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Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. by Various

V >> Various >> Great Epochs in American History, Volume I.



GREAT EPOCHS IN AMERICAN HISTORY

DESCRIBED BY FAMOUS WRITERS
FROM COLUMBUS TO WILSON


Edited, with Introductions and Explanatory Notes

By FRANCIS W. HALSEY

_Associate Editor of "The World's Famous Orations"; Associate Editor
of "The Best of the World's Classics"; author of "The Old New York
Frontier"; Editor of "Seeing Europe With Famous Authors"_


IN TEN VOLUMES

ILLUSTRATED


VOL. I

VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY AND EARLY EXPLORATIONS: 1000 A.D.-1682


COPYRIGHT, 1912 AND 1916, by

FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY

[_Printed in the United States of America_]




[Transcriber's Note: This text retains original spellings.]



PREFACE


In these ten volumes the aim has been to present striking accounts of
ten great epochs in the history of the United States, from the landing
of Columbus to the building of the Panama Canal. In large part, events
composing each epoch are described by men who participated in them, or
were personal eye-witnesses of them.

Columbus, for example, described his own first voyage; Washington, the
defeat of Braddock; Gen. "Sam" Houston the battle of San Jacinto;
General Robert E. Lee, the capture of John Brown at Harper's Ferry;
Murat Halstead, the nomination of Lincoln; Jefferson Davis, the
evacuation of Richmond, and his own arrest in Georgia by Federal
troops; Mrs. James Chesnut, wife of the Confederate general, the
firing on Fort Sumter; Edmund Clarence Stedman, the retreat from Bull
Run; Gen. James Longstreet, Pickett's charge at Gettysburg; General
Sheridan, Sheridan's ride to Winchester; James G. Blaine, the funeral
of Lincoln; Cyrus W. Field, the laying of the Atlantic cable; Horace
White, the great Chicago fire; William Jennings Bryan, the first Bryan
campaign; Admiral Dewey, the battle of Manila Bay, and Admiral Peary,
the finding of the North Pole.

These accounts are often supplemented by passages from the writings of
historians and biographers, including George Bancroft, Washington
Irving, Francis Parkman, Richard Hildreth, William E.H. Lecky, James
Schouler, and John Fiske; or from those of statesmen, journalists and
publicists, among them, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Thomas H.
Benton, Robert Toombs, Horace Greeley, "Bull Run" Russell, Carl
Schurz, and Theodore Roosevelt.

The tables of contents prefixt to the several volumes, or the index
appended to the last, will show how wide is the range of topics. The
events described have been of vital, and often of transcendant,
importance to this country and Europe. The writers will be found
interesting as authorities, and are often supremely competent, alike
as authorities and writers. The work is believed to present American
history in a form that will appeal to readers for its authenticity and
its novelty.

Francis W. Halsey.




INTRODUCTION

(_Voyages of Discovery and Early Explorations._)


Schoolboys have been taught from their earliest years that Columbus
discovered America. Few events in prehistoric times seem more probable
now than that Columbus was not the first to discover it. The importance
of his achievement over that of others lay in his own faith in his
success, in his definiteness of purpose, and in the fact that he
awakened in Europe an interest in the discovery that led to further
explorations, disclosing a new continent and ending in permanent
settlements.

The earliest voyages to America, made probably from Asia, led to
settlements, but they remained unknown ever afterward to all save the
settlers themselves, while those from Europe led to settlements that
were either soon abandoned or otherwise came to nought. Wandering
Tatar, Chinese, Japanese, Malay, or Polynesian sailors who drifted,
intentionally or accidentally, to the Pacific coast in some unrecorded
and prehistoric past, and from whom the men we call our aborigines
probably are descended, sent back to Asia no tidings of what they had
found. Their discovery, in so far as it concerned the people of the
Old World, remained as if it had never been.

The hardy Northmen of the Viking age, who, like John Smith, six
hundred years afterward, found in Vinland "a pleasant land to see,"
understood so little of the importance of what they had found, that,
by the next century, their discovery had virtually been forgotten in
all Scandinavia. It seems never to have become known anywhere else in
Europe. Indeed, had the Northmen made it known to other Europeans, it
is quite unlikely that any active interest would have been taken in
it. Europe in the year 1000 was self-centered. She had troubles enough
to absorb all her energies. Ambition for the expansion of her
territory, for trade with peoples beyond the great waters, nowhere
existed. Most European states were engaged in a grim struggle to hold
what they had--to hold it from the aggressions of their neighbors, to
hold it against the rising power of Islam.

Columbus did not know he had discovered the continent we call America.
He died in the belief that he had found unknown parts of Asia; that he
had discovered a shorter and safer route for trade with the East, and
that he had given new proof of the assertions made by astronomers that
the earth is round. The men who immediately followed him--Vespucius
and the Cabots--believed only that they had confirmed and extended his
discovery. Cabot first found the mainland of North America, Vespucius
the mainland of South America, but neither knew he had found a new
continent. Each saw only coast lines; made landings, it is true; saw
and conversed with natives, and Vespucius fought with natives; but of
the existence of a new world, having continents comparable to Europe,
Asia, or Africa, with an ocean on both sides of them, neither ever so
much as dreamed.

Under the splendid inspiration of Prince Henry the Navigator, an
inspiration that remained potent throughout Portugal long after his
death, Bartholomew Dias, five years before Columbus made his voyage to
America, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, actually sailed into the
Indian Ocean, and was pressing on toward India when his crew, from
exhaustion, refused to go farther, and he was forced to return home.
Vasco da Gama, ten years later (1497), following the route of Dias,
actually reached India and thus demonstrated that, instead of going
overland by caravan, India could be reached by sailing around
two-thirds of Africa.

Spanish and Portuguese navigators--Columbus, Da Gama, Dias--alike
sought a new and shorter route for trade with the Far East--one,
moreover, that would not be molested by the advancing and aggressive
Turks. Columbus believed, and so believed Spain and Portugal, that
he had found a shorter route than the one Diaz and Da Gama found.
Disputes arose between the rival powers as to titles and benefits from
the discoveries, and it was because of these that Pope Alexander VI
issued his famous Bull, dividing between the two all lands discovered
by the navigators, an act which, in our time, has become a curious
anomaly, since later proof of the existence of continents between the
Atlantic and Pacific made the Pope's decree virtually a partitioning
of all America between two favored countries as sole beneficiaries.

Da Gama returned from India laden with Eastern treasure. Columbus
returned from America poorer than when he sailed from the port of
Palos. Columbus was believed to have found Asia, but he brought home,
after several voyages, none of the wealth of Asia. Hence those fierce
storms that beat about his head, leading to his imprisonment and to
his death in Valladolid, a broken-hearted man.

The Spanish explorers who in the next century followed Columbus, came
to America in pursuit of silver and gold. Rich stores had already been
found by their countrymen in Mexico and the Peruvian Andes. In
meetings with Indians farther north wearing ornaments of gold, the new
explorers became convinced that mineral wealth also existed in the
lands now called the United States, and especially in the fabled
"Seven Cities of Cibola," in the Southwest. Out of this belief came
the bold enterprises of Ponce de Leon, De Vaca, Coronado and De Soto,
while out of the Spanish successes in finding gold in America came the
first known voyage into New York Harbor, that of Verazzano, the
Italian in French service, who was seeking Spanish vessels returning
richly laden.

Of the French and English explorers of later years--Cartier, Champlain,
Marquette, Hudson, Drake--who came to Cape Breton, the St. Lawrence,
Hudson, and Mississippi valleys, the California coast--the motives
were different. These came to fish for cod, to explore the country, to
plant the banners of the Sun King and Queen Bess over new territories,
to convert the Indians, to find a northwest passage--that problem of
the navigators which baffled them all until 1854--362 years after the
landing of Columbus--when an English ship, under Sir Robert McClure,
sailed from Bering Sea to Davis Strait, and thus proved that America,
North and South, was an island.

Spaniards, however, had dreamed of a northwest passage before any of
these. When Magellan passed through the strait that bears his name,
and his ship completed the first circumnavigation of the globe, men
began first to see that America was no part of Asia. In further proof
they sought to find a passage into the Pacific from the north, as a
complement to Magellan's passage from the south. Such an attempt was
first made by the Spaniards under Vasquez d'Ayllon, four years after
the voyage of Magellan; that is, in 1524. Ayllon was hoping to find
this passage when he put in at Hampton Roads, just as Hudson hoped to
find it, eighty-five years afterward, when he entered the harbor of
New York--Hudson, who in a later voyage, sought it once more in Hudson
Bay, and perished miserably there, set adrift in an open boat and
abandoned by his own mutinous sailors.

F.W.H.




CONTENTS

VOL. I--VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY AND EARLY EXPLORATIONS


PREFACE

INTRODUCTION. By the Editor

DISCOVERIES BEFORE COLUMBUS

I. Men from Asia and from Norway. By Justin Winsor
II. How the Norwegians Came to Vinland
III. The First European Child
IV. Other Pre-Columbian Voyages. By Henry Wheaton

THE DISCOVERY BY COLUMBUS:

I. As Described by Washington Irving
II. As Described by Columbus Himself

THE BULL OF POPE ALEXANDER VI PARTITIONING AMERICA

THE DISCOVERY OF THE MAINLAND BY THE CABOTS:

I. The Account Given by John A. Doyle
II. Peter Martyr's Account

THE VOYAGES OF VESPUCIUS. Vespucius' Own Account

A BATTLE WITH THE INDIANS. As Described by Vespucius

THE FIRST ACCOUNT OF AMERICA PRINTED IN ENGLISH

THE DISCOVERY OF FLORIDA BY PONCE DE LEON. Parkman's Account

THE DISCOVERY OF THE PACIFIC BY BALBOA. By Manuel Jose Quintana

THE VOYAGE OF MAGELLAN TO THE PACIFIC. By John Fiske

THE DISCOVERY OF NEW YORK HARBOR BY VERAZZANO. Verazzano's Own Account

CARTIER'S EXPLORATION OF THE ST. LAWRENCE:

I. The Account Given by John A. Doyle
II. Cartier's Own Account

SEARCHES FOR THE "SEVEN CITIES OF CIBOLA." By Reuben Gold Thwaites

CABEZA DE VACA'S JOURNEY TO THE SOUTH-WEST. De Vaca's Own Account

THE EXPEDITION OF CORONADO TO THE SOUTH-WEST. Coronado's Own Account

THE DISCOVERY OF THE MISSISSIPPI BY DE SOTO. Parkman's Account

THE DEATH OF DE SOTO. By One of De Soto's Companions

DRAKE'S VISIT TO CALIFORNIA. By One of Drake's Companions

HUDSON'S DISCOVERY OF THE HUDSON RIVER. By Robert Juet, Hudson's Secretary

CHAMPLAIN'S BATTLE WITH THE IROQUOIS ON LAKE CHAMPLAIN. By Champlain
Himself

MARQUETTE'S DISCOVERY OF THE MISSISSIPPI. Marquette's Own Account

THE DEATH OF MARQUETTE. By Father Claude Dablon

THE DISCOVERY OF NIAGARA FALLS. By Father Louis Hennepin

LA SALLE'S VOYAGE TO THE MOUTH OF THE MISSISSIPPI. By Francis Parkman





VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY AND EARLY EXPLORATIONS

1000 A.D.--1682


DISCOVERIES BEFORE COLUMBUS

I

THE MEN FROM ASIA AND FROM NORWAY[1]

BY JUSTIN WINSOR


There is not a race of eastern Asia--Siberian, Tatar, Chinese,
Japanese, Malay, with the Polynesians--which has not been claimed as
discoverers, intending or accidental, of American shores, or as
progenitors, more or less perfect or remote, of American peoples; and
there is no good reason why any one of them may not have done all that
is claimed. The historical evidence, however, is not such as is based
on documentary proofs of indisputable character, and the recitals
advanced are often far from precise enough to be convincing in
details, if their general authenticity is allowed.

Nevertheless, it is much more than barely probable that the ice of
Bering Straits or the line of the Aleutian Islands was the pathway of
successive immigrations, on occasions perhaps far apart, or maybe near
together; and there is hardly a stronger demonstration of such a
connection between the two continents than the physical resemblances
of the peoples now living on the opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean
in these upper latitudes, with the similarity of the flora which
environs them on either shore.

It is quite as conceivable that the great northern current, setting
east athwart the Pacific, should from time to time have carried along
disabled vessels, and stranded them on the shores of California and
farther north leading to the infusion of Asiatic blood among whatever
there may have been antecedent or autochthonous in the coast peoples.
It is certainly in this way possible that the Chinese or Japanese may
have helped populate the western slopes of the American continent.
There is no improbability even of the Malays of southeastern Asia
extending step by step to the Polynesian Islands, and among them and
beyond them, till the shores of a new world finally received the
impress of their footsteps and of their ethnic characteristics. We may
very likely recognize not proofs, but indications, along the shores of
South America, that its original people constituted such a stock or
were increased by it.

As respects the possible early connections of America on the side of
Europe, there is an equally extensive array of claims, and they have
been set forth, first and last, with more persistency than effect....

Leaving the old world by the northern passage, Iceland lies at the
threshold of America. It is nearer to Greenland than to Norway, and
Greenland is but one of the large islands into which the arctic
currents divide the North American continent. Thither, to Iceland, if
we identify the localities in Geoffrey of Monmouth, King Arthur sailed
as early as the beginning of the sixth century, and overcame whatever
inhabitants he may have found there. Here, too, an occasional
wandering pirate or adventurous Dane had glimpsed the coast. Thither,
among others, came the Irish, and in the ninth century we find Irish
monks and a small colony of their countrymen in possession. Thither
the Gulf Stream carries the southern driftwood, suggesting sunnier
lands to whatever race had been allured or driven to its shelter. Here
Columbus, when, as he tells us, he visited the island in 1477, found
no ice. So that, if we may place reliance on the appreciable change of
climate by the precession of the equinoxes, a thousand years ago and
more, when the Norwegians crossed from Scandinavia and found these
Christian Irish there, the island was not the forbidding spot that it
seems with the lapse of centuries to be becoming.

It was in A.D. 875 that Ingolf, a jarl of Norway, came to Iceland with
Norse settlers. They built their habitation at first where a pleasant
headland seemed attractive, the present Ingolfshofdi, and later
founded Reikjavik, where the signs directed them; for certain carved
posts, which they had thrown overboard as they approached the island,
were found to have drifted to that spot. The Christian Irish preferred
to leave their asylum rather than consort with the newcomers, and so
the island was left to be occupied by successive immigrations of the
Norse, which their king could not prevent. In the end, and within half
a century, a hardy little republic--as for a while it was--of near
70,000 inhabitants, was established almost under the arctic circle.

The very next year (A.D. 876) after Ingolf had come to Iceland, a
sea-rover, Gunnbiorn, driven in his ship westerly, sighted a strange
land, and the report that he made was not forgotten. Fifty years
later, more or less, for we must treat the dates of the Icelandic
sagas with some reservation, we learn that a wind-tossed vessel was
thrown upon a coast far away, which was called Iceland the Great.
Then, again, we read of a young Norwegian, Eric the Red, not
apparently averse to a brawl, who killed his man in Norway and fled to
Iceland, where he kept his dubious character; and again outraging the
laws, he was sent into temporary banishment--this time in a ship which
he fitted out for discovery; and so he sailed away in the direction of
Gunnbiorn's land, and found it. He whiled away three years on its
coast, and as soon as he was allowed, ventured back with the tidings.
While, to propitiate intending settlers, he said he had been to
Greenland, and so the land got a sunny name.

The next year, which seems to have been A.D. 985, he started on his
return with 35 ships, but only fourteen of them reached the land.
Whenever there was a habitable fiord, a settlement grew up, and the
stream of immigrants was for a while constant and considerable. Just
at the end of the century (A.D. 999) Lief, a son of Eric, sailed back
to Norway, and found the country in the early fervor of a new
religion; for King Olaf Tryggvesson had embraced Christianity, and was
imposing it on his people. Leif accepted the new faith, and a priest
was assigned to him to take back to Greenland; and thus Christianity
was introduced into arctic America. So they began to build churches in
Greenland, the considerable ruins of one of which stands to this day.
The winning of Iceland to the Church was accomplished at the same
time....

In the next year after the second voyage of Eric the Red, one of the
ships which were sailing from Iceland to the new settlement, was
driven far off her course, according to the sagas, and Bjarni
Herjulfson, who commanded the vessel, reported that he had come upon a
land, away to the southwest, where the coast country was level; and he
added that when he turned north it took him nine days to reach
Greenland. Fourteen years later than this voyage of Bjarni, which was
said to have been in A.D. 986--that is, in the year 1000 or
thereabouts--Lief, the same who had brought the Christian priest to
Greenland, taking with him 35 companions, sailed from Greenland in
quest of the land seen by Bjarni, which Lief first found, where a
barren shore stretched back to ice-covered mountains, and, because of
the stones there, he called the region Helluland. Proceeding farther
south, he found a sandy shore, with a level forest country back of it,
and because of the woods it was named Markland. Two days later they
came upon other land, and tasting the dew upon the grass they found it
sweet. Farther south and westerly they went, and going up a river,
came into an expanse of water, where on the shores they built huts to
lodge in for the winter, and sent out exploring parties. In one of
these Tyrker, a native of a part of Europe where grapes grew, found
vines hung with their fruit, which induced Lief to call the country
Vinland.

Attempts have been made to identify these various regions by the
inexact accounts of the direction of their sailing, by the very
general descriptions of the country, by the number of days occupied in
going from one point to another, with the uncertainty if the ship
sailed at night, and by the length of the shortest day in Vinland--the
last a statement that might help us, if it could be interpreted with a
reasonable concurrence of opinion, and if it were not confused with
other inexplicable statements. The next year Lief's brother, Thorwald,
went to Vinland with a single ship, and passed three winters there,
making explorations meanwhile, south and north. Thorfinn Karlsefne,
arriving in Greenland in A.D. 1006, married a courageous widow named
Gudrid, who induced him to sail with his ships to Vinland and make
there a permanent settlement, taking with him livestock and other
necessaries for colonization. Their first winter in the place was a
severe one; but Gudrid gave birth to a son, Snorre, from whom it is
claimed Thorwaldsen, the Danish sculptor, was descended. The next
season they removed to the spot where Leif had wintered, and called
the bay Hop. Having spent a third winter in the country, Karlsefne,
with a part of the colony, returned to Greenland.

The saga then goes on to say that trading voyages to the settlement
which had been formed by Karlsefne now became frequent, and that the
chief lading of the return voyages was timber, which was much needed
in Greenland. A bishop of Greenland, Eric Upsi, is also said to have
gone to Vinland in A.D. 1121. In 1347 the last ship of which we have
any record in these sagas went to Vinland after timber. After this all
is oblivion.

There are in all these narratives many details beyond this outline,
and those who have sought to identify localities have made the most
they could of the mention of a rock here or a bluff there, of an
island where they killed a bear, of others where they found eggs, of a
headland where they buried a leader who had been killed, of a cape
shaped like a keel, of broadfaced natives who offered furs for red
cloths, of beaches where they hauled up their ships, and of tides that
were strong; but the more these details are scanned in the different
sagas, the more they confuse the investigator, and the more successive
relators try to enlighten us the more our doubts are strengthened,
till we end with the conviction that all attempts at consistent
unravelment leave nothing but a vague sense of something somewhere
done.

[1] From an article by Mr. Winsor in "The Narrative and Critical
History of America," of which he was editor. By arrangement with
the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co., Copyright 1889. For a long
period Mr. Winsor was librarian of Harvard University. He wrote
"From Cartier to Frontenac," "Christopher Columbus," "The Mississippi
Basin," and made other important contributions to American history.




II

HOW THE NORWEGIANS CAME TO VINLAND[1]

(1000 A.D.)


Lief invited his father, Eric, to become the leader of the expedition,
but Eric declined, saying that he was then stricken in years, and
adding that he was less able to endure the exposure of sea life than
he had been. Lief replied that he would, nevertheless, be the one who
would be most apt to bring good luck, and Eric yielded to Lief's
solicitation, and rode from home when they were ready to sail.

They put the ship in order; and, when they were ready, they sailed out
to sea, and found first that land which Bjarni and his shipmates found
last. They sailed up to the land and cast anchor, and launched a boat
and went ashore, and saw no grass there. Great ice mountains lay
inland back from the sea, and it was as a [table-land of] flat rock
all the way from the sea to the ice mountains; and the country seemed
to them to be entirely devoid of good qualities. Then said Lief, "It
has not come to pass with us in regard to this land as with Biarni,
that we have not gone upon it. To this country I will now give a name,
and call it Helluland," They returned to the ship, put out to sea, and
found a second land.

They sailed again to the land, and came to anchor, and launched the
boat, and went ashore. This was a level wooded land; and there were
broad stretches of white sand where they went, and the land was level
by the sea. Then said Lief, "This land shall have a name after its
nature; and we will call it Markland." They returned to the ship
forthwith, and sailed away upon the main with northeast winds, and
were out two "doegr" before they sighted land. They sailed toward this
land, and came to an island which lay to the northward off the land.
There they went ashore and looked about them, the weather being fine,
and they observed that there was dew upon the grass, and it so
happened that they touched the dew with their hands, and touched their
hands to their mouths, and it seemed to them that they had never
before tasted anything so sweet as this....

A cargo sufficient for the ship was cut, and when the spring came they
made their ship ready, and sailed away; and from its products Lief
gave the land a name, and called it Wineland. They sailed out to sea,
and had fair winds until they sighted Greenland and the fells below
the glaciers. Then one of the men spoke up and said, "Why do you steer
the ship so much into the wind?" Lief answers: "I have my mind upon my
steering, but on other matters as well. Do ye not see anything out of
the common?" They replied that they saw nothing strange. "I do not
know," says Lief, "whether it is a ship or a skerry that I see." Now
they saw it, and said that it must be a skerry; but he was so much
keener of sight than they that he was able to discern men upon the
skerry. "I think it best to tack," says Lief, "so that we may draw
near to them, that we may be able to render them assistance if they
should stand in need of it; and, if they should not be peaceable
disposed, we shall still have better command of the situation than
they."

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