The Discoveries of America to the Year 1525
9781465671813
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
It is a fact that America in the early ages was one of the inhabited parts of the earth. The Egyptians, who were among the first of the peoples of the eastern hemisphere to use letters and to write history, furnish the earliest known account of the inhabitants of this continent. It is also a truth that some ancient geographers and philosophers, who had no personal knowledge of the existence of a primitive people in the western hemisphere, regarded the information recorded by the Egyptians as fictitious and incredible. When Columbus proposed to go to this inhabited realm beyond the western ocean almost all the learned men of Portugal and Spain opposed the undertaking as visionary, and not a few of them asserted that the navigator’s opinions were absurd, because, as they argued, no one of all the seamen who had lived since the creation of the world had discovered land beyond Hibernia. The discovery of the continent and the subsequent explorations of the Spaniards not only confuted the fallacious arguments of the learned men of the middle ages but confirmed the statements of the Egyptian records descriptive of the civilization of the Atlantic country. The tradition of the peopling of the continent by the descendants of Euenor, the good man begotten in the beginning from the ground, and of the residence of celestial beings among the inhabitants peculiarly confirms the account in the Bible of the creation of the first man from the dust of the ground and of his descendants having communications with angels. The asserted discovery of America by the Northmen rests more upon conjecture than evidence. It appears that Columbus was not the discoverer of the continent, for it was seen in 1497 not only by Giovanni Caboto but by the commander of the Spanish fleet with whom Amerigo Vespucci first sailed to the New World. The land of Francesca, discovered by Verrazzano in 1524, it will be seen, was early possessed by the French, who built a fort near the Indian village where now is the city of New York, and called the surrounding country La Terre d’Anormée Berge; a geographical designation more significantly expressed in the phraseology, The Land of the Palisades. The writing of this work required the personal examination of many old and rare books, manuscripts, and maps, besides the perusal of a large number of recent papers and publications relating to its subject. The task further demanded a careful review and comparison of the various statements of historical writers concerning the voyages of the persons whom they believed to have been the discoverers of certain parts of the coast of America, between Baffin’s Bay and Tierra del Fuego.
