Forenoon on New Seas i8i 



knowledge and many unique skills. These were mostly ignored by 

 the European colonists, but some of them were quietly taken over. 

 Due credit for their development, however, has seldom been given 

 to the red man. The single most important of these skills, which was 

 thus acquired by the European colonists, was that of offshore 

 whaling. 



There are those, and serious-minded historians among them, who 

 try to deny this fact, but fortunately the original records are still 

 extant for all of us to see, and everywhere you search around our 

 coasts you will find some picture such as that given above in the 

 early fishing records. Later on in our pursuit of the whale, we will 

 see that the same thing also occurred on the west coast, in Canada, 

 and in Alaska. The truth is that both the Eskimos and the Amer- 

 indians all around the edge of the North American continent were 

 skilled fishermen, and all of them had regularly for thousands of 

 years been killing whales when they approached the coast. It is, 

 perhaps, our own native pride that causes us to recoil from the idea 

 that our worthy ancestors learned what was later to become one of 

 our most important industrial arts from various heathen peoples still 

 living in the Stone Age, but there can be no denying the fact that 

 they did so. The proof, moreover, is overwhelming. 



More has probably been written on the so-called "discovery" of 

 America than on almost any other historical incident, but there is a 

 curious gap in all our history books following this famous event and 

 extending to the emergence of English-speaking America. This 

 covers a period of exactly one hundred years, from 1500 to 1600 a.d. 

 Likewise, there is still totally insufficient popular understanding of 

 the following century — namely, 1600 to 1700 a.d. — during which 

 time the true foundations of what is now the United States were 

 actually laid. 



Cristoforo Colombo, as everybody knows, first sighted the West 

 Indies in 1492, almost exactly five hundred years after the Norse 

 first sighted Greenland. It is odd to realize that there were still 

 Europeans living in America when he did so, for the last Norse 

 Greenlander did not die till fifty years later. After 1500 a.d., how- 

 ever, Europe concentrated on tropical America. Apart from the voy- 

 ages of John Cabot in 1497, Corte Real, about 1500, and Jacques 

 Cartier up the St. Lawrence in 1534 and 1542, nothing really hap- 



