No. IX.

Pomponius Mela, qui vivoit à une époque assez rapprochée du temps de Cornelius Nepos, raconte, et Pline répète que Metellus Celer, tandis qu'il étoit proconsul dans les Gaules, avoit reçu en cadeau, d'un roi des Boii (Pline le nomme roi des Suèves) quelques Indiens qui, chassés des mers de l'Inde par des tempêtes, avoient abordé sur les côtes de la Germanie. Il ne peut rester aucun doute que Pomponius Mela n'ait cru que les Indiens étoient arrivés sur les côtes nordest de l'Allemagne par la circumnavigation de l'Asie orientale et boréale. Il dit, 'Vi tempestatum ex Indicis æquoribus abrepti.'. Comme il est reconnu que malgré le grand perfectionnement de la navigation moderne, l'accumulation des glaces s'oppose à toute navigation par le détroit de Behring le long des îles de la Nouvelle Zemble on a soulevé la question de savoir de quelle race peuvent avoir été les hommes de couleur que le proconsul Metellus Celer a pris pour des Indiens. Gomara dit que, 'Les Indiens de Quintus Metellus Celer etoient peut-être de la Terre du Laboureur, et l'on se trompe (sur leur vraie origine) à cause de leur couleur.'. Il paraissoit peu probable que des Eskimaux fussent venus aux côtes d'Allemagne; et tandis que Vossius, le savant commentateur de Mela, ne voyait dans les Indiens de Cornelius Nepos que des Bretons, dont le corps étoit fardé de pastel, d'autres commentateurs adoptant l'explication de Gomara et de Wytfleet, substituoient au Suevorum Rex, un prince Scandinave qui avoit recueillé des naufragés sur les côtes de Norwège. L'analogie du fait non contesté de l'arrivée d'Eskimaux aux îles Orcades, semble jeter une vive lumière sur le fait que nous examinons ici; et quand on considère les nombreux exemples d'individus tombés entre les mains des barbares et traînés comme captifs de nation à nation loin du lieu du naufrage, on trouve moins surprenant que des étrangers aient été conduits dans les Gaules, en passant des îles Britanniques en Batavie et en Germanie: mais ce qui est bien étrange, c'est que dans des évènemens semblables et également énigmatiques, du moyen-âge, il ne soit toujours questions que de côtes Germaniques. Ces évènemens sont rapportés aux règnes des Othons et de Frédéric Barberousse; ils sont, par conséquent, du dixième et du douzième siècle. 'Nos apud Othonem legimus,' dit le pape Æneas Sylvius, 'sub imperatoribus teutonicis indicam navem et negotiatores Indos in Germanico littore fuisse deprehensos.' Et dans Gomara, on lit, 'On assure aussi que, du temps de l'empereur Frédéric Barberousse on amena à Lubec certains Indiens dans un canot.' Sir Humphrey Gilbert après avoir discutí prolixement en trois chapitres le passage de Cornelius Nepos, ajoute 'L'an 1160, quelques Indiens arrivèrent, sous le règne de Frédéric Barberousse, upon the coast of Germanie.' J'ai perdu beaucoup de temps dans de vaines recherches sur la première source de ces faits curieux. D'où Gomara, historien généralement très exact, a-t-il su que, 'Les Indiens ont été amenés à Lubec ?' Comment les continuateurs des Annales

d'Othon de Freising, et le Franciscain Ditmar, auteur de l'excellente Chronique de Lubec, n'ont ils rien sur de ces prétendus Indiens? ..... à la maison où se réunit la corporation des marins de Lubec on conserve un canot groenlandois dans lequel se trouve une figure d'Eskimau en bois. Le canot a été reparé plusieurs fois; la première inscription ne porte que l'année 1607; mais d'après une tradition très vague, un navire de Lubec doit avoir capturé ce pêcheur Eskimau, il y a trois cent ans, dans les mers de l'ouest. On agrandit la pensée,

en reunissant, sous un pointe de vue général, les preuves de ces communications lointaines, favorisées par le hazard; on voit comment les mouvemens de l'océan et de l'atmosphère ont pu, dès les époques les plus reculées, contribuer à répandre les differentes races d'hommes sur la surface du globe; on comprend avec Colomb (sida del Almirante, cap. viii.) comme un continent a pu ses révéler à l'autre."-Humboldt's Examen Critique du Géographie du Nouveau Continent, vol. ii., p. 278.

No. X.

Herodotus relates that a Phoenician fleet, fitted out by Necho, king of Egypt, took its departure about six hundred and four years before the Christian era, from a port in the Red Sea, doubled the southern promontory of Africa, and, after a voyage of three years, returned by the Straits of Gades to the mouth of the Nile. Eudoxus of Cyzicus is said to have held the same course, and to have accomplished the same arduous undertaking.-Herod., lib. iv., cap. xlii.; Plin., Nat. Hist., lib. ii., cap. lxvii.

These voyages, if performed in the manner narrated, may justly be reckoned the greatest efforts of navigation in the ancient world; and if we attend to the imperfect state of the art at that time, it is difficult to determine whether we should most admire the courage and sagacity with which the design was formed, or the conduct and good fortune with which it was executed. But, unfortunately, all the original and authentic accounts of the Phœnician and Carthaginian voyages, whether undertaken by public authority or in prosecution of their private, have perished. Whatever acquaintance with the remote regions of the earth the Carthaginians or Phoenicians may have acquired, was concealed from the rest of mankind with a mercantile jealousy. Every thing relating to the course of their navigation was not only a mystery of trade, but a secret of state. Extraordinary facts are recorded concerning their solicitude to prevent other nations from penetrating into what they wished should remain undivulged (Strab., Geogr., lib. iii., p. 265; lib. xviii., p. 1154). Many of their discoveries seem accordingly to have been scarcely known beyond the precincts of their own The navigation round Africa, in particular, is recorded by the Greek and Roman writers rather as a strange, amusing tale, which they either did not comprehend or did not believe, than as a real transaction which enlarged their knowledge and influenced their opinion.

states.

As neither the progress of the Phoenician and Carthaginian discoveries, nor the extent of their navigation, were communicated to the rest of mankind, all memorials of their extraordinary skill in naval affairs seem, in a great measure, to have perished when the maritime power of the former was annihilated by Alexander's conquest of Tyre, and the empire of the latter was overturned by the Roman arms: The Periplus Hannonis is the only authentic monument of the Carthaginian skill in naval affairs, and one of the most curious fragments transmitted to us by antiquity. Montesquieu and De Bougainville have established its authenticity by arguments that appear to me unanswerable. Hanno sailed from Gades to the island of Cerne in twelve days. This is probably what is known to the moderns by the name of the island of Arguim. His furthest advance was to a promontory, which he named the South Horn, manifestly Cape de Tres Puntas, about five degrees north of the line.-Robertson's America, vol. i., p. 9-250.

No. XI.

The importance of this discovery, and of the European settlements consequent upon it, is chiefly interesting with regard to the intellectual and moral effects produced by the sudden increase in the stock of ideas upon the improvement and the social condition of mankind. Since that grand era, a new and active state of the intellect and feelings, bold wishes and hopes scarcely to be restrained, have gradually penetrated into the whole of civil society; the scanty population of a hemisphere, especially the coasts opposite Europe, favored the settlement of colonies, which, in rendering themselves extensive and independent in position, have overturned unlimited states by their choice of a free form of government; and, lastly, the Reformation, a forerunner of vast political revolutions, had to pass through different phases of its development in one country which had become the place of refuge for all religious opinions, and for the most varied ideas of divinity. The boldness of the Genoese mariner is the first link in the immeasurable chain of these pregnant events. We might be induced to suppose that the value of these great discoveries, and of the double victory in the physical and intellectual world, was first acknowledged in our times, since the history of the civilization of the human race has been treated in a philosophical way. Such a supposition is refuted by Columbus's cotemporaries. The most talented of them anticipated the influence which the events of the latter years of the fifteenth century would exercise upon mankind. "Each day," says Peter Martyr, in his letters of the years 1493 and 1494, “bring us new wonders from a new world, from the Western antipodes, which a certain Genoese traveler has discovered..... Our friend Pomponius Lætus could scarcely restrain his tears of joy when I communicated to him the first accounts of so unexpected an event.... What aliment more delicious than such It is like an acces

tidings can be set before an ingenious mind.

sion of wealth to a miser.

Our minds, soiled with vices, become meliorated by contemplating such glorious events."

"Sebastian Cabot mentioned that he was in London when news was brought there of the discovery, and that it caused great talk and admiration in the court of Henry VII., being affirmed to be a thing more divine than human."—Hakluyt, p. 7.

"The mind of men became sharpened in order to comprehend the boundless store of new phenomena, to work them out, and by comparison to employ them för the attainment of general and higher views of the creation. If we carefully examine the original works of the earliest historians of the Conquista, we are astonished at finding, in a Spanish author of the sixteenth century, the germs of so many important physical truths. Upon the occasion of the discovery of a continent, which appeared to be separated from all the other regions of the creation, in the distant solitude of the ocean, a great number of the same questions with which we are employed at the present day occurred to the excited curiosity of the travelers, and to those who were collected together by their narratives; these questions were, Of the unity of the human race, and the derivation of its varieties from a common original form; of the migration of nations, and the affinities of language; of the possibility of varieties in the species of plants and animals; of the causes of the trade winds, and of the constant currents in the ocean; of the regular decrease of temperature at the declivities of the Cordilleras, and in the various strata of water at different depths of the ocean; and of the repective effects of chains of volcanic mountains, and their influence upon the frequency of earthquakes, and the extension of the range of the volcanic forces. The foundation of what is at the present day called physical geography is, exclusive of mathematical considerations, found in the works of the Jesuit, Joseph Acosta, and in the work of Oviedo, which appeared scarcely twenty years after the death of Columbus. In no other period of time since the existence of man in a social condition has the range of ideas in respect to the external world, and the relations of different places, been so suddenly and so wonderfully extended, or the necessity of observing natural phenomena in different latitudes and at different elevations above the level of the sea, or of multiplying the means of examining them, so deeply felt."-Humboldt's Cosmos, vol. ii., p. 295–337.

No. XII.

More than ten places have disputed the glory of having given birth to Columbus: Genoa, Cogoleto (Cucchereto, Cugurco, Cogoreo, Cucurco d'Herrera, et Cugurco de Puffendorf), Bugiasco, Finale, Quinto et Nervi, dans la Riviera di Genova, Savone, Palestrella, et Arbizoli, Cosseria, la vallée d'Oneglia, Castello di Cuccaro, la ville de Plaisance, et Pradello. "Le nombre de ces lieux s'est accru progressivement avec l'illustration du héros, car ses contemporains, Pierre Martyr, le cura

de los Palacios, Geraldine, Pietro Coppo da Isola, l'évêque Giustiniani, le chancelier Antonio Gallo et Senerega l'ont unanimement appellé Génois. . . . . . Un voyageur moderne, dit en parlant de Cogoleto: Ce lieu n'a pas renoncé à l'honneur d'avoir vu naître Colomb, malgré la multitude de recherches et de dissertations d'aprês lesquelles le grand homme paroît tout simplement Génois. On prétend même á Cogoleto indiquer sa maison, espèce de cabane, sur le bord de la mer, que je trouvai assex convenablement occupée par un gardecôte, et sur laquelle on lit, à la suite d'autres inscriptions pitoyables, ce beau vers improvisé par M. Gagliuffi.

"Unus erat Mundus; Duo sint, ait iste: fuere."

Voyages Hist. et Littér, en Italie de M. Valery, tom. v., p. 73.

No. XIII.

"Christophe Colomb, Cortez et Raleigh ont eprouvé que le genie ne régne que sur l'avenir et que son pouvoir est tardive. Ils ont pendant quelques tems, excité au plus haut degré l'admiration de leurs contemporains; mais la bienveillance publique a abandonné leur viellesse, on ne s'est souvenu d'eux que pour les affliger dans leur isolement.* Le siècle qui les a vus naître n'a pas compris ce que leur action successive a produit et préparê de changements dans l'état des peuples de l'occident. L'influence que ces peuples exercent sur tous les points du globe ou leur présence se fait sentir simultanément, la prépondérance universelle qui en est la suite, ne datent que de la découverte de l'Amérique et du voyage de Gama. Les évènemens qui appartiennent à un petit group de six années (1492–1498) ont determiné pour

* Ces Nouvelles Indes que Colomb nomma sa propriété (cosa que era suya) etoient inabordables pour celui qui les avoient refusées à la France, à l'Angleterre et au Portugal. Les lettres que l'amiral adresse à sa famille et ses amis depuis l'année 1502, ne respirent que la douleur.

The following is an extract from one of Columbus's mournful appeals to Ferdinand and Isabella:

"Such is my fate, that the twenty years of service through which I have passed with so much toil and danger have profited me nothing, and at this very day I do not possess a roof in Spain that I can call my own: if I wish to eat or sleep, I have nowhere to go but to the inn or tavern, and most times lack wherewith to pay the bill...... I was twenty-eight years old when I came into your highnesses' service, and now I have not a hair upon me that is not gray; my body is infirm, and all that was left to me, as well as to my brothers, has been taken away and sold, even to the frock that I wore, to my great dishonor...... The honest devotedness I have always shown to your majesties' service, and the so unmerited outrage with which it has been repaid, will not allow my soul to keep silence, however much I may wish it. I implore your highnesses to forgive my complaints. I am, indeed, in as ruined a condition as I have related. Hitherto I have wept over others: may Heaven now have mercy upon me, and may the earth weep for me. Weep for me, whoever has charity, truth, and jusice !"-Select Letters of Columbus, published by the Hakluyt Society.