Historical Lectures and Essays

C >> Charles Kingsley >> Historical Lectures and Essays

HISTORICAL LECTURES AND ESSAYS
by Charles Kingsley


Contents:

The First Discovery of America
Cyrus, Servant of the Lord
Ancient Civilisation
Rondelet
Vesalius
Paracelsus
Buchanan




THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA


Let me begin this lecture {1} with a scene in the North Atlantic 863
years since.

"Bjarne Grimolfson was blown with his ship into the Irish Ocean; and
there came worms and the ship began to sink under them. They had a boat
which they had payed with seals' blubber, for that the sea-worms will not
hurt. But when they got into the boat they saw that it would not hold
them all. Then said Bjarne, 'As the boat will only hold the half of us,
my advice is that we should draw lots who shall go in her; for that will
not be unworthy of our manhood.' This advice seemed so good that none
gainsaid it; and they drew lots. And the lot fell to Bjarne that he
should go in the boat with half his crew. But as he got into the boat,
there spake an Icelander who was in the ship and had followed Bjarne from
Iceland, 'Art thou going to leave me here, Bjarne?' Quoth Bjarne, 'So it
must be.' Then said the man, 'Another thing didst thou promise my
father, when I sailed with thee from Iceland, than to desert me thus. For
thou saidst that we both should share the same lot.' Bjarne said, 'And
that we will not do. Get thou down into the boat, and I will get up into
the ship, now I see that thou art so greedy after life.' So Bjarne went
up into the ship, and the man went down into the boat; and the boat went
on its voyage till they came to Dublin in Ireland. Most men say that
Bjarne and his comrades perished among the worms; for they were never
heard of after."

This story may serve as a text for my whole lecture. Not only does it
smack of the sea-breeze and the salt water, like all the finest old Norse
sagas, but it gives a glimpse at least of the nobleness which underlay
the grim and often cruel nature of the Norseman. It belongs, too, to the
culminating epoch, to the beginning of that era when the Scandinavian
peoples had their great times; when the old fierceness of the worshippers
of Thor and Odin was tempered, without being effeminated, by the Faith of
the "White Christ," till the very men who had been the destroyers of
Western Europe became its civilisers.

It should have, moreover, a special interest to Americans. For--as
American antiquaries are well aware--Bjarne was on his voyage home from
the coast of New England; possibly from that very Mount Hope Bay which
seems to have borne the same name in the time of those old Norsemen, as
afterwards in the days of King Philip, the last sachem of the Wampanong
Indians. He was going back to Greenland, perhaps for reinforcements,
finding, he and his fellow-captain, Thorfinn, the Esquimaux who then
dwelt in that land too strong for them. For the Norsemen were then on
the very edge of discovery, which might have changed the history not only
of this continent but of Europe likewise. They had found and colonised
Iceland and Greenland. They had found Labrador, and called it Helluland,
from its ice-polished rocks. They had found Nova Scotia seemingly, and
called it Markland, from its woods. They had found New England, and
called it Vinland the Good. A fair land they found it, well wooded, with
good pasturage; so that they had already imported cows, and a bull whose
lowings terrified the Esquimaux. They had found self-sown corn too,
probably maize. The streams were full of salmon. But they had called
the land Vinland, by reason of its grapes. Quaint enough, and bearing in
its very quaintness the stamp of truth, is the story of the first finding
of the wild fox-grapes. How Leif the Fortunate, almost as soon as he
first landed, missed a little wizened old German servant of his father's,
Tyrker by name, and was much vexed thereat, for he had been brought up on
the old man's knee, and hurrying off to find him met Tyrker coming back
twisting his eyes about--a trick of his--smacking his lips and talking
German to himself in high excitement. And when they get him to talk
Norse again, he says: "I have not been far, but I have news for you. I
have found vines and grapes!" "Is that true, foster-father?" says Leif.
"True it is," says the old German, "for I was brought up where there was
never any lack of them."

The saga--as given by Rafn--had a detailed description of this quaint
personage's appearance; and it would not he amiss if American
wine-growers should employ an American sculptor--and there are great
American sculptors--to render that description into marble, and set up
little Tyrker in some public place, as the Silenus of the New World.

Thus the first cargoes homeward from Vinland to Greenland had been of
timber and of raisins, and of vine-stocks, which were not like to thrive.

And more. Beyond Vinland the Good there was said to be another land,
Whiteman's Land--or Ireland the Mickle, as some called it. For these
Norse traders from Limerick had found Ari Marson, and Ketla of Ruykjanes,
supposed to have been long since drowned at sea, and said that the people
had made him and Ketla chiefs, and baptized Ari. What is all this? and
what is this, too, which the Esquimaux children taken in Markland told
the Northmen, of a land beyond them where the folk wore white clothes,
and carried flags on poles? Are these all dreams? or was some part of
that great civilisation, the relics whereof your antiquarians find in so
many parts of the United States, still in existence some 900 years ago;
and were these old Norse cousins of ours upon the very edge of it? Be
that as it may, how nearly did these fierce Vikings, some of whom seemed
to have sailed far south along the shore, become aware that just beyond
them lay a land of fruits and spices, gold and gems? The adverse current
of the Gulf Stream, it may be, would have long prevented their getting
past the Bahamas into the Gulf of Mexico; but, sooner or later, some
storm must have carried a Greenland viking to San Domingo or to Cuba; and
then, as has been well said, some Scandinavian dynasty might have sat
upon the throne of Mexico.

These stories are well known to antiquarians. They may be found, almost
all of them, in Professor Rafn's "Antiquitates Americanae." The action
in them stands out often so clear and dramatic, that the internal
evidence of historic truth is irresistible. Thorvald, who, when he saw
what seems to be, they say, the bluff head of Alderton at the south-east
end of Boston Bay, said, "Here should I like to dwell," and, shot by an
Esquimaux arrow, bade bury him on that place, with a cross at his head
and a cross at his feet, and call the place Cross Ness for evermore;
Gudrida, the magnificent widow, who wins hearts and sees strange deeds
from Iceland to Greenland, and Greenland to Vinland and back, and at
last, worn out and sad, goes off on a pilgrimage to Rome; Helgi and
Finnbogi, the Norwegians, who, like our Arctic voyagers in after times,
devise all sorts of sports and games to keep the men in humour during the
long winter at Hope; and last, but not least, the terrible Freydisa, who,
when the Norse are seized with a sudden panic at the Esquimaux and flee
from them, as they had three weeks before fled from Thorfinn's bellowing
bull, turns, when so weak that she cannot escape, single-handed on the
savages, and catching up a slain man's sword, puts them all to flight
with her fierce visage and fierce cries--Freydisa the Terrible, who, in
another voyage, persuades her husband to fall on Helgi and Finnbogi, when
asleep, and murder them and all their men; and then, when he will not
murder the five women too, takes up an axe and slays them all herself,
and getting back to Greenland, when the dark and unexplained tale comes
out, lives unpunished, but abhorred henceforth. All these folks, I say,
are no phantoms, but realities; at least, if I can judge of internal
evidence.

But beyond them, and hovering on the verge of Mythus and Fairyland, there
is a ballad called "Finn the Fair," and how

An upland Earl had twa braw sons,
My story to begin;
The tane was Light Haldane the strong,
The tither was winsome Finn.

and so forth; which was still sung, with other "rimur," or ballads, in
the Faroes, at the end of the last century. Professor Rafn has inserted
it, because it talks of Vinland as a well-known place, and because the
brothers are sent by the princess to slay American kings; but that Rime
has another value. It is of a beauty so perfect, and yet so like the old
Scotch ballads in its heroic conception of love, and in all its forms and
its qualities, that it is one proof more, to any student of early
European poetry, that we and these old Norsemen are men of the same
blood.

If anything more important than is told by Professor Rafn and Mr. Black
{2} be now known to the antiquarians of Massachusetts, let me entreat
them to pardon my ignorance. But let me record my opinion that, though
somewhat too much may have been made in past years of certain
rock-inscriptions, and so forth, on this side of the Atlantic, there can
be no reasonable doubt that our own race landed and tried to settle on
the shore of New England six hundred years before their kinsmen, and, in
many cases, their actual descendants, the august Pilgrim Fathers of the
seventeenth century. And so, as I said, a Scandinavian dynasty might
have been seated now upon the throne of Mexico. And how was that strange
chance lost? First, of course, by the length and danger of the coasting
voyage. It was one thing to have, like Columbus and Vespucci, Cortes and
Pizarro, the Azores as a halfway port; another to have Greenland, or even
Iceland. It was one thing to run south-west upon Columbus's track,
across the Mar de Damas, the Ladies' Sea, which hardly knows a storm,
with the blazing blue above, the blazing blue below, in an ever-warming
climate, where every breath is life and joy; another to struggle against
the fogs and icebergs, the rocks and currents of the dreary North
Atlantic. No wonder, then, that the knowledge of Markland, and Vinland,
and Whiteman's Land died away in a few generations, and became but
fireside sagas for the winter nights.

But there were other causes, more honourable to the dogged energy of the
Norse. They were in those very years conquering and settling nearer home
as no other people--unless, perhaps, the old Ionian Greeks--conquered and
settled.

Greenland, we have seen, they held--the western side at least--and held
it long and well enough to afford, it is said, 2,600 pounds of walrus'
teeth as yearly tithe to the Pope, besides Peter's pence, and to build
many a convent, and church, and cathedral, with farms and homesteads
round; for one saga speaks of Greenland as producing wheat of the finest
quality. All is ruined now, perhaps by gradual change of climate.

But they had richer fields of enterprise than Greenland, Iceland, and the
Faroes. Their boldest outlaws at that very time--whether from Norway,
Sweden, Denmark, or Britain--were forming the imperial life-guard of the
Byzantine Emperor, as the once famous Varangers of Constantinople; and
that splendid epoch of their race was just dawning, of which my lamented
friend, the late Sir Edmund Head, says so well in his preface to Viga
Glum's Icelandic Saga, "The Sagas, of which this tale is one, were
composed for the men who have left their mark in every corner of Europe;
and whose language and laws are at this moment important elements in the
speech and institutions of England, America, and Australia. There is no
page of modern history in which the influence of the Norsemen and their
conquests must not be taken into account--Russia, Constantinople, Greece,
Palestine, Sicily, the coasts of Africa, Southern Italy, France, the
Spanish Peninsula, England, Scotland, Ireland, and every rock and island
round them, have been visited, and most of them at one time or the other
ruled, by the men of Scandinavia. The motto on the sword of Roger
Guiscard was a proud one:

Appulus et Calaber, Siculus mihi servit et Afer.

Every island, says Sir Edmund Head, and truly--for the name of almost
every island on the coast of England, Scotland, and Eastern Ireland, ends
in either _ey_ or _ay_ or _oe_, a Norse appellative, as is the word
"island" itself--is a mark of its having been, at some time or other,
visited by the Vikings of Scandinavia.

Norway, meanwhile, was convulsed by war; and what perhaps was of more
immediate consequence, Svend Fork-beard, whom we Englishmen call
Sweyn--the renegade from that Christian Faith which had been forced on
him by his German conqueror, the Emperor Otto II.--with his illustrious
son Cnut, whom we call Canute, were just calling together all the most
daring spirits of the Baltic coasts for the subjugation of England; and
when that great feat was performed, the Scandinavian emigration was
paralysed, probably, for a time by the fearful wars at home. While the
king of Sweden, and St. Olaf Tryggvason, king of Norway, were setting on
Denmark during Cnut's pilgrimage to Rome, and Cnut, sailing with a mighty
fleet to Norway, was driving St. Olaf into Russia, to return and fall in
the fratricidal battle of Stiklestead--during, strangely enough, a total
eclipse of the sun--Vinland was like enough to remain still uncolonised.
After Cnut's short-lived triumph--king as he was of Denmark, Norway,
England, and half Scotland, and what not of Wendish Folk inside the
Baltic--the force of the Norsemen seems to have been exhausted in their
native lands. Once more only, if I remember right, did "Lochlin," really
and hopefully send forth her "mailed swarm" to conquer a foreign land;
and with a result unexpected alike by them and by their enemies. Had it
been otherwise, we might not have been here this day.

Let me sketch for you once more--though you have heard it, doubtless,
many a time--the tale of that tremendous fortnight which settled the fate
of Britain, and therefore of North America; which decided--just in those
great times when the decision was to be made--whether we should be on a
par with the other civilised nations of Europe, like them the "heirs of
all the ages," with our share not only of Roman Christianity and Roman
centralisation--a member of the great comity of European nations, held
together in one Christian bond by the Pope--but heirs also of Roman
civilisation, Roman literature, Roman Law; and therefore, in due time, of
Greek philosophy and art. No less a question than this, it seems to me,
hung in the balance during that fortnight of autumn, 1066.

Poor old Edward the Confessor, holy, weak, and sad, lay in his new choir
of Westminster--where the wicked ceased from troubling, and the weary
were at rest. The crowned ascetic had left no heir behind. England
seemed as a corpse, to which all the eagles might gather together; and
the South-English, in their utter need, had chosen for their king the
ablest, and it may be the justest, man in Britain--Earl Harold
Godwinsson: himself, like half the upper classes of England then, of the
all-dominant Norse blood; for his mother was a Danish princess. Then out
of Norway, with a mighty host, came Harold Hardraade, taller than all
men, the ideal Viking of his time. Half-brother of the now dead St.
Olaf, severely wounded when he was but fifteen, at Stiklestead, when Olaf
fell, he had warred and plundered on many a coast. He had been away to
Russia to King Jaroslaf; he had been in the Emperor's Varanger guard at
Constantinople--and, it was whispered, had slain a lion there with his
bare hands; he had carved his name and his comrades' in Runic
characters--if you go to Venice you may see them at this day--on the
loins of the great marble lion, which stood in his time not in Venice but
in Athens. And now, king of Norway and conqueror, for the time, of
Denmark, why should he not take England, as Sweyn and Canute took it
sixty years before, when the flower of the English gentry perished at the
fatal battle of Assingdune? If he and his half-barbarous host had
conquered, the civilisation of Britain would have been thrown back,
perhaps, for centuries. But it was not to be.

England _was_ to be conquered by the Norman; but by the civilised, not
the barbaric; by the Norse who had settled, but four generations before,
in the North East of France under Rou, Rollo, Rolf the Ganger--so-called,
they say, because his legs were so long that, when on horseback, he
touched the ground and seemed to gang, or walk. He and his Norsemen had
taken their share of France, and called it Normandy to this day; and
meanwhile, with that docility and adaptability which marks so often truly
great spirits, they had changed their creed, their language, their
habits, and had become, from heathen and murderous Berserkers, the most
truly civilised people of Europe, and--as was most natural then--the most
faithful allies and servants of the Pope of Rome. So greatly had they
changed, and so fast, that William Duke of Normandy, the
great-great-grandson of Rolf the wild Viking, was perhaps the finest
gentleman, as well as the most cultivated sovereign, and the greatest
statesman and warrior in all Europe.

So Harold of Norway came with all his Vikings to Stamford Bridge by York;
and took, by coming, only that which Harold of England promised him,
namely, "forasmuch as he was taller than any other man, seven feet of
English ground."

The story of that great battle, told with a few inaccuracies, but told as
only great poets tell, you should read, if you have not read it already,
in the "Heimskringla" of Snorri Sturluson, the Homer of the North:

High feast that day held the birds of the air and the beasts of the
field,
White-tailed erne and sallow glede,
Dusky raven, with horny neb,
And the gray deer the wolf of the wood.

The bones of the slain, men say, whitened the place for fifty years to
come.

And remember, that on the same day on which that fight befell--September
27, 1066--William, Duke of Normandy, with all his French-speaking
Norsemen, was sailing across the British Channel, under the protection of
a banner consecrated by the Pope, to conquer that England which the Norse-
speaking Normans could not conquer.

And now King Harold showed himself a man. He turned at once from the
North of England to the South. He raised the folk of the Southern, as he
had raised those of the Central and Northern shires; and in sixteen
days--after a march which in those times was a prodigious feat--he was
entrenched upon the fatal down which men called Heathfield then, and
Senlac, but Battle to this day--with William and his French Normans
opposite him on Telham hill.

Then came the battle of Hastings. You all know what befell upon that
day; and how the old weapon was matched against the new--the English axe
against the Norman lance--and beaten only because the English broke their
ranks. If you wish to refresh your memories, read the tale once more in
Mr. Freeman's "History of England," or Professor Creasy's "Fifteen
Decisive Battles of the World," or even, best of all, the late Lord
Lytton's splendid romance of "Harold." And when you go to England, go,
as some of you may have gone already, to Battle; and there from off the
Abbey grounds, or from Mountjoye behind, look down off what was then "The
Heathy Field," over the long slopes of green pasture and the rich hop-
gardens, where were no hop-gardens then, and the flat tide-marshes
winding between the wooded heights, towards the southern sea; and imagine
for yourselves the feelings of an Englishman as he contemplates that
broad green sloping lawn, on which was decided the destiny of his native
land. Here, right beneath, rode Taillefer up the slope before them all,
singing the song of Roland, tossing his lance in air and catching it as
it fell, with all the Norse berserker spirit of his ancestors flashing
out in him, at the thought of one fair fight, and then purgatory, or
Valhalla--Taillefer perhaps preferred the latter. Yonder on the left, in
that copse where the red-ochre gully runs, is Sanguelac, the drain of
blood, into which (as the Bayeux tapestry, woven by Matilda's maids,
still shows) the Norman knights fell, horse and man, till the gully was
bridged with writhing bodies for those who rode after. Here, where you
stand--the crest of the hill marks where it must have been--was the
stockade on which depended the fate of England. Yonder, perhaps, stalked
out one English squire or house-carle after another: tall men with long-
handled battle-axes--one specially terrible, with a wooden helmet which
no sword could pierce--who hewed and hewed down knight on knight, till
they themselves were borne to earth at last. And here, among the trees
and ruins of the garden, kept trim by those who know the treasure which
they own, stood Harold's two standards of the fighting-man and the dragon
of Wessex. And here, close by (for here, for many a century, stood the
high altar of Battle Abbey, where monks sang masses for Harold's soul),
upon this very spot the Swan-neck found her hero-lover's corpse. "Ah,"
says many an Englishman--and who will blame him for it--"how grand to
have died beneath that standard on that day!" Yes, and how right. And
yet how right, likewise, that the Norman's cry of _Dexaie_!--"God
Help!"--and not the English hurrah, should have won that day, till
William rode up Mountjoye in the afternoon to see the English army,
terrible even in defeat, struggling through copse and marsh away toward
Brede, and, like retreating lions driven into their native woods, slaying
more in the pursuit than they slew even in the fight.

But so it was to be; for so it ought to have been. You, my American
friends, delight, as I have said already, in seeing the old places of the
old country. Go, I beg you, and look at that old place, and if you be
wise, you will carry back from it one lesson: That God's thoughts are not
as our thoughts; nor His ways as our ways.

It was a fearful time which followed. I cannot but believe that our
forefathers had been, in some way or other, great sinners, or two such
conquests as Canute's and William's would not have fallen on them within
the short space of sixty years. They did not want for courage, as
Stamford Brigg and Hastings showed full well. English swine, their
Norman conquerors called them often enough; but never English cowards.
Their ruinous vice, if we are to trust the records of the time, was what
the old monks called accidia--[Greek text]--and ranked it as one of the
seven deadly sins: a general careless, sleepy, comfortable habit of mind,
which lets all go its way for good or evil--a habit of mind too often
accompanied, as in the case of the Angle-Danes, with self-indulgence,
often coarse enough. Huge eaters and huger drinkers, fuddled with ale,
were the men who went down at Hastings--though they went down like
heroes--before the staid and sober Norman out of France.

But those were fearful times. As long as William lived, ruthless as he
was to all rebels, he kept order and did justice with a strong and steady
hand; for he brought with him from Normandy the instincts of a truly
great statesman. And in his sons' time matters grew worse and worse.
After that, in the troubles of Stephen's reign, anarchy let loose tyranny
in its most fearful form, and things were done which recall the cruelties
of the old Spanish _conquistadores_ in America. Scott's charming romance
of "Ivanhoe" must be taken, I fear, as a too true picture of English
society in the time of Richard I.

And what came of it all? What was the result of all this misery and
wrong?

This, paradoxical as it may seem: That the Norman conquest was the making
of the English people; of the Free Commons of England.

Paradoxical, but true. First, you must dismiss from your minds the too
common notion that there is now, in England, a governing Norman
aristocracy, or that there has been one, at least since the year 1215,
when Magna Charta was won from the Norman John by Normans and by English
alike. For the first victors at Hastings, like the first
_conquistadores_ in America, perished, as the monk chronicles point out,
rapidly by their own crimes; and very few of our nobility can trace their
names back to the authentic Battle Abbey roll. The great majority of the
peers have sprung from, and all have intermarried with, the Commons; and
the peerage has been from the first, and has become more and more as
centuries have rolled on, the prize of success in life.

The cause is plain. The conquest of England by the Normans was not one
of those conquests of a savage by a civilised race, or of a cowardly race
by a brave race, which results in the slavery of the conquered, and
leaves the gulf of caste between two races--master and slave. That was
the case in France, and resulted, after centuries of oppression, in the
great and dreadful revolution of 1793, which convulsed not only France
but the whole civilised world. But caste, thank God, has never existed
in England, since at least the first generation after the Norman
conquest.