Christopher Columbus and the Discovery of America
THE discovery of America was an accident. The brave sailors of the fifteenth century who turned the prows of their tiny vessels into the strange waters of the Atlantic Ages were seeking a new way to "the Indies," -a term vaguely used to denote not In-dia alone but also China, Japan, and all the Far Eastern countries of Asia. From these lands western Europe had for cen-turies been getting many of its luxuries and comforts. Ever-lengthening traders' caravans brought Orien-tal rugs, flowered silks, gems, spices, porcelains, damasks, dyes, drugs, perfumes, and precious woods across the plains and pla-teaus of middle Asia to the Persian Gulf and the Black Sea, or crept along the hot borders of the Arabian peninsula to the headwaters of the Red Sea. At the ports of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean the fleets of Venice and Genoa were waiting to carry the Indian merchandise to the distributing centers of southern Europe, whence it was conveyed over the Alpine passes or along the Rhone valley to the busy, prosperous towns of France, Germany, England, and the Netherlands.
1.The Turks block the trade routes (1300-1450)
But in the fourteenth century the Osmanli Turks - an aggres-sive, bigoted Mohammedan race-began to block the path of the Eastern traders. The Turks were determined not only to drive the Christians out of Asia, but to cross over into Europe them-selves. In 1453 they captured the great city of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine, or eastern Roman, Empire. In the following decades they dislodged the "Franks" (as they called all Europeans) from Syria, Asia Minor, and the islands of the Ægean Sea. The Venetian and Genoese trade was ruined by these wars, which practically closed the eastern end of the Medi-terranean to European vessels, and made it of the utmost im-portance to discover new routes to the rich treasure lands of the Indies.
2. The progress of maritime science in the fifteenth century
Under the stimulus of this practical need the study of geog-raphy and the science of navigation flourished in the fifteenth century. Hundreds of portolani, or sailing charts, were drawn by the Italian and Portuguese mariners. Six new editions of the "Geography" of Ptolemy were published between 1472 and 1492.¹ The compass and the astrolabe (for measuring latitude) were perfected. Ships were designed to sail close to the wind and to stand the buffeting of the high ocean waves. Before the end of the fifteenth century Portuguese sailors had pushed nearly a thousand miles westward into the uncharted Atlantic, and were creeping mile by mile down the western coast of Africa. In 1486 Bartholomew Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and had not his crew refused to go farther from home, he might have stood out across the Indian Ocean and reached the Spice Islands of the East and all the cities of the Chinese Empire.
3. Christo-pher Columbus seeks aid for a westward voyage to the Indies
While Dias was making his way back to Portugal an Italian mariner from Genoa, named Cristoforo Colombo, better known by his Latinized name of Columbus, who had become convinced by his geographical studies that he could reach the Indies by sailing westward across the Atlantic, was seeking aid for his project at the courts of Europe. He first applied to the king of Portugal, in whose service he had already made several voy-ages down the African coast. On being repulsed he transferred his request to Ferdinand and Isabella, the sovereigns of Spain, and at the same time sent his brother Bartholomew, who had been with Dias on his famous voyage, to solicit the support of King Henry VII of England.
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| The Toscanelli Map of 1474 The outline of the Western Continent is in red, showing its actual position |
4. Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain fur-nisa himpril 1492.
Columbus had despaired of enlisting the interest of the Span-ish sovereigns, and was about to start for Paris, when the influ-ence of some important persons at the Spanish court procured him a favorable audience. He met Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 their gorgeous camp before Granada, from which city they had just driven out the last of the Moorish rulers in Spain. In the auspicious moment of victory the sovereigns were moved to grant Columbus financial aid for his project, to confer upon him a title of nobility, and to create him admiral of all the lands and islands which he might find on his voyage. This was in April, 1492. By the following August, Columbus was ready to start from Palos, with three small ships and about a hundred sailors, on what proved to be the most momentous voyage in history.
5. Columbus's geographical knowledge.
Columbus was a student as well as a man of affairs. His son Ferdinand tells us in his " Biography" that his father was influ-enced by the old Arabian and Greek astronomers. There are geographical works in existence with notes in Columbus's hand-writing in the margin. He shared with the best scholars of his day the long-established belief in the sphericity of the earth.¹ As a guide for his voyage he had a chart made for the king of Portugal in 1474, by the Florentine astronomer Toscanelli, to demonstrate that the Indies could be reached by sailing west-ward. Toscanelli had calculated the size of the earth almost exactly, but, misled by the description of travelers to the Far East, he had made the continent of Asia extend eastward almost all the way across the Pacific Ocean, so that Cipango (or Japan) on his map occupied the actual position of Mexico. Columbus therefore, although not deceived as to the length of voyage necessary to reach land, was deceived to the day of his death as to the land he reached at the end of his voyage.
6. Columbus crosses the Atlantic, September- October, 1492
The little trio of vessels, favored by clear skies and a steady east wind, made the passage from the Canary Islands to the Bahamas in five weeks. No storms racked the ships, but still it was a fearsome voyage over the quiet seas. To the trembling crews each mile westward was a further venture into the great mysterious sea of darkness," where horrible monsters might be waiting to engulf them, where the fabled mountain of load-stone might draw the nails from their ships, or the dreaded boring worm puncture their wooden keels. The auspicious and unvarying east wind itself was a menace. How could they ever get home again in the face of it? And if the world was round, as their captain said, were they not daily sliding down its slope, which they could never remount? Dark faces and ominous whisperings warned Columbus of his danger. Early in October there were overt signs of mutiny, but the great pilot quelled the discontent, saying that complain as they might, he must reach the Indies, and would sail on until with God's help he found them. His courage was rewarded, for the very next night he espied a light ahead, and when day dawned (October 12, 1492) the sandy beach of an island lay spread before the eyes of his wearied crew. Surrounded by the naked awe-stricken natives, Columbus took solemn pos-session of the land in the name of Ferdinand and Isa-== bella, and called it San Salvador ("Holy Saviour").
7. He is dis appointed in finding the cities of Cathay, and returns to Spain.
He then continued his voyage among the small islands of the Bahamas, seeking the mainland of Cathay (China). When he reached the apparently interminable coast of Cuba, he was sure that he was at the gates of the kingdom of the Great Khan, and that the cities of China with their fabulous wealth would soon hear the voice of his Arab interpreter, presenting to the monarch of the East the greetings and gifts of the sovereigns of Spain. He was doomed to disappointment. The misfortunes which dogged his steps to the end of his life now began. Martin Pinzon, pilot of the Pinta, deserted him on the coast of Cuba. His largest caravel, the Santa Maria, was wrecked on Christmas Day on the coast of Hayti, which he mistook for the long-sought Cipango, and he hastened back to Spain in the remaining vessel, the tiny Niña. He was hailed with enthusiasm by the nation, and loaded with honors by his sovereigns, who had no suspicion that he had failed to reach the islands lying off the rich lands of the East, or that he had discovered still richer lands in the west.
8. Columbus's later voyages (1493-1502); his disgrace and death (1506).
Columbus made three more voyages to the "Indies" in 1493, 1498, and 1502. On the voyage of 1498 he discovered the mainland of South America, and in 1502 he sailed along the coast of Central America, vainly attempting to find a strait which would let him through to the main coast of Cathay. All the while the clouds of misfortune were gathering about him. His costly expeditions had so far brought no wealth to Spain. While his ships were skirting the pestilential coasts of South America, the Portuguese Vasco da Gama had reached the real Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, and brought back to Lisbon cargoes of spices, satins, damask, ivory, and gold (see map, p. 10). The Spanish sovereigns were jealous of the laurels of the Portuguese mariners. Mutiny, shipwreck, and fever were lighter evils for Columbus to contend with than the plots of his enemies and the envious disappointment of the grandees of Spain. One of the Spanish governors of Hayti sent him home in irons. His little sons, Diego and Ferdinand, who were pages in the queen's service, were jeered at as they passed through the courtyard of the Alhambra: "There go the sons of the Ad-miral of the Mosquitoes, who has discovered lands of vanity and delusion as the miserable graves of Castilian gentlemen." Re-turning from his fourth voyage in 1504, he found his best friend at court, Queen Isabella, on her deathbed; and bowed with discouragement, illness, humiliation, and poverty, he followed her to the grave in 1506. So passed away in misery and ob-scurity a man whose service to mankind was beyond calculation. His wonderful voyage of 1492 had linked together the two hemi-spheres of our planet, and "mingled the two streams of human life which had flowed for countless ages apart" (John Fiske).
9. Pope Alexander VI's "de-marcation mark 1493.
Had Columbus and his fellow voyagers known that a solid barrier of land reaching from arctic to antarctic snows, and beyond that another ocean vaster than the one they had just crossed, lay between the islands they mistakenly called the Indies and the real Indies of the East, they would have prob-ably abandoned the thought of a western route and returned to contest with Portugal the search for the Indies via the Cape of Good Hope. As it was, the Spanish sovereigns, confident that their pilots had reached the edge of Asia, asked of Pope Alexander VI a "bull." (or formal papal decree) admitting them to a share with Portugal in all lands and islands which should be discovered in the search for the Indies. The Pope, who was quite generally recognized in Europe as the arbiter of inter-national disputes, acceded to the request, and in his bull of 1493 divided the undiscovered world between Spain and Portugal by a "demarcation" line, which was determined the next year at 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. All lands discov-ered to the west of this line were to belong to Spain; those to the east, to Portugal.
10. John Cabot reaches the mainland of the west-ern conti-nent, 1497
The Pope's bull, however, did not deter the other nations of Europe from taking part in the search for the Indies by both the eastern and the western routes. The honor of being the first of the mariners of Columbus's time to reach the mainland of the western continent belongs to John Cabot, an Italian in the serv-ice of King Henry VII of England. In the summer of 1497, while the Spanish navigators were still tarrying among the West Indies, Cabot sailed with one ship from Bristol, and after plant-ing the banner of England somewhere on the coast of Labrador, returned to plan a larger expedition. The voyage of 1497 created great excitement in England for a time. "This Venetian of ours who went in search of new islands is returned," wrote an Italian in London to his brother at home; "his name is Zuan Cabot, and they all call him the great admiral. Vast honor is paid him, and he dresses in silk. These English run after him like mad people." The more prosaic account book of Henry VII contains the entry: "To hym that found the new isle 10f." But interest in Cabot's voyage soon died out. The importance of the voyage for us is that it was for two centuries made the basis of England's claims to the whole mainland of North America.
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| Christopher Columbus (A painting image ) |
11. The Voyage of Amerigo Vespucci (Americus Vespucius), 1501-1502.
Cabot's name is not connected with mountain, river, state, or town in the New World, but the name of another Italian became the birth name of the continent. Amerigo Vespucci was a Florentine merchant established at Cadiz in Spain. He helped fit out Columbus's fleet, and catching the fever for maritime ad-venture, he joined the goodly company of navigators. In 1501 he made a most remarkable voyage in the service of the king of Portugal. Sailing from Lisbon, he struck the coast of South America at Cape San Roque, and running south to the thirty-fourth parallel, found the constant westward trend of the coast carrying him across the Pope's line separating Portuguese from Spanish territory. So he turned south by east into the Atlantic, and reached the icebound crags of a desert island, 54° south latitude. Again heading northeast, he struck boldly across the south Atlantic and reached the coast of Sierra Leone in a straight course of four thousand miles (see map, p. 10). This voyage, which lasted over a year, showed that the land along whose northern shores the Spanish navigators had sailed was not an island off the southeastern coast of Asia, but a great continent. It led also to the naming of the western continent.
12. The "new world," revealed by Vespucci's voyage, called "America," 1507
Vespucci wrote to Italian friends: "We found what may be called a new world... since most of the ancients said that there was no continent below the equator." Vespucci's "new world," then, was a new southern continent. In 1507 the faculty of the college of St. Dié, in the Vosges Mountains, were preparing a new edition of Ptolemy's "Geography." Martin Waldseemüller wrote an introduction to the edition, in which he included one of Vespucci's letters, and made the suggestion that since in addi-tion to Europe, Asia, and Africa, "another fourth part has been discovered by Americus Vespucius... I do not see what fairly hinders us from calling it Amerige or America, viz., the land of Americus." At the same time Waldseemüller made a map of the world on which he placed the new continent and named it America. This map was lost for centuries, and scholars were almost convinced that it never existed, when in the summer of 1901 an Austrian professor found it in the library of a castle in Württemberg. It had evidently circulated enough before its dis-appearance to fix the name "America" on the new southern continent, whence it spread to the land north of the Isthmus of Panama.
13. Why the New World was not named for its real discoverer, Columbus
The admirers of Columbus from the sixteenth century to the twentieth have cried out against the injustice of the name "America" instead of "Columbia" for the New World, "as if the Sistine Madonna had been called not by Raphael's name, but by the name of the man who first framed it." But there was no injustice done, at least with intent. "America" was a name invented for what was thought to be a new world south of the equator, whereas Columbus and his associates believed that they had only found a new way to the Old World. When it was realized that Columbus had really discovered the new world of which Vespucci wrote, it was too late to remedy the mistake in the name. So it came about that this continent was named, by an obscure German professor in a French college, after an Italian navigator in the service of the king of Portugal.
A CENTURY OF EXPLORATION AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH
The spirit of ex-ploration in the sixteenth century
From the death of Columbus (1506) to the planting of the first permanent English colony on the shores of America (1607) just a century elapsed, - a century filled with romantic voyages and thrilling tales of exploration and conquest in the New World. Nowadays men explore new countries for scientific study of the native races or the soil and its products, or to open up new markets for trade and develop the hidden resources of the land; but in the romantic sixteenth century Spanish noblemen tramped through the swamps and tangles of Florida to find the fountain of perpetual youth, or toiled a thousand miles over the western desert, lured by the dazzling gold of fabled cities of splendor. The sixteenth century was furthermore a century of intense reli-gious belief; so we find a grim spirit of missionary zeal mingled with the thirst for gold. The cross was planted in the wilderness, and the soldiers knelt in thanksgiving on the ground stained by the blood of their heretical neighbors.
17. Eastern Asia the object of the explorers' search
Of course it was Asia with its fabulous wealth, not America with its savage tracts and tribes, which was the real goal of European explorers. Until even far into the seventeenth century the mariners were searching the northern coast of America for a way around the continent, and hailing the broad mouth of each new river as a possible passage to the Indies. Columbus in his fourth voyage (1502) had skirted the coast of Central America to find the passage to Cathay, and Vespucci in his great voy-age of 1501-1502 had followed the South American coast far enough to demonstrate that he had found a "new world," even if he had not discovered a gateway to the East.
18. Magel-lan's ship sails around the world, 1519-1522
With Columbus and Vespucci we must rank a third mariner, Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese in the service of the king of Spain. In September, 1519, Magellan with five ships and about three hundred men started on what proved to be perhaps the most romantic voyage in history. Reaching the Brazilian coast, he made his way south, and after quelling a dangerous mutiny in his winter quarters on the bleak coast of Patagonia, entered the narrow straits (since called by his name) at the extremity of South America. A stormy passage of five weeks through the tortuous narrows brought him out on the calm waters of an ocean to which, in grateful relief, he gave the name "Pacific."¹ Magellan met worse trials than storms, how-ever, when he put out into the Pacific. Week after week he sailed westward across the smiling but apparently interminable sea, little dreaming that he had embarked on waters which cover nearly half the globe. Hunger grew to starvation, thirst to mad-ness. Twice on the voyage of ten thousand miles land appeared to the eyes of the famished sailors, only to prove a barren, rocky island. At last the inhabited islands of Australasia were reached. Magellan himself was killed in a fight with the natives of the Philippine Islands, but his sole seaworthy ship, the Vic-toria, continued westward across the Indian Ocean, and rounding the Cape of Good Hope, reached Lisbon with a crew of eighteen "ghostlike men," September 6, 1522.
19. Signifi-cance of Magellan's voyage
Magellan's ship had circumnavigated the globe. His wonder-ful voyage proved conclusively the sphericity of the earth, and showed the great preponderance of water over land. It demon-strated that America was not a group of islands off the Asiatic coast (as Columbus had thought), nor even a southern conti-nent reaching down in a peninsula from the corner of China (see maps, pp. 18-19), but a continent set in its own hemisphere, and separated on the west from the old world of Cathay by a far greater expanse of water than on the east from the old world of Europe. It still required generations of explorers to develop the true size and shape of the western continent; but Magellan's wonderful voyage had located the continent at last in its relation to the known countries of the world.
20. Cortez's conquest of Mexico, 1519-1521
While Magellan's starving sailors were battling their way across the Pacific, stirring scenes were being enacted in Mexico. The Spaniards, starting from Hayti as a base, had conquered and colonized Porto Rico and Cuba (1508), and sent expedi-tions west to the Isthmus of Panama (Balboa, 1513), and north to Florida (Ponce de Leon, 1513). In 1519 Hernando Cortez, a Spanish adventurer of great courage and sagacity, was sent by the governor of Cuba to conquer and plunder the rich Indian kingdom which explorers had found to the north of the isthmus. This was the Aztec confederacy of Indian tribes under an emperor," Montezuma. The land was rich in silver and gold ;
the people were skilled in art and architecture. They had an elaborate religion with splendid temples, but practiced the cruel rite of human sacrifices. Their capital city of Mexico was situ-ated on an island in the middle of a lake, and approached by four causeways from the four cardinal points of the compass. One of their religious legends told of a fair-haired god of the sky (Quetzacoatl), who had been driven out to sea, but who would return again to rule over them in peace and plenty. When the natives saw the Spaniard with his "white-winged towers" mov-ing on the sea, they thought that the "fair god" had returned. Cortez was not slow to follow up this advantage. His belching cannon and armored knights increased the superstitious awe of the natives. By a rare combination of courage and intrigue, Cortez seized their ruler, Montezuma, captured their capital, and made their ancient and opulent realm a dependency of Spain (1521). It was the first sure footing of the Spaniards on the American continent, and served as an important base for further exploration and conquest.
21. Spanish pathfinders in America, 1520-1550
The twenty years following Cortez's conquest of Mexico mark the height of Spanish exploration in America. From Kansas to Chile, and from the Carolinas to the Pacific, the flag and speech of Spain were carried. No feature of excitement and romance is absent from the vivid accounts which the heroes of these expeditions have left us. Now it is a survivor of ship-wreck in the Mexican Gulf, making his way from tribe to tribe across the vast stretches of Texas and Mexico to the Gulf of California (Cabeza de Vaca, 1528-1536); now it is the ruffian captain Pizarro, repeating south of the isthmus the conquest of Cortez, and adding the untold wealth of the silver mines of Peru to the Spanish treasury (1531-1533); now it is the noble governor De Soto, with his train of six hundred knights in "doublets and cassocks of silk" and his priests in splendid vestments, with his Portuguese in shining armor, his horses, hounds, and hogs, all ready for a triumphal procession to king-doms of gold and ivory - but doomed to toil, with his famished and ambushed host, through tangle and swamp from Georgia to Arkansas, and finally to leave his fever-stricken body at the bottom of the Mississippi, beneath the waters "alwaies muddie, down which there came continually manie trees and timber" (1539-1542); now it is Coronado and his three hundred fol-lowers, intent on finding the seven fabled cities of Cibola, and chasing the golden mirage of the western desert from the Pacific coast of Mexico to the present state of Kansas (1540-1542). For all this vast expenditure of blood and treasure, not a Spanish settlement existed north of the Gulf of Mexico in the middle of the sixteenth century. The Spaniards were gold seekers, not colonizers. They had found a few savages living in cane houses and mud pueblos, but the fountain of perpetual youth and the cities of gold they had not found. They could not, of course, foresee the wealth which one day would be derived from the rich lands through which they had so painfully struggled; and the survivors returned to the Mexican towns discouraged and disillusioned.
22. The Spanish empire in america
South and west of the Gulf of Mexico, however, and in the 22. The islands of the West Indies the Spaniards had built up a huge empire. The discovery of gold in Hayti, and the conquest of the America rich treasures of Mexico and Peru, brought thousands of ad-venturers and tens of thousands of negro slaves to tropical America. Spain governed the American lands despotically. Commerce and justice were exclusively regulated through the "India House" at Seville. The Spanish culture was intro-duced. In the year 1536 a printing press was set up,¹ and shortly after the middle of the century universities were opened in Mexico and Peru. The essential features of the Spanish gov-ernment also were brought across the ocean, - its absolutism in government and in religion. Trade was restricted to certain ports; heretics and their descendants to the third generation were excluded from the colonies; the natives were almost exter-minated by the rigors of the slave driver in the mines. The land was the property of the sovereign, and by him was granted to nobles, who, under the guise of protecting and converting the natives, made their fiefs great slave estates, and treated both Indians and negroes with frightful cruelty.
23. Bartolomeo the Houses
On the dark background of the Spanish-American slave sys-tem one figure stands out in dazzling moral brightness, - the saintly bishop, Las Casas, who in an age when slavery was gen-erally practiced by the most enlightened nations of the world, devoted his life to the emancipation of the negro and Indian slaves in Spanish America. Las Casas came out to the Indies in 1502. He was himself a slave owner, until, converted by the sermon of a Dominican friar, he freed his own slaves and en-tered on his long crusade for emancipation. Contending against hatred, jealousy, and court intrigue, he persuaded the emperor Charles V to put an emancipation clause in the "New Laws" for the Indies (1542), and brought the document to America to enforce in person. In one of the worst regions of Central America, called the "land of war," he demonstrated the pos-sibility of human brotherhood by establishing a free colony and winning the love and devotion of the natives. His "History of the Indies" is one of the most valuable accounts of Spanish America in the earliest years.
24. French explorers in North America; Verrazano and Cartier.
The Spaniards were the chief, but not the only, explorers in America in the sixteenth century. In 1524 the king of France, scorning the papal bull of 1493, and jocosely asking to see old Adam's will bequeathing the world to Spain and Portugal, sent his Italian navigator, Verrazano, to seek the Indies by the west-ern route. Verrazano sailed and charted the coast of North America from Labrador to the Carolinas, but did not find a route to Asia. Ten years later Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence River to the Indian village on the site of Mont-real. There his way to China was blocked by the rapids which were later named Lachine ("China" rapids). But wars, foreign and civil, absorbed the strength of France during the last half of the sixteenth century, and, with one trifling exception, projects of colonization slept until the return of peace and the accession to the throne of the glorious King Henry of Navarre (1589).
25. The Eng-lish sea rovers in Eliza-beth's reign, 1558-1603
War, which was the death of French enterprise, was the very life of English colonial activity, which had languished since John Cabot's day. England and Spain became bitter rivals religious, commercial, political-during Elizabeth's reign (1558-1603). England was fighting for her very life and the life of the Protestant cause against the aggressive Catholic monarch Philip II. She had no army to attack Philip in his Spanish penin-sula, but she sent troops to aid the revolting Netherlands, and struck at the very roots of Philip's power by attacking his treasure-laden fleets from the Indies. England's dauntless sea-men, Hawkins, Davis, Cavendish, and above all Sir Francis Drake, performed marvels of daring against the Spaniards, scouring the coasts of America and the high seas for their treasure ships, fighting single-handed against whole fleets, cir-cumnavigating the globe with their booty, and even sailing into the harbors of Spain to "singe King Philip's beard" by burn-ing his ships and docks.
26. Attempts of Gilbert and Raleigh to found colonies. in America, 1578-1591
From capturing the Spanish gold on the seas to contending with Spain for the possession of the golden land was but a step; and we find the veteran soldier, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, receiving in 1578 a patent from Queen Elizabeth to " inhabit and possess all remote and heathen lands not in the actual possession of any Christian prince." Gilbert was unsuccessful in founding a colony on the bleak coast of Newfoundland, and his little ship foundered on her return voyage. His patent was handed on to his half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, Elizabeth's favorite courtier. Raleigh's ships sought milder latitudes, and a colony was landed on Roanoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina (1585). The land, at Elizabeth's own suggestion, was named "Virginia," in honor of the "Virgin Queen." The colonists sought diligently for gold and explored the coasts and rivers for a passage to Cathay.
But misfortune overtook them, supplies failed to come from England on time, and the colony was abandoned. Again and again Raleigh tried to found an enduring settlement (1585, 1586, 1587, 1589), but the struggle with Spain absorbed the attention of the nation, and the planters preferred gold hunting to agriculture. Raleigh sank a private fortune equivalent to a million dollars in his enterprise, and finally abandoned it with the optimistic prophecy to Lord Cecil: "I shall yet live to see it an Inglishe nation." He did live to see the beginnings of an ९९ Inglishe nation" in Virginia, but it was from his prison, where he lay under sentence of death, treacherously procured by the envy of the Stuart king who followed the "spacious times of great Elizabeth."
27. The North Ameri-can Indians.
The opening of the seventeenth century found America, north of the Gulf of Mexico (except for one or two feeble Spanish settlements), still the undisputed possession of the native Indian tribes. Wherever the European visitors had struck the western continent, whether on the shores of Labrador or the tropical islands of the Caribbean Sea, on the wide plains of the south-west or the slopes of the Andes, they had found a scantily clad, copper-colored race of men with high cheek bones and straight black hair. Columbus, thinking he had reached the Indies, called the curious, friendly inhabitants who came running down to his ships, Indians, and that inappropriate name has been used ever since to designate the natives of the western hemisphere.
28. Civiliza-tion of the Indians of Mexico andca.
None of the North American Indians had reached the stage of civilization characterized by an alphabet and literature, al-though all but some Rocky Mountain and Pacific coast tribes had passed beyond the stage of the savage hunter, housed in his flimsy tepee or skin tent, and living on the quarry of his bow and arrow. In Mexico, Central America, and South America the Spanish explorers and conquerors found a higher native development in art, industry, mythology, architecture, and agriculture than was later found among the Indians of the north. Even the germ of an organized state existed in the Aztec confederacy of Mexico. Huge pueblos, or communal houses, made of adobe (clay), were built around a square or semicircular court in rising tiers reached by ladders. A single pueblo some-times housed a thousand persons. The Aztec and Inca chiefs in Mexico and Peru lived in elaborately decorated "palaces." Still the natives of these regions were by no means so highly civilized a race as the exaggerated accounts of the Spanish con-querors often imply. They had not invented such simple con-trivances as stairs, chimneys, and wheeled vehicles. They could neither forge iron nor build arched bridges. Their intellectual range is shown by the knotted strings which they used for mathematical calculations, and their moral degradation appears in the shocking human sacrifices of their barbarous religion.
29. The tribes north of the Gulf of Mexico.
The Indian tribes north of the Gulf of Mexico had generally reached the stage of development called "lower barbarism," a stage of pottery making and rude agricultural science. Midway between the poor tepee of the Pacific coast savage and the im-posing pueblo of Mexico was the ordinary "long house" or "round house" of the village Indians from Canada to Florida. The house was built of stout saplings, covered with bark or a rough mud plaster. Along a central aisle, or radiating from a central hearth, were ranged the separate family compartments, divided by thin walls. Forty or fifty families usually lived in the house, sharing their food of corn, beans, pumpkins, wild turkey, fish, bear, and buffalo meat in common. Only their clothing, ornaments, and weapons were personal property. The women of the tribe prepared the food, tended the children, made the utensils and ornaments of beads, feathers, and skins, and strung the polished shells or "wampum" which the Indian used for money and for correspondence. The men were occupied with war, the hunt, and the council. In their leisure they repaired their bows, sharpened new arrowheads, or stretched the smooth bark of the birch tree over their canoe frames. They had a great variety of games and dances, solemn and gay; and they loved to bask idly in the sun, too, like the Mississippi negro of to-day.
In character the Indian showed the most astonishing extremes, now immovable as a rock, now capricious as the April breeze. Around the council fire he was taciturn, dignified, thoughtful, but in the dance he broke into unrestrained and uncontrollable ecstasies. He bore with stoical fortitude the most horrible tor-tures at the stake, but howled in his wigwam over an injured fin-ger. His powers of smell, sight, and hearing were incredibly keen on the hunt or the warpath, but at the same time he showed a stolid stupidity that no white man could match. The Indian seems to have been generally friendly to the European on their first meeting, and it was chiefly the fault of the white man's cruelty and treachery that the friendly curiosity of the red man was turned so often into malignant hatred instead of firm alliance.
30. the future of the indians.
There were probably never more than a few hundred thou- 30. The future of the sand Indians in America. Their small number perhaps accounts Indians for their lack of civilization. At any rate their development reached its highest point in the thickly settled funnel-shaped region south of the Mexican boundary, where it has been sug-gested that they were crowded by the advance of a glacial ice sheet from the north. There are about 225,000 Indians living within the boundaries of the United States. Many tribes have died out; others have been almost completely exterminated or as-similated by the whites. The surviving Indians, on their western reservations or in the government schools, are rapidly learning the ways of the white men. It is to be hoped that their education will be wisely fostered, and that instead of the billion dollars spent on the forty Indian wars of the nineteenth century, a few hundred thousand dollars spent in the twentieth century on Indian schools like Hampton and Carlisle will forever divest the word "Indian " of its associations with the tomahawk, torture, and treachery.