Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/22

2 to it. The name applied to the aborigines of this continent perpetuates for all time the original illusion and lure under the prompting and impulse of which this continent was first brought to the knowledge of Europeans. There is myth, there is poetic legend, there may be something which looks like testimony, about visits by dwellers on the Old World to this so called New World, before the historic voyages of Columbus and his successors. But there is nothing which can stand the severest tests of evidence for those visits as matters of positive fact. At any rate, if there were such visits they bore no fruits, left no tokens of use or occupancy, and did not bring the dwellers on either hemisphere into intercourse. Nor did Columbus when on our soil, not even to the day of his death, know that he had opened a new continent, with a new race of men. The America that we know, as substantially two continents, — both of them together stretching to a greater length than Europe, Asia, and Africa, — floating between two vast oceans, was a realm that he never sought, nor ever dreamed of, nor knew that he had reached when he stood upon it.

Columbus held this globe of earth to be much smaller than it is, — to be in fact of the size which it would have been if America and the Pacific Ocean had been left out of it. What he had sought for, after fourteen years of importunate pleading for patronage from European monarchs, what he supposed he had found, as he lay upon his deathbed, was a sort of back-door entrance to the Indies. That gorgeous realm, — the slender positive knowledge of which to Europeans was heightened by all the inventiveness of human fancy and all the glow and craving of greed, investing it with fabulous charms and glitter as a vast mine of gold and gems awaiting the spoiler, — had been opened vaguely and invitingly to here and there a land traveller and a venturous mariner, on its western edge. It was a long and perilous route to it, either by land or sea. Columbus believed that by sailing westward upon the Atlantic he could