MASSON. Quebec. 1890. Two volumes.

New Light on the Early History of the Greater North-West: The Manuscript Journals of Alexander Henry, Jun., and of David Thompson. Edited by ELLIOTT COUES. Three Volumes. New York. Harper. 1897.

Sport and Travel in the Northland of Canada. By DAVID T. HANBURY. London. Edward Arnold. 1904.

Henry Hudson the Navigator, &c. By G.M. ASHER. London. Hakluyt Society, 1860.

The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher. By Rear-Admiral RICHARD COLLINSON. London. Hakluyt Society. 1867.

The Voyages and Works of John Davis the Navigator. By Admiral Sir ALBERT HASTINGS MARKHAM. London. Hakluyt Society. 1880.

The Voyages of William Baffin, 1612-1622. By Sir CLEMENTS R. MARKHAM. London. 1881.

CHAPTER I

The White Man's Discovery of North America

So far as our knowledge goes, it is almost a matter of certainty that Man originated in the Old World—in Asia possibly. Long after this wonderful event in the Earth's history, when the human species was spread over a good deal of Asia, Europe, and Africa, migration to the American continents began in attempts to find new feeding grounds and unoccupied areas for hunting and fishing. How many thousands or hundreds of thousands of years ago it was since the first men entered America we do not yet know, any more than we can determine the route by which they travelled from Asia. Curiously enough, the oldest traces of man as yet discovered in the New World are not only in South America, but in the south-eastern parts of South America. Although the most obvious recent land connection between the Old and New Worlds is the Aleutian chain of islands connecting Kamschatka with Alaska, the ethnologist is occasionally led to think by certain evidence that there may, both earlier and later, have existed another way of reaching western America from south-eastern Asia through Pacific archipelagoes and islets now sunk below the sea. In any case it seems quite probable that men of Mongolian or Polynesian type reached America on its western coasts long before the European came from the north-east and east, and that they were helped on this long journey by touching at islands since submerged by earthquake shocks or tidal waves.

The aboriginal natives of North and South America seem to be of entirely Asiatic origin; and such resemblances as there are between the North-American Indians and the peoples of northern Europe do not arise (we believe) from any ancient colonization of America from western or northern Europe, but mainly from the fact that the North-American Indians and the Eskimo (two distinct types of people) are descended from the same human stocks as the ancient populations of the northern part of Europe and Asia.

It was—we think—from the far north-west of Europe that America was first visited by the true White man, though there has been an ancient immigration of imperfect "White" men (Ainu) from Kamschatka. Three or four hundred years after the birth of Christ there were great race movements in northern and central Europe, due to an increase of population and insufficiency of food. Not only did these white barbarians (though they were not as barbarous as we were led to think by Greek and Roman literature) invade southern Europe, North Africa, and Asia Minor, but from the fourth century of the Christian era onwards they began to cross over to England and Scotland. At the same time they took more complete possession of Scandinavia, driving north before their advance the more primitive peoples like the Lapps and Finns, who were allied to the stock from which arose both the Eskimo and the Amerindian.[1] All this time the Goths and Scandinavians were either learning ideas of navigation from the Romans of the Mediterranean or the Greeks of the Black Sea, or they were inventing for themselves better ways of constructing ships; and although they propelled them mainly by oars, they used masts and sails as well.[2] Having got over the fear of the sea sufficiently to reach the coasts of England and Scotland, the Hebrides, Orkneys, and Shetlands, they became still more venturesome in their voyages from Norway, until they discovered the Faroe Archipelago (which tradition says they found inhabited by wild sheep), and then the large island of Iceland, which had, however, already been reached and settled by the northern Irish.

Iceland, though it lies so far to the north that it is partly within the Arctic Circle, is, like Norway, Scotland, and Ireland, affected by the Gulf Stream, so that considerable portions of it are quite habitable. It is not almost entirely covered with ice, as Greenland is; in fact, Iceland should be called Greenland (from the large extent of its grassy pastures), and Greenland should be called Iceland. Instead of this, however, the early Norwegian explorers called these countries by the names they still bear.

The Norse rovers from Norway and the Hebrides colonized Iceland from the year 850; and about a hundred and thirty-six years afterwards, in their venturesome journeys in search of new lands, they reached the south-east and south-west coasts of Greenland. Owing to the glacial conditions and elevated character of this vast continental island (more than 500,000 sq. miles in area)—for the whole interior of Greenland rises abruptly from the sea-coast to altitudes of from 5000 to 11,000 ft.—this discovery was of small use to the early Norwegians or their Iceland colony. After it was governed by the kingdom of Norway in the thirteenth century, the Norse colonization of south-west Greenland faded away under the attacks of the Eskimo, until it ceased completely in the fifteenth century. When Denmark united herself with the kingdom of Norway in 1397, the Danish king became also the ruler of Iceland. In the eighteenth century the Norwegian and Danish settlements were re-established along the south-east and south-west coasts of Greenland, mainly on account of the value of the whale, seal, and cod fisheries in the seas around this enormous frozen island; and all Greenland is now regarded as a Danish possession.

But the adventurous Norsemen who first reached Greenland from Iceland attempted to push their investigations farther to the south-west, in the hope of discovering more habitable lands; and in this way it was supposed that their voyages extended as far as Massachusetts and Rhode Island, but in all probability they reached no farther than Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. This portion of North America they called "Vinland", more from the abundance of cranberries (vinbær) on the open spaces than the few vines to be found in the woods of Nova Scotia.[3]

This brings us down to the year 1008. The Icelandic Norsemen then ceased their investigations of the North-American Continent, and were too ignorant to realize the value of their discoveries. Their colonies on the coasts of Nova Scotia ("Vinland") and Newfoundland ("Estotiland") were attacked probably by Eskimos, at any rate by a short, thick-set, yellow-skinned ugly people whom the Norsemen called "Skræling",[4] who overcame