reached not merely by southern
+but also by the northern seas. Hence it came about that the Portuguese,
+going far southward in Africa, went also far northward in America and
+sailed along the coast of Canada.
+
+We find, in consequence, that when King Manoel of Portugal was fitting
+out a fleet of twenty ships for a new expedition under da Gama, which
+was to sail to the Indies by way of Africa, another Portuguese
+expedition, setting out with the same object, was sailing in the
+opposite direction. At its head was Gaspar Corte-Real, a nobleman of
+the Azores, who had followed with eager interest the discoveries of
+Columbus, Diaz, and da Gama. Corte-Real sailed from Lisbon in the
+summer of 1500 with a single ship. He touched at the Azores. It is
+possible that a second vessel joined him there, but this is not clear.
+From the Azores his path lay north and west, till presently he reached
+a land described as a 'cool region with great woods.' Corte-Real called
+it from its verdure 'the Green Land,' but the similarity of name with
+the place that we call Greenland is only an accident. In reality the
+Portuguese captain was on the coast of Newfoundland. He saw a number of
+natives. They appeared to the Portuguese a barbarous people, who
+dressed in skins, and lived in caves. They used bows and arrows, and
+had wooden spears, the points of which they hardened with fire.
+
+Corte-Real directed his course northward, until he found himself off
+the coast of Greenland. He sailed for some distance along those rugged
+and forbidding shores, a land of desolation, with jagged mountains and
+furrowed cliffs, wrapped in snow and ice. No trace of the lost
+civilization of the Norsemen met his eyes. The Portuguese pilot
+considered Greenland at its southern point to be an outstanding
+promontory of Asia, and he struggled hard to pass beyond it westward to
+a more favoured region. But his path was blocked by 'enormous masses of
+frozen snow floating on the sea, and moving under the influence of the
+waves.' It is clear that he was met not merely by the field ice of the
+Arctic ocean, but also by great icebergs moving slowly with the polar
+current. The narrative tells how Corte-Real's crew obtained fresh water
+from the icebergs. 'Owing to the heat of the sun, fresh and clear water
+is melted on the summits, and, descending by small channels formed by
+the water itself, it eats away the base where it falls. The boats were
+sent in, and in that way as much was taken as was needed.'
+
+Corte-Real made his way as far as a place (which was in latitude 60
+degrees) where the sea about him seemed a flowing stream of snow, and
+so he called it Rio Nevado, 'the river of snow.' Probably it was Hudson
+Strait.
+
+Late in the same season, Corte-Real was back in Lisbon. He had
+discovered nothing of immediate profit to the crown of Portugal, but
+his survey of the coast of North America from Newfoundland to Hudson
+Strait seems to have strengthened the belief that the best route to
+India lay in this direction. In any case, on May 15, 1501, he was sent
+out again with three ships. This time the Portuguese discovered a
+region, so they said, which no one had before visited. The description
+indicates that they were on the coast of Nova Scotia and the adjacent
+part of New England. The land was wooded with fine straight timber, fit
+for the masts of ships, and 'when they landed they found delicious
+fruits of various kinds, and trees and pines of marvellous height and
+thickness.' They saw many natives, occupied in hunting and fishing.
+Following the custom of the time, they seized fifty or sixty natives,
+and crowded these unhappy captives into the holds of their ships, to
+carry home as evidence of the reality of their discoveries, and to be
+sold as slaves. These savages are described by those who saw them in
+Portugal as of shapely form and gentle manner, though uncouth and even
+dirty in person. They wore otter skins, and their faces were marked
+with lines. The description would answer to any of the Algonquin tribes
+of the eastern coast. Among the natives seen on the coast there was a
+boy who had in his ears two silver rings of Venetian make. The
+circumstance led the Portuguese to suppose that they were on the coast
+of Asia, and that a European ship had recently visited the same spot.
+The true explanation, if the circumstance is correctly reported, would
+seem to be that the rings were relics of Cabot's voyages and of his
+trade in the trinkets supplied by the merchants.
+
+Gaspar Corte-Real sent his consort ships home, promising to explore the
+coast further, and to return later in the season. The vessels duly
+reached Lisbon, bringing their captives and the news of the voyage.
+Corte-Real, however, never returned, nor is anything known of his fate.
+
+When a year had passed with no news of Gaspar Corte-Real, his brother
+Miguel fitted out a new expedition of three ships and sailed westward
+in search of him. On reaching the coast of Newfoundland, the ships of
+Miguel Corte-Real separated in order to make a diligent search in all
+directions for the missing Gaspar. They followed the deep indentations
+of the island, noting its outstanding features. Here and there they
+fell in with the natives and traded with them, but they found nothing
+of value. To make matters worse, when the time came to assemble, as
+agreed, in the harbour of St John's, only two ships arrived at the
+rendezvous. That of Miguel was missing. After waiting some time the
+other vessels returned without him to Portugal.
+
+Two Corte-Reals were now lost. King Manoel transferred the rights of
+Gaspar and Miguel to another brother, and in the ensuing years sent out
+several Portuguese expeditions to search for the lost leaders, but
+without success. The Portuguese gained only a knowledge of the
+abundance of fish in the region of the Newfoundland coast. This was
+important, and henceforth Portuguese ships joined with the Normans, the
+Bretons, and the English in fishing on the Grand Banks. Of the
+Corte-Reals nothing more was ever heard.
+
+The next great voyage of discovery was that of Juan Verrazano, some
+twenty years after the loss of the Corte-Reals. Like so many other
+pilots of his time, Verrazano was an Italian. He had wandered much
+about the world, had made his way to the East Indies by the new route
+that the Portuguese had opened, and had also, so it is said, been a
+member of a ship's company in one of the fishing voyages to
+Newfoundland now made in every season.
+
+The name of Juan Verrazano has a peculiar significance in Canadian
+history. In more ways than one he was the forerunner of Jacques
+Cartier, 'the discoverer of Canada.' Not only did he sail along the
+coast of Canada, but did so in the service of the king of France, the
+first representative of those rising ambitions which were presently to
+result in the foundation of New France and the colonial empire of the
+Bourbon monarchy. Francis I, the French king, was a vigorous and
+ambitious prince. His exploits and rivalries occupy the foreground of
+European history in the earlier part of the sixteenth century. It was
+the object of Francis to continue the work of Louis XI by consolidating
+his people into a single powerful state. His marriage with the heiress
+of Brittany joined that independent duchy, rich at least in the
+seafaring bravery of its people, to the crown of France. But Francis
+aimed higher still. He wished to make himself the arbiter of Europe and
+the over-lord of the European kings. Having been defeated by the
+equally famous king of Spain, Charles V, in his effort to gain the
+position and title of Holy Roman Emperor and the leadership of Europe,
+he set himself to overthrow the rising greatness of Spain. The history
+of Europe for a quarter of a century turns upon the opposing ambitions
+of the two monarchs.
+
+As a part of his great design, Francis I turned towards western
+discovery and exploration, in order to rival if possible the
+achievements of Columbus and Cortes and to possess himself of
+territories abounding in gold and silver, in slaves and merchandise,
+like the islands of Cuba and San Domingo and the newly conquered empire
+of Montezuma, which Spain held. It was in this design that he sent out
+Juan Verrazano; in further pursuit of it he sent Jacques Cartier ten
+years later; and the result was that French dominion afterwards,
+prevailed in the valley of the St Lawrence and seeds were planted from
+which grew the present Dominion of Canada.
+
+At the end of the year 1523 Juan Verrazano set out from the port of
+Dieppe with four ships. Beaten about by adverse storms, they put into
+harbour at Madeira, so badly strained by the rough weather that only a
+single seaworthy ship remained. In this, the Dauphine, Verrazano set
+forth on January 17, 1524, for his western discovery. The voyage was
+prosperous, except for one awful tempest in mid-Atlantic, 'as
+terrible,' wrote Verrazano, 'as ever any sailors suffered.' After seven
+weeks of westward sailing Verrazano sighted a coast 'never before seen
+of any man either ancient or modern.' This was the shore of North
+Carolina. From this point the French captain made his way northward,
+closely inspecting the coast, landing here and there, and taking note
+of the appearance, the resources, and the natives of the country. The
+voyage was chiefly along the coast of what is now the United States,
+and does not therefore immediately concern the present narrative.
+Verrazano's account of his discoveries, as he afterwards wrote it down,
+is full of picturesque interest, and may now be found translated into
+English in Hakluyt's Voyages. He tells of the savages who flocked to
+the low sandy shore to see the French ship riding at anchor. They wore
+skins about their loins and light feathers in their hair, and they were
+'of colour russet, and not much unlike the Saracens.' Verrazano said
+that these Indians were of 'cheerful and steady look, not strong of
+body, yet sharp-witted, nimble, and exceeding great runners.' As he
+sailed northward he was struck with the wonderful vegetation of the
+American coast, the beautiful forest of pine and cypress and other
+trees, unknown to him, covered with tangled vines as prolific as the
+vines of Lombardy. Verrazano's voyage and his landings can be traced
+all the way from Carolina to the northern part of New England. He noted
+the wonderful harbour at the mouth of the Hudson, skirted the coast
+eastward from that point, and then followed northward along the shores
+of Massachusetts and Maine. Beyond this Verrazano seems to have made no
+landings, but he followed the coast of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. He
+sailed, so he says, as far as fifty degrees north, or almost to the
+Strait of Belle Isle. Then he turned eastward, headed out into the
+great ocean, and reached France in safety. Unfortunately, Verrazano did
+not write a detailed account of that part of his voyage which related
+to Canadian waters. But there is no doubt that his glowing descriptions
+must have done much to stimulate the French to further effort.
+Unhappily, at the moment of his return, his royal master was deeply
+engaged in a disastrous invasion of Italy, where he shortly met the
+crushing defeat at Pavia (1525) which left him a captive in the hands
+of his Spanish rival. His absence crippled French enterprise, and
+Verrazano's explorations were not followed up till a change of fortune
+enabled Francis to send out the famous expedition of Jacques Cartier.
+
+One other expedition to Canada deserves brief mention before we come to
+Cartier's crowning discovery of the St Lawrence river. This is the
+voyage of Stephen Gomez, who was sent out in the year 1524. by Charles
+V, the rival of Francis I. He spent about ten months on the voyage,
+following much the same course as Verrazano, but examining with far
+greater care the coast of Nova Scotia and the territory about the
+opening of the Gulf of St Lawrence. His course can be traced from the
+Penobscot river in Maine to the island of Cape Breton. He entered the
+Bay of Fundy, and probably went far enough to realize from its tides,
+rising sometimes to a height of sixty or seventy feet, that its farther
+end could not be free, and that it could not furnish an open passage to
+the Western Sea. Running north-east along the shore of Nova Scotia,
+Gomez sailed through the Gut of Canso, thus learning that Cape Breton
+was an island. He named it the Island of St John-or, rather, he
+transferred to it this name, which the map-makers had already used.
+Hence it came about that the 'Island of St John' occasions great
+confusion in the early geography of Canada. The first map-makers who
+used it secured their information indirectly, we may suppose, from the
+Cabot voyages and the fishermen who frequented the coast. They marked
+it as an island lying in the 'Bay of the Bretons,' which had come to be
+the name for the open mouth of the Gulf of St Lawrence. Gomez, however,
+used the name for Cape Breton island. Later on, the name was applied to
+what is now Prince Edward Island. All this is only typical of the
+difficulties in understanding the accounts of the early voyages to
+America. Gomez duly returned to the port of Corunna in June 1525.
+
+We may thus form some idea of the general position of American
+exploration and discovery at the time when Cartier made his momentous
+voyages. The maritime nations of Europe, in searching for a passage to
+the half-mythical empires of Asia, had stumbled on a great continent.
+At first they thought it Asia itself. Gradually they were realizing
+that this was not Asia, but an outlying land that lay between Europe
+and Asia and that must be passed by the navigator before Cathay and
+Cipango could rise upon the horizon. But the new continent was vast in
+extent. It blocked the westward path from pole to pole. With each
+voyage, too, the resources and the native beauty of the new land became
+more apparent. The luxuriant islands of the West Indies, and the Aztec
+empire of Mexico, were already bringing wealth and grandeur to the
+monarchy of Spain. South of Mexico it had been already found that the
+great barrier of the continent extended to the cold tempestuous seas of
+the Antarctic region. Magellan's voyage (1519-22) had proved indeed
+that by rounding South America the way was open to the spice islands of
+the east. But the route was infinitely long and arduous. The hope of a
+shorter passage by the north beckoned the explorer. Of this north
+country nothing but its coast was known as yet. Cabot and the fishermen
+had found a land of great forests, swept by the cold and leaden seas of
+the Arctic, and holding its secret clasped in the iron grip of the
+northern ice. The Corte-Reals, Verrazano, and Gomez had looked upon the
+endless panorama of the Atlantic coast of North America--the glorious
+forests draped with tangled vines extending to the sanded beaches of
+the sea--the wide inlets round the mouths of mighty rivers moving
+silent and mysterious from the heart of the unknown continent. Here and
+there a painted savage showed the bright feathers of his headgear as he
+lurked in the trees of the forest or stood, in fearless curiosity,
+gazing from the shore at the white-winged ships of the strange
+visitants from the sky. But for the most part all, save the sounds of
+nature, was silence and mystery. The waves thundered upon the sanded
+beach of Carolina and lashed in foam about the rocks of the iron coasts
+of New England and the New Found Land. The forest mingled its murmurs
+with the waves, and, as the sun sank behind the unknown hills, wafted
+its perfume to the anchored ships that rode upon the placid bosom of
+the evening sea. And beyond all this was mystery--the mystery of the
+unknown East, the secret of the pathway that must lie somewhere hidden
+in the bays and inlets of the continent of silent beauty, and above all
+the mysterious sense of a great history still to come for this new land
+itself--a sense of the murmuring of many voices caught as the undertone
+of the rustling of the forest leaves, but rising at last to the mighty
+sound of the vast civilization that in the centuries to come should
+pour into the silent wildernesses of America.
+
+To such a land--to such a mystery--sailed forth Jacques Cartier,
+discoverer of Canada.
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+The Icelandic sagas contain legends of a discovery of America before
+Columbus. Benjamin de Costa, in his 'Pre-Columbian Discovery of
+America', has given translations of a number of these legends. Other
+works bearing on this mythical period are: A. M. Reeves's 'The Finding
+of Wineland the Good'; J. E. Olson's 'The Voyages of the Northmen' in
+Vol. I of the 'Original Narrative of Early American History', edited by
+J. F. Jameson; Fridtjof Nansen's 'In Northern Mists'; and John Fiske's
+'The Discovery of America'. A number of general histories have chapters
+bearing on pre-Columbian discovery; the most accessible of these are:
+Justin Winsor's 'Narrative and Critical History of America';
+Charlevoix's 'Histoire et description generale de la Nouvelle France'
+(1744), translated with notes by J. G. Shea (1886); Henry Harrisse's
+'Discovery of North America'; and the 'Conquest of Canada', by the
+author of 'Hochelaga'.
+
+There are numerous works in the Spanish, French, Italian, and English
+languages dealing with Columbus and his time. Pre-eminent among the
+latter are: Irving's 'Life of Columbus'; Winsor's 'Christopher Columbus
+and how he Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery'; Helps's
+'Life of Columbus'; Prescott's 'History of Ferdinand and Isabella';
+Crompton's 'Life of Columbus'; St John's 'Life of Columbus'; and
+Major's 'Select Letters of Columbus' (a Hakluyt Society publication).
+Likewise in every important work which deals with the early history of
+North or South America, Columbus and his voyages are discussed.
+
+The literature dealing with the Cabots is quite as voluminous as that
+bearing on Columbus. Henry Harrisse's 'John Cabot, the Discoverer of
+North America and Sebastian, his Son; a Chapter of the Maritime History
+of England under the Tudors, 1496-1557', is a most exhaustive work.
+Other authoritative works on the Cabots are Nichols's 'Remarkable Life,
+Adventures, and Discoveries of Sebastian Cabot', in which an effort is
+made to give the chief glory of the discovery of America not to John
+Cabot, but to his son Sebastian; Dawson's 'The Voyages of the Cabots,
+1497 and 1498', 'The Voyages of the Cabots, a Sequel', and 'The Voyages
+of the Cabots, Latest Phases of the Controversy', in 'Transactions
+Royal Society of Canada'; Biddle's 'Memoir of Sebastian Cabot';
+Beazley's 'John and Sebastian Cabot, The Discovery of North America';
+and Weare's 'Cabot's Discovery of America'.
+
+A number of European writers have made able studies of the work of
+Verrazano, and two American scholars have contributed valuable works on
+that explorer's life and achievements; these are, De Costa's 'Verrazano
+the Explorer: a Vindication of his Letter and Voyage', and Murphy's
+'The Voyage of Verrazano'.
+
+In addition to the general histories already mentioned, the following
+works contain much information on the voyages of the forerunners of
+Jacques Cartier: Parkman's 'Pioneers of France'; Kohl's 'Discovery of
+Maine'; Woodbury's 'Relation of the Fisheries to the Discovery of North
+America' (in this work it is claimed that the Basques antedated the
+Cabots); Dawson's 'The St Lawrence Basin and Its Borderlands'; Weise's
+'The Discoveries of America'; 'The Journal of Christopher Columbus',
+and 'Documents relating to the Voyages of John Cabot and Gaspar
+Corte-Real', translated with Notes and an Introduction by Sir Clements
+R. Markham; and Biggar's 'The Precursors of Jacques Cartier,
+1497-1534'. This last work is essential to the student of the early
+voyages to America. It contains documents, many published for the first
+time, in Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and French dealing with
+exploration. The notes are invaluable, and the documents, with the
+exception of those in French, are carefully though freely translated.
+
+For the native tribes of America the reader would do well to consult
+the 'Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico', published by the
+Bureau of American Ethnology, and the 'Handbook of Indians of Canada',
+reprinted by the Canadian Government, with additions and minor
+alterations, from the preceding work, under the direction of James
+White, F.R.G.S.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Dawn of Canadian History: A
+Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada, by Stephen Leacock
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DAWN OF CANADIAN HISTORY ***
+
+***** This file should be named 4069.txt or 4069.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/4/0/6/4069/
+
+Produced by Gardner Buchanan.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.