Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/30

10 navigators have pounded at the barriers of Polar ice in the vain attempt to pierce a passage, and have left the names of capes and bays for their epitaphs.

The Spaniards might still ply their cupidity in drawing out the treasures from the mines of their El Dorado in Mexico and Peru, and the efforts of the less greedy pioneer navigators from the other nations of Europe might still be spent upon finding a northern route opened for them to India. But at last the thrift and practical sagacity, chiefly of the English adventurers, began to rest upon the value and promise of this upper section of the continent for itself alone. “Why go further? Why not stop here, and see what other forms of wealth and good beside gold and pearls may be found here?” These were questions then asked by those best able to answer them. From the moment that the capabilities and the attractions of the new realm fixed the thoughts and engaged the energies of wise and earnest men, these fair expanses began to open themselves — as, by a continuous course of adventure and exploration, they have been doing ever since — to the noblest uses of man. Nor from the first wiser, yet hardly chastened, view taken of them by those who looked on them for themselves alone, did they lack eyes and minds appreciative of their grandeur, their beauty, and their fascination. With almost the sole exceptions of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, who first beheld their bleak and sandy land-fall under the desolation of its wintry aspect, the first Europeans who came with a view to stay in some part of North America, visitors or colonists, so timed their voyages as to arrive at a destination or to skirt the shores in the beauty of the opening spring-time, the gay aspects of summer, or the golden glory of the autumn. The pages of their journals gleam and glow with their enthusiastic pictures of the lovely aspects of Nature here, and the winning charms which beckoned them on to trace her from the shore through the river and the lake up into the recesses of