Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/122

110 and other writers supposed to have come over from Scandinavia, it seems to me a fact, as certain as any that history presents, of the Scandinavians as we now know them having found their way across the Atlantic many centuries before Columbus. I am even ready to believe that they had come across more frequently, and had penetrated further even than what their records testify. We must not always rely on the silence of history to put a negative on any particular question, any more than we can rely on its assertions for an affirmative. From Norway to the American continent there is generally found a favourable wind blowing to waft a vessel across the ocean, and thus many a small vessel may have had no other resource than to go before the wind, driven over by storms against which they could not make head, and of which no remembrance has been recorded, even though some might have returned. With this persuasion in my mind, I can readily admit, as probably true, the traditions of Welsh and Irish colonies having also crossed over the Atlantic, as well as the better authenticated ones of the northmen, some of which might have soon perished from violent or natural causes, and some, in the course of a few generations, have become so swamped among the natives as to lose all knowledge of the strangers that had arrived there among their ancestors. Under the circumstances supposed, of vessels driven across the Atlantic, it is unnecessary to argue that females could not have been present in any proportionate numbers; and if the men had to form any associations with the natives, so as to leave a mixed progeny, that progeny might have shewn their origin by a fairer complexion and greater intelligence than their neighbours, as the Mandans for instance, and other tribes both of North and South America. In such cases, even if the unfortunate castaways had been of a superior class of persons in their own country, their progeny would naturally grow up with the habits of the mothers, rather than with a knowledge of the civilization of their fathers. Nay, it is probable that these would soon forget the knowledge of civilized life themselves, and, in a new state of society, with the pressure of new wants, sink into barbarism, rather than continue superior to it. That there have been numberless cases of vessels driven or drifted across the Atlantic we have abundant instances. Even if we doubt the story, which I must say I do not doubt, of the mariner who is stated by many respectable authors to have given Columbus positive information of lands on the other side of the ocean, I think I can gather from his son's narrative that he had heard of such