﻿NO. 19 NORSE VISITS TO NORTH AMERICA BABCOCK 9 



Who can say how early these crossings of the ocean may have 

 begun ? It is true, as Prof. Shaler x has suggested, that there might 

 have been great difficulty in winning home again without a keel ; 

 but ancient Egypt, Greece, and Phenicia all used this important appli- 

 ance, according to Dr. Nansen ; 2 the Celts, Saxons, and Normans con- 

 tinued its use, and Scandinavian shipbuilding, in this as in other 

 things, inherited from antiquity and the Mediterranean. Besides, 

 the Polynesians in their great sea-boats have made recorded ocean 

 voyages more extensive than crossing the Atlantic, and there must 

 have been many such in far earlier times, or islands as remote as 

 Hawaii and Easter would not have been peopled by them. Why 

 must we suppose that there were no 1 navigators on the Atlantic side 

 of America who were able to emulate the dusky adventurers of the 

 Pacific ? 



We must remember that the Mediterranean civilization had an out- 

 post at Cadiz from about noo B. C, directly facing America; that, 

 like all Phenician towns, it was probably even then a center of mari- 

 time curiosity and enterprise, and, at any rate, had grown into a 

 wealthy and far-reaching commercial city when visited five hundred 

 years later ; and that in the middle of the twelfth century, after a long 

 period of Mahometan rule just ended, it was still important enough 

 to make Edrisi greatly exaggerate on his map the size of its peninsula, 

 making this an island, and giving it a name when most other islands 

 of the sea went nameless. 



. We know that Phenicia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome were somehow 

 aware, or dreamed, of lands beyond the great water ; and that these 

 fascinating suggestions were useful long afterward in helping to 

 inspire Prince Henry and Toscanelli, Columbus, and Cabot. It would 

 be a pleasure to find their enduring charm rooted in real knowledge, 

 as it well may have been ; but modern works on Atlantis — for the most 

 part valueless — add nothing trustworthy to Plato's memorable report 

 of legendary echoes ; and we must feel that this story, and others 

 like it, may have arisen from some vision, as unreal as the white 

 surviving phantom city which a Central American padre saw from a 

 mountain top so vividly that he made Stephens 3 believe in it also, 

 with several picturesque romances by Haggard, Westall, and others 

 for a much later result. Yet this is not the only and inevitable expla- 



1 Nature and Man in America, p. 189. 

 2 Tn Northern Mists, vol. 1, pp. 37, 40, 48, 242, 248. 



3 Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, p. 195. Also J. L. Stephens : Travels 

 in Yucatan, pp. 191 and 202. 



