Page:Lamb - History of the city of New York - Volume 1.djvu/30

12 is a city in the vigor of its youth, its final growth yet to be attained; thus its history the more especially deserves careful and elaborate treatment. If we would correctly estimate the men who laid its foundation-stones, we must enter into the spirit of the age in which they lived, and become to a certain degree familiar with the world’s progress at that period. If we would appreciate their proceedings, we must learn somewhat of national characteristics and the practical operation of government and laws, in the various countries which they represented. The reader, therefore, is invited first to a brief ancestral disquisition, care being taken to make plain the causes which led to the discovery and settlement of Manhattan Island.

The earliest record of the existence of the American Continent is found among the literary legacies of the Icelanders of the tenth century, who were superior to the continental people of that age both in mental vigor and physical endurance. But their discoveries were the result of haphazard adventure rather than scientific probabilities, and their efforts at colonization were signal failures. From their geographical works we find that they supposed these western lands to be a part of Europe; and, while the accounts of their expeditions were carefully preserved, not a line was committed to parchment until many centuries had passed, so that there is very little reason for presuming that succeeding generations were materially benefited by reason of them.

1435. Christopher Columbus appeared upon the stage of action just as the world was waking from the long sleep of the Middle Ages. Marco Polo had made his famous journey across the whole longitude of Asia, and the manuscript account of his travels, dictated to a fellow-prisoner in a Genoese prison, was beginning to attract attention to the vast and fertile countries he described,—the cities running over with diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires, the palaces with floors and roofs of solid gold, and the rivers hot enough to boil eggs.

The new epoch in the art of printing was also scattering information of various kinds. The books of the ancients were reproduced, and those who could afford to read— for it was a luxury confined entirely to the upper and wealthy classes—discovered that geometrical principles had been applied to the construction of maps by Ptolemy in the second century, and that the places of the earth had been planned out and described according to their several latitudes and longitudes. Some geographical knowledge was interwoven with a vast amount of absurd fiction and very little ascertained fact, but the desire for more light became so great that those same curious old maps were exhumed and copied and circulated. They must have been appalling to the pioneers of maritime discovery, for they