To Monseigneur, Count Frontenac, Councillor of the King, Governor and Lieutenant-General for his Majesty in Canada, Acadia, Newfoundland and in the country of New France. Monseigneur I take pleasure in presenting to you this map which will enable you to understand the location of the rivers and lakes on which one travels through Canada or North America, which is more than 1,200 leagues from East to West. That great river (the Mississippi) beyond Lake Huron and Lake Illinois (or Michigan), which bears your name, the River Buade, since it was discovered in these last two years, 1673 and 1674, as a result of the first orders you gave me as you entered on the government of New France, flows between Florida and Mexico, and on its way to the sea runs through the most beautiful country imaginable. I have seen nothing in France so beautiful as the abundance of fine prairies and nothing so pleasant as the varieties of groves and forests where one can pick plums, pomegranates, lemons and several small fruits which are not found in Europe. In the fields, quail rise; in the woods, parrots are seen; and in the rivers one catches fish which cannot be identified by taste, shape or size. Iron mines and reddish rocks, never found except with copper, are not rare, likewise slate, saltpetre, coal, marble, and alloys of copper. The largest pieces of copper that I saw were as large as a fist and free from impurities. It was discovered near the reddish rocks which are much like those of France and numerous. All the savages have wooden canoes, fifty feet and more in length; they do not care for deer as food, but they kill buffalo, which roam in herds of thirty or fifty. I have myself counted 400 on the banks of the river, and turkeys are extremely common. They harvest Indian corn generally three times a year, and they have watermelons for refreshment in the heat, since there is no ice and very little snow. One of the great rivers running into the Mississippi from the West gives a passage into the Gulf of California (Mer Vermeille). I saw a village which is only five days' journey from a tribe which trades with the natives of California. If I had arrived two days earlier I could have talked to those who had come and had brought four hatchets as a present. The description of everything could have been seen in my diary, if the good fortune which attended me all through the journey had not failed me a quarter of an hour before arriving at the place from which I had departed. I had escaped the dangers from the savages, I had passed forty rapids and was about to land with all possible joy over the success of such a long and difficult undertaking when my canoe was overturned and I lost two men and my chest, in sight of and at the doors of the first French houses that I had left nearly two years before. Nothing is left to me but my life and the desire to use it for whatever will please you. Monseigneur, your very humble and obedient servant and subject, xii JOLIET PART I THE NEW WORLD CHAPTER I DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION Introduction. IDEAS AND EVENTS LEADING UP TO THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA FOR centuries before Columbus the seas which stretched away from the coasts of Europe had remained an expanse of mystery and wonder. Ships had crept cautiously out upon their waters and back again, but no one had ventured to sail away from land for days and days, with no signs of hope from the apparently limitless waste, sustained only by faith in his own enterprise, until Columbus dared, and solved the mystery. In view of the results that have come from his ventures, his may be accounted the greatest discovery in the history of the world. Certainly his bold incursions into the mystery of the western horizon mark the beginning of American history. great idea and among the early Greeks. its source Rejecting the common belief that the world was flat, Christopher Columbus maintained that it was round and that by sailing westward he could come to China and Japan in the East. Where Columbus's did he get this idea? It was not new, for the Greeks had held it two thousand years before him. At the very dawn of Greek civilization Homer had asserted that the earth was wheel-shaped and flat, surrounded on all sides by the ocean, beyond which was mythland; but Aristotle, in the fourth century before Christ, noting the circular shadow of the earth on the moon during an eclipse, and the different altitudes of the North Star at different places, reached the conclusion that the earth was spherical, and wrote that those who said that the sea was one from Gibraltar to India "do not assert things very improbable." After the decline of Greek civilization, the idea did not completely die out, but was handed down to modern times through the Mohammedans, from whom Columbus himself may have derived it in southern Spain, where Mohammedan civilization, though on the decline, was still prevalent in his day. In the thirteenth century, Roger Bacon in England gave Aristotle's theory a place in Christian literature in his "Opus Majus," and his words were later repeated in a Latin book called "Imago Mundi," which we know influenced Columbus. From 1472 to 1492 Europe saw several new editions of Ptolemy's old Greek geography, dating from the second century after Christ and based upon the Scientific data in Columbus's day concerning the shape of the earth. theory that the world was round. In Columbus's time, too, the modern globe was slowly coming into use to represent the Greek conception of the earth's rotundity, and Columbus may have had opportunity to study one of these, or possibly he may have owned one himself. The Behaim globe of his day is still in existence. Finally, the Florentine astronomer, Toscanelli, to whom Columbus wrote for advice, furnished him with geographical data based on the Greek conception, though both Behaim and Toscanelli underestimated the CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS size of the earth and extended the continent of Asia so as to locate Cipango (Japan) about as far from Europe as is in actuality the Gulf of Mexico. It is possible that Columbus made a visit to Iceland before 1492, or that he talked with sailors and others who knew the Icelandic sea Possible sug- tales. These tales, called sagas, first reduced to writing gestions by in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, contained an account of certain old Icelandic or Norse sea rovers, who in the year 1000 or thereabouts, under the leadership of Leif Ericson, made a long ocean journey to a new land west and south of Greenland, where they found fields of "self-sown" grain and grapevines growing wild. This land they named Vinland. Since there is but one land west and south of Greenland, scholars generally believe that the Northmen reached the mainland of North America. Here to-day on the Atlantic coast is to be found a wild rice, which may be identified with the grain mentioned in the sagas, |