Seeing then that the first steps in navigation were taken in an age lying beyond all memory, and that the oldest traditions assign its origin to the remarkable people who figure alike in early sacred and profane history—in Joshua and Ezekiel, in Dius and Menander of Ephesus, in the Homeric poems and in later Greek writings,—as unequalled in their enterprise on the sea: what impediments existed in B.C. 1400 or any earlier century that did not still exist in A.D. 1400, to render intercourse between the eastern and the western hemisphere impossible? America was no further off from Tarshish in the golden age of Tyre than in that of Henry the Navigator. With the aid of literary memorials of the race of sea-rovers who carved out for themselves the Duchy of Normandy from the domain of Charlemagne’s heir, and spoiled the Angles and Saxons in their island home, we glean sufficient evidence to place the fact beyond all doubt that, after discovering and colonising Iceland and Greenland, they made their way southward to Labrador, and so, some way along the American coast. How far south their explorations actually extended, after being long assigned to the locality of Rhode Island, has anew excited interest, and is still a matter of controversy. The question is reviewed on a subsequent page; but its final settlement does not, in any degree, affect the present question. Certain it is that, about A.D. 1000, when St. Olaf was introducing Christianity by a sufficiently high-handed process into the Norse fatherland, Leif, the son of Eric, the founder of the first Greenland colony, sailed from Ericsfiord, or other Greenland port, in quest of southern lands already reported to have been seen, and did land on more than one point of the North American coast. We know what the ships of those Norse rovers were: mere galleys, not larger than a good fishing smack, and far inferior to it in deck and rigging. For compass they had only the same old “Phœnician star,” which, from the birth of navigation, had guided the mariners of the ancient world over the pathless deep. The track pursued by the Northmen, from Norway to Iceland, and so to Greenland and the Labrador coast, was, doubtless, then as now, beset by fogs, so that “neither sun nor stars in many days appeared”; and they stood much more in need of compass than the sailors of the “Santa Maria,” the “Pinta,” and the “Nina,” the little fleet with which Columbus sailed from the Andalusian port of Palos, to his first discovered land of “Guanahani,” variously identified among the islands of the American Archipelago. Yet, notwithstanding all the advantages of a southern latitude, with its clearer skies, we have to remember that the “Santa Maria,” the only decked vessel of the expedition, was stranded; and the “Pinta” and “Nina,” on which Columbus and his party had to depend for their homeward voyage, were mere coasting craft, the one with a crew of thirty, and the other with twenty-four men, with only _latine_ sails. As to the compass, we perceive how little that availed, on recalling the fact that the Portuguese admiral, Pedro Alvares de Cabral, only eight years later, when following on the route of Vasco de Gama, was carried by the equatorial current so far out of his intended course that he found himself in sight of a strange land, in 10° S. lat., and so accidentally discovered Brazil and the new world of the west, not by means of the mariner’s compass, but in spite of its guidance. It is thus obvious that the discovery of America would have followed as a result of the voyage of Vasco de Gama round the Cape, wholly independent of that of Columbus. What befell the Portuguese admiral of King Manoel, in A.D. 1500, was an experience that might just as readily have fallen to the lot of the Phœnician admiral of Pharaoh Necho in B.C. 600, to the Punic Hanno, or other early navigators; and may have repeatedly occurred to Mediterranean adventurers on the Atlantic in older centuries. On the news of de Cabral’s discovery reaching Portugal, the King despatched the Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the coast of South America, prepared a map of the new-found world, and thereby wrested from Columbus the honour of giving his name to the continent which he discovered.