The vessels of the old Vikings looked very picturesque but they were exceedingly clumsy vehicles when it came to the actual business of sailing them across a choppy sea. As a result those hardy Norsemen were continually blown out of their normal course, for they had neither compass nor log and their sailing rig was as clumsy as that of those Egyptian feluccas which you may still admire on a roll of papyrus painted in the valley of the Nile three thousand years ago.
Now if you will kindly look at the map of the Gulf Stream (there are several in this book) you will see that the Gulf Stream, after having crossed the ocean from Africa to America, re-crosses the northern part of the Atlantic from the south-west to the north-east in a leisurely fashion, bestows its blessings upon the coast of Norway, visits the Arctic Ocean and then decides to go home by way of Iceland and Greenland, where it changes its name and its temperature, to travel southward once more, first as the Greenland current and next as the Labrador current, that accursed stream which sprinkles chunks of .Greenland’s azure glaciers all over the northern part of the Atlantic.
The Norsemen, sailing by God and by guess, as my own ancestors used to call this procedure, had reached Iceland as early as the ninth century. Once, however, regular communications had, been established between Iceland and Europe, the discovery of Greenland and America became inevitable. Just as a Chinese or Japanese junk, blown out of its course, must inevitably reach the shores of British Columbia or California, being carried thither by the Kuro Siwo, the Gulf Stream of the Pacific, so a Norseman, bound from Trondheim to Iceland and being prevented by fog from locating his place of destination (and even to-day with all the instruments in the world, a fog is a terrible thing), would sooner or later find himself on the east coast of Greenland, or, if the fog continued and his luck held out, on the very coasts of the great land-barrier to the east which those early visitors called Vine- land, because it raised a kind of grape from which they could make an excellent sort of wine.
Now it is well to remember that there have been a great many discoveries made of which the world at large never heard at all. The average skipper has an instinctive fear of making a fool of himself before his colleagues by telling them a yarn which none of them will believe anyway and which afterwards may prove to have been the result of a hallucination, or of low clouds mistaken for a mountain-range, or a strip of sunlight, maybe, interpreted as a flat coast. Australia was undoubtedly seen from the distance by a number of French and Spanish sailors long before Abel Tasman set foot on shore and cut himself a new goosequill of the natives. The Azores and Canary Islands were discovered and forgotten and re-discovered so often that our school books have a hard time trying to find out just exactly when they should be first mentioned among the world’s great discoveries. French fishermen had undoubtedly found their way to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland centuries before the days of Columbus. But they merely told their neighbours that the fishing was good and let it go at that. Fish interested them. Another piece of land was just another piece of land. There was enough land in Brittany for everybody. Why worry about something that lay so far away from hone?
As in everything I have ever written, I have steadfastly defended the doctrine that humanity comes ahead of nationality. I shall not lose myself in the usual acrimonious disputes concerning the desirability of celebrating Columbus Day or Leif Ericsson Day or a day in honour of some French sailor who eventually may be dug out of the archives of Normandy. Suffice it to say that we have documentary evidence that the Norsemen visited America during the first ten years of the eleventh century and that a small group of sailors, preponderantly Spanish but with certain foreign admixtures and more or less obeying the commands of an Italian captain, visited those shores during the last ten years of the fifteenth century and that when they arrived there they found that they could not possibly be the original discoverers because the country was already inhabited by people who were of unmistakable Asiatic origin, wherefore, if the honour of “having been there first” must go to any specific group of people, the Mongolians are the logical candidates for all future commemorative tablets.
We have a monument to the Unknown Soldier. Another and slightly larger pile of marble erected to the Unknown Discoverer would not be out of place in America. But as the relatives of that poor man are now forbidden by law to set foot on the soil of our continent. I fear me that nothing will come of this plan.
Concerning the descendants of those first intrepid explorers who undoubtedly hailed from the Far East, we know a great deal, but the one thing that would really interest us will probably remain a mystery until the end of time. And that one thing is this how did the people of Asia actually reach the American continent? Did they sail across the narrow northern part of the Pacific Ocean, or did they walk across the ice of the Bering Strait, or did they come at a time when America and Asia were still connected by a narrow bridge of land? Well, we just don’t happen to know. Nor can I sec that it matters very much. When the white man reached these distant shores he came in contact with a race which, except in a few isolated spots, had barely passed out of the late stone age and which had not yet reached that stage of development when the wheel was used to relieve the human back of its manifold burdens, or when the domesticated animals had set their owners free from the everlasting drudgery of gaining a meagre daily livelihood by means of hunting and fishing. Even with his bows and arrows the copper-coloured man was no match for the white man who was able to kill his enemies at a distance by means of a gun.