INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 7 
to pronounce judgment on the theory propounded by Columbus, and decide whether in that 
most catholic of Christian kingdoms, on the very eve of its final triumph over the infidel, 
it was a permissible belief that this Western World of ours had even a possible existence. 
Columbus set before them the scientific demonstration which constituted for himseif 
indisputable evidence of an ocean highway across the Atlantic to the continent beyond. 
The clerical council included professors of mathematics, astronomy and geography, as well 
as other learned friars and dignitaries of the church: probably as respectable an assemblage 
of cloister-bred pedantry and orthodox conservatism as that 15th century could produce. 
Philosophical deductions were parried by a quotation from St. Jerome or St. Augustine ; 
and mathematical demonstrations by a figurative text of Scripture; and in spite alike of 
the science and the devout religious spirit of Columbus, the divines of Salamanca pro- 
nounced the idea of the earth’s spherical form to be heterodox; and declared a belief in 
antipodes incompatible with the historical traditions of the Christian faith: since to assert 
that there were inhabited lands on the opposite side of the globe would be to maintain 
that there were nations not descended from Adam, it being impossible for them to have 
passed the intervening ocean. 
It may naturally excite a smile to thus find the very ethnological problem of this 
19th century thus dogmatically produced four centuries earlier to prove that America was 
an impossibility. But in reality this ethnological problem long continued in all ways to 
affect the question. Among the various evidences which Columbus adduced in confirma- 
tion of his belief in the existence of a continent beyond the Atlantic, was the report brought 
to him by his own brother-in-law, Pedro Correa, that the bodies of two dead men had been 
cast ashore on the island of Flores, differing essentially from any known race, “very broad- 
faced, and diverse in aspect from Christians ;” and, in truth, the more widely they differed 
from all familiar Christian humanity, the more probable did their existence appear to the 
men of that 15th century. Hence Shakespeare’s marvellous creation of his Caliban. Upwards 
of a century and half had then elapsed since Columbus returned with the news of a world 
beyond the Western Ocean; yet still to the men of Shakespeare’s day, the strange regions of 
which Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Gomara, Lane, Harriot, and Raleigh wrote, seemed 
more fitly occupied by Calibans, and the like rude approximations to humanity, than by 
men and women in any degree akin to ourselves. Othello indeed only literally reproduces 
Raleigh’s account of a strange people on the Caoro, in Guiana. He had not, indeed, himself, 
got sight of those marvellous Ewaipanoma, though anxious enough to do so. Their eyes, as 
reported, were in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts ; nor could 
the truth be doubted, since every child in the provinces of Arromaia and Canuri affirmed the 
same. The founder of Virginia, assuredly one of the most sagacious men of that wise 
Elizabethan era, and with all the experience which travel supplies, reverts again and again 
to this strange new-world race, as to a thing of which he entertained no doubt. The 
designation of Shakespeare’s Caliban, is but an anagram of the epithet which Raleigh 
couples with the specific designation of those monstrous dwellers on the Caoro. “To the west 
of Caroli,” he says, “are divers nations of Cannibals, and of those Ewaipanoma without 
heads.” Of “such men, whose head stood in their breasts,’ Gonsalo, in “The Tempest” 
reminds his companions, as a tale which every voyager brings back “ good warrant of” ; 
and so, it was in all honesty that Othello entertained Desdemona with the story of his 
adventures :— 
