The poet, William Morris, represents the Vikings of the fourteenth century following the old leadings of Leif Ericson in search of the earthly paradise:—
That desired gate To immortality and blessed rest Within the landless waters of the West.
The time chosen is that of England’s Edward III., and, still more, of England’s Chaucer. But in reality all memory of the land which lay beyond the waters of the Atlantic had faded as utterly from the minds of Europe’s mariners, in that fourteenth century, as in the older days when Plato restored a lost Atlantis to give local habitation to his ideal Republic. When the idea revived in the closing years of the fifteenth century, not as a philosophic dream, but as a legitimate induction of science, the reception which it met with from the embodied wisdom of that age, curiously illustrates the common experience of the pioneers in every path of novel discovery.
To Columbus, with his well-defined faith in the form of the earth which gave him confidence to steer boldly westward in search of the Asiatic Cipango: the existence of a continent beyond the Atlantic was no mere possibility. So early, at least, as 1474 he had conceived the design of reaching Asia by sailing to the West; and in that year he is known to have expounded his plans to Paolo Toscanelli, the learned Florentine physician and cosmographer, and to have received from him hearty encouragement. Assuming the world to be a sphere, he fortunately erred alike in under-estimating its size, and in over-estimating the extent to which the continent of Asia stretched eastward. In this way he diminished the distance between the coasts of Europe and Asia; and so, when at length he sighted the new-found land of the West, so far from dreaming of another ocean wider than the Atlantic between him and the object of his quest, he unhesitatingly designated the natives of Guanahani, or San Salvador, “Indians,” in the confident belief that this was an outlying coast of Asiatic India. Nor was his reasoning unsound. He sought, and would have found, a western route to that old east by the very track he followed, had no American continent intervened. It was not till his third voyage that the great Admiral for the first time beheld the new continent,—not indeed the Asiatic mainland, nor even the northern continent,—but the embouchures of the Orinoco river, with its mighty volume of fresh water, proving beyond dispute that it drained an area of vast extent, and opened up access far into the interior of a new world.